CELPIP Reading Part 3 Practice Test: Inventing Bakelite

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Bakelite was the first plastic synthesized wholly from scratch, and for half a century it turned up as electrical switches, radio cabinets, telephone housings and drawers full of buttons. Its creator, the Belgian-born chemist Leo Baekeland, arrived in the United States as a young man from Ghent bearing a doctorate and little else. His first commercial triumph had nothing to do with plastic at all: Velox, a photographic paper developable under artificial light rather than daylight, which amateur photographers embraced at once. He sold the rights to Eastman Kodak at the close of the nineteenth century, and the proceeds financed a private laboratory behind his house in Yonkers, New York.

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Other chemists had already combined phenol and formaldehyde and watched the pair congeal into an unworkable mass, prompting most of them to abandon the reaction as commercially futile. Baekeland persisted, confining the reaction inside a sealed pressure vessel of his own devising, which he dubbed the Bakelizer. Through meticulous control of temperature and pressure, he discovered he could arrest the process while the material remained pliable enough to press into a mould, whereupon it set permanently hard. He completed the work in 1907, secured a patent two years afterward, named the substance for himself, and presided over the Bakelite Corporation for three decades.

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Nothing in the new material had been cultivated on a farm or extracted from the earth. Earlier substitutes, celluloid among them, originated in plant fibre, whereas phenol and formaldehyde alike issued from a factory. Once cured, Bakelite could never again be melted and reworked, yet that irreversibility proved a virtue: it held its form under heat, resisted combustion, and would not conduct electricity. Manufacturers accordingly moulded it into switches, sockets and telephone housings, besides fashioning it into automobile fittings, buttons and inexpensive jewellery.

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Demand spread from one industry to the next, and competing firms soon paid for licences to manufacture comparable resins under their own labels. Time magazine placed Baekeland on its cover in 1924. By the time he died in 1944, annual output exceeded 100,000 tons across many thousands of distinct products, although he had divested the Bakelite Corporation some years prior and retired to Florida. The celebrated brown resin, however, was not his most consequential achievement: what Bakelite demonstrated was that a useful material could be synthesized purely from laboratory chemicals, a principle underlying every resin that followed — the phenolics of the ensuing decade, then polyethylene and nylon.

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