It was invented by accident only a hundred years ago.

The story begins in the late 19th century in the United States, during the booming "Gilded Age".

Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born in Belgium in 1863. He was born in an ordinary family. His father was an ordinary craftsman and his mother was a servant. However, with his love for knowledge, he went to college and continued his studies, and finally became a professor of chemistry. In 1889, he moved to the United States and invested in industrial manufacturing.

In 1905, he first artificially synthesized a product called "phenolic resin", which was the world's first completely synthetic plastic. He then registered a patent for this plastic, named it after himself (Bakelite, translated into Chinese as "bakelite" or "bakelite"), and put it into mass production. On May 20, 1940, he was called the "Father of Plastics" by Time magazine.

So, what is this process like? And what can we learn from it? Let’s talk about it.

Some old telephones have shells made of bakelite. Image source: pixabay

New materials are calling

Plastic, a cheap industrial product, broke through the limitations of natural materials and became an all-purpose material due to its insulating, stable and corrosion-resistant properties. Baekeland himself became an industrial tycoon with this invention.

At first glance, this story is a story of knowledge being transformed into application and achieving great success. However, the birth of plastic was not smooth sailing. Baekeland's ability to synthesize plastic was also due to a lot of coincidences.

At that time, people involved in the chemical materials industry generally had two goals: one was to replace natural materials, and the other was to develop insulating materials. After the Industrial Revolution, the middle class emerged and the demand for high-end consumer goods increased greatly. Some people wanted to use artificial materials to replace natural materials, such as ivory, agate, amber, etc., so that they could be mass-produced.

For example, the consumer market at that time had a very high demand for billiard balls, but if ivory was used to make them, one piece of ivory could only make 8 billiard balls. The output can be imagined, so developing new materials became profitable.

Image source: pixabay

Through constant exploration, people discovered that natural fiber-containing materials, such as wood and cotton, could be transformed into plastic materials after some processing, adding nitric acid and camphor and heating. They could be molded into different shapes and their texture was very similar to ivory. This material was called " celluloid ".

However, this material has a fatal flaw: it is flammable. The billiard ball is constantly hit, and the flammable celluloid material is like a time bomb. No wonder there were occasional suspicious explosions in the billiard hall at that time. After all, the main component of celluloid is nitrocellulose, which is indeed very unstable. If you don't believe it, light a ping-pong ball (mainly composed of celluloid) with a lighter in a safe and open place without flammable materials, and you can feel how quickly this thing burns.

Another demand comes from the emerging power industry.

The rise of electricity brought with it a thirst for synthetic materials. People wanted to find a cheap, mass-produced synthetic material to meet the insulation needs of wires and lines. Something like rubber was their "template", but even if the rubber plantations in tropical colonies were running at full capacity, they could not keep up with the pace of electricity expansion. But at that time, the "skill points" of synthetic materials could not go that far, and people's imagination of good materials was also very limited.

The more critical issue is that, at that time, whether it was looking for substitutes for natural materials or looking for insulating materials, it was actually far away from real chemical research. So what were chemists doing at that time?

The answer is at hand, but...

In fact, chemists at that time were very close to the "correct answer". As early as 1872, German chemist Adolf von Baeyer discovered that after the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde, some colorless, resinous, turbid residues would remain. However, these residues were discarded as garbage by chemists at that time.

This cannot be blamed on the chemists for being "blind" because the chemical industry at that time focused a lot of attention on dyes. Even the later pharmaceutical industry was derived from the manufacture of dyes. The famous "Prontosil", the world's first synthetic antibiotic, was originally a red dye. The company that developed it was called Farben, which also means "color" in German. Chemists who were bent on finding pure dyes were of course not very interested in this seemingly useless residue.

Back to Baekeland himself. Before he entered the manufacturing industry, he was indeed a chemistry researcher. Even though chemistry as a discipline was not as systematic as it is now, it systematically trained him to be sensitive to the discipline, especially to attach great importance to experiments.

Before he came to the United States, he taught chemistry at Ghent University in Belgium, and his research was on photographic chemistry, that is, how to use various means to optimize imaging technology. His research content is to study the catalysts and conditions of various chemical reactions, control various variables, and observe the differences in the finished products.

On the one hand, this gave him a sensitivity to various conditions and elements that people in the chemical industry did not have. On the other hand, he was able to access some cutting-edge, new materials at the time and mass-produce laboratory products. For example, he helped to invent a photographic paper called Volex, which was eventually patented by Kodak. In summary, Baekeland not only understood research, but also paid attention to what the newly discovered substances could be used for.

With his dual sensitivity to chemical reactions and synthetic material manufacturing, he keenly discovered the potential of the "by-products" of the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde. After continuous trial and error, he finally synthesized phenolic resin plastic and applied for a patent.

Baekeland's Revelation

If we only see Baekeland's success, it would be a bit like falling into the cliché of scientific "inspirational and refreshing articles". Let's analyze it a little more deeply.

Baekeland's success was somewhat accidental, but it also revealed an important element in scientific and technological innovation: breakthrough innovation often comes from breaking the existing framework. Wiebe E. Bijker, a Dutch sociologist and scholar of science and technology research, used the term "technological frame" to explain this phenomenon: when people explore new technological inventions, they are not without direction, but often come from a set of existing frameworks.

This framework defines "what is the goal", "what is the current problem", and the logic of how to solve the problem, and then develops corresponding strategies, takes corresponding measures, and applies corresponding technologies on this basis. Such a framework helps to concentrate resources and solve problems, but sometimes it also causes us to miss important new discoveries.

Going back to the invention of plastic, we can also see such a framework.

First of all, people didn’t know what “plastic” was at that time. In the process of invention, people just stood on their existing framework and explored a solution from the already defined problems and solutions. For example, people in the materials industry at that time, because they already had celluloid, their focus was to make celluloid less flammable, and they solved the problem by changing the solution, adjusting the reaction and molding temperature, adding stabilizers, etc. At that time, their imagination of materials was only based on natural materials, and then added production costs, production processes and other considerations. This framework was mature at the time, but there was an unsolvable bottleneck: it could only be improved, but it was difficult to break through.

On the other hand, the technical framework of chemists is completely different. The goal of synthetic dyes and related preparations is to find and extract as pure a compound as possible, while other products are just garbage or "by-products". In the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde, the resinous "plastic" prototype is difficult to purify, so it was ignored by most chemists at that time.

This existing framework provides clear goals and behavioral paths, which can help people continuously optimize existing inventions and products. But the key to breakthrough new inventions lies in its "newness" and its unpredictability. Thomas Kuhn, a famous historical sociologist, also proposed a similar concept, namely "paradigm", in his research on scientific development. Paradigms can help the development of conventional science, but the birth of new scientific concepts such as relativity and quantum mechanics requires completely different paradigms to break the original explanatory framework.

Image source: pixabay

Opportunities always come to those who are prepared, and also to those who can break the existing framework and engage in open-ended imagination and observation. Baekeland's plastic empire is the result of the times creating heroes, and also the result of courageous and flexible thinking.

This kind of thinking is often interdisciplinary and cross-domain. Our innovation is not the pursuit of "standard answers", nor can it be limited to the calculation of scale and investment, nor should it be limited to fields and frameworks. At present, many scientific and technological fields are extremely specialized, and communication between professions is particularly important. Technological innovation cannot be promoted by one person or one invention. Future scientific and technological progress requires confrontation and exchange between different social groups and different cognitive frameworks to continuously break the shackles of existing frameworks.

References

[1]Bijker, WE (1997). Of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: Toward a theory of sociotechnical change. MIT press.

[2]Sovacool, BK (2006). Reactors, Weapons, X-Rays, and Solar Panels: Using SCOT, Technological Frame, Epistemic Culture, and Actor Network Theory to Investigate Technology. Journal of Technology Studies, 32(1), 4-14.

[3]Kuhn, TS (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press.

Planning and production

This article is a work of Science Popularization China-Starry Sky Project

Produced by: Science Popularization Department of China Association for Science and Technology

Producer｜China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Xinghe Culture Media Co., Ltd.

Author: Zheng Li, popular science creator

Audit丨Li Zongpeng, Senior Engineer, National Light Industry Plastics Product Quality Center

Planning｜Ding Zong

Editor: Ding Zong