Leo Baekeland & Wallace Carothers

Maestros of Molecules 

Two industrial chemists formulate the Synthetic Century 

US News 17aug98

Charles Baekeland, an illiterate Belgian shoemaker, wanted his son to follow him in his craft. But little Leo had his own ideas. At age 8 he had read Ben Franklin's Autobiography, which tells how a poor boy with thrift, energy, and ingenuity may rise to great wealth and high position. Leo studied hard when he wasn't making shoes, tutored dim lads for fees, won a scholarship, worked as a teaching assistant, acquired a doctorate in chemistry (along with the hand of the professor's daughter), became an inventor, sailed to America, invented Velox--a type of photographic paper--and sold it to George Eastman for $750,000, a sum that in 1899 went as far as $15 million would 100 years later. Then, after molding himself into a Franklinesque legend by age 35, Leo Baekeland stumbled upon his true life's work--molding the future of his adopted land. He invented plastic.

At the start of the 20th century, "Doc" Baekeland was ensconced at Snug Rock, his Hudson River Valley estate, with his wife, two children, and a 4-horsepower motorcar, casting about for a fresh challenge. He found it in the inelastic workload of lac beetles. The Southeast Asian insect secreted a resin, marketed as shellac, that was both a good lacquer and the only first-rate electrical insulator known. But with the electrical industry expanding hell for leather, demand was fast outrunning supply (making 1 pound required six months of single-minded effort by 15,000 beetles). As shellac grew pricier by the day, the search for a synthetic substitute intensified, joined now by Baekeland. For deep thinking, he set aside a tiny room in a turret in his Victorian manse; a converted stable out back served as his laboratory.

He decided that the solution might lie in reacting phenol (a coal tar derivative) with formaldehyde (a wood alcohol derivative). Others had done this and produced an amber-colored substance that stood up under both heat and solvents. But as the material condensed, the buildup of violent gases rendered it unusable. It ended up syrupy or brittle or porous. With the help of an assistant, Baekeland tried for five years to tame those gases by slowing the reaction. Each experiment yielded a fresh batch of worthless gunk. The Eureka moment came in 1907: He would speed the reaction by increasing the heat while keeping the gases in check by subjecting the whole process to high pressure in a pot-like vessel he called a Bakelizer. He lifted the lid and gazed on a substance with exactly the properties wanted--a resin that perfectly mirrored its mold, hardening into a uniform solid that didn't burn, melt, or dissolve. Baekeland christened it Bakelite. Composed of molecules born in the lab, not in nature, it was the world's first true synthetic.

Although he did not immediately foresee the vast potential of his invention, Baekeland knew Bakelite was more than an electrical insulator. After filing for his patents, he set to work exploring applications. He turned the pioneer plastic into billiard balls, pipestems, phonograph records, buttons, knobs, varnish, valves, and other items. Then, in 1909, he went to a meeting of the New York chapter of the American Chemical Society, popped open his sample case, and announced his invention. The chemists gave him a standing ovation. As inquiries poured in, Baekeland fired up "Old Faithful," a Bakelizer in his garage, and launched the General Bakelite Co., which would both make Bakelite and license its manufacture. The market paid its highest tribute: Competitors used similar processes to produce Bakelite-like plastic. A patent war went on intermittently for a decade. But "Doc" Baekeland, equipped with technical expertise, an imperious air, and a Flemish accent, melded men as cannily as molecules. He engineered a merger with the usurpers and became the president of a new, big-tent Bakelite Corp.

Bakelite emerged as the signature substance of 1920s design, the sleek essence of Moderne (later known as Art Deco). With the boom in sales of radio sets, "Bakelite" became a household word. Radios with Bakelite cases and filled with Bakelite components were suddenly everywhere. Time magazine put Leo Baekeland on the cover in 1924 and gushed that within a few years Americans would dwell in a Bakelite world: "From the time that a man brushes his teeth in the morning with a Bakelite-handled brush until the moment when he removes his last cigarette from a Bakelite holder, extinguishes it in a Bakelite ashtray, and falls back upon a Bakelite bed, all that he touches, sees, uses will be made of this material of a thousand purposes." In 1927, an ad revealed that Bakelite had licked the problem of pens falling from skyscrapers. "Stopped traffic on Fifth Avenue," crowed the Parker Pen Co., which assembled a crowd to watch a new pen with a Bakelite barrel "hurled 23 stories to cement! Picked up unbroken!" The same year, Bell introduced a spiffy new rotary-dial telephone. It was made of Bakelite, as was Kodak's "Baby Brownie" camera, which came along in the early 1930s.

Yet Bakelite, the Model T of plastics, was soon losing its state-of-the-art aura to Catalin, Lucite, Plexiglas, and other new plastics invented by competitors. The new wonder materials had their own, often superior, properties. Catalin, for example, sported brilliant colors; Bakelite was limited to dark tones and was more susceptible to cracking than rival resins. Baekeland, after turning 75, decided to leave the future of plastic to younger men. He sold out to Union Carbide in 1939 and retired to Florida to sail his yacht and write unsolicited letters of advice to statesmen. His last invention was a regimen for staying cool at his Miami mansion on a hot day. Offering no forewarning to any visitors who might be present, he would wade fully clothed into his swimming pool till the water lapped beneath his chin, soaking every part of his ensemble but his sun helmet. Without tarrying, he emerged just as casually--water oozing from his white shoes and dripping from his white shirt and duck trousers--to resume his duties as host.

Pure genius. The year "Doc" Baekeland retired, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. was introducing nylon, the world's first synthetic fiber. Its inventor was another "Doc," Wallace Carothers. The son of a teacher, Carothers acquired the moniker in grade school in Iowa, where the shy boy performed such feats as building crystal radios in Quaker Oats boxes when he wasn't lost in a biography of Edison. Unlike Edison and Baekeland, Carothers as an adult was dedicated to pure science; he cared much less about practical applications. But his genius, often kissed by serendipity, made him one of his era's most influential chemists.

DuPont decided in 1927 to create a lab for pure science, housing it in its own special building (called "Purity Hall" by the irreverent). Carothers, then an up-and-coming 31-year-old chemistry instructor at Harvard, was named head of research. He went to work with eight junior chemists to do what was then a daunting task--synthesizing polymers of heavy weight. Carothers merely sought to prove the theories of a German chemist, Hermann Staudinger, on the nature of heavy, long-chain molecules. He and his team did that and also ended up pioneering a new realm of industrial chemistry.

Serendipity visited Purity Hall most notably one day in 1930 when an associate, Julian Hill, opened a molecular still of Carothers's design and happened to dip a heated glass rod into the polymer within. Backing across the room, Hill found the material could be drawn taffy-like into long filaments. Once hardened and stretched to several times their original length, the filaments became strong and elastic. As far back as 1664, visionaries had dreamed of artificial silk. "CHEMISTS PRODUCE SYNTHETIC SILK" a front-page story in the New York Times trumpeted after the experiment was revealed. But that was headline writers' hyperbole. Science had not yet humbled the silkworm. If laundered or ironed, the new fibers melted.

When in the thrall of some abstruse hypothesis, Carothers labored over his test tubes up to 36 hours straight. At other times, bouts of depression shut him down cold; a colleague once came upon him in a men's room holding a vial of cyanide. "I carry it around with me all the time," he said. "One day I'll use it." In up periods, he had a wandering eye--not for something new in a skirt, for something new in a beaker. Frustrated with the flaws of his "silk" super-polymer, he set aside the project, so rich in commercial potential, to investigate a new intellectual fancy, so-called cyclic compounds. One of them, he noticed, gave off an intriguing aroma. Marketed as Astrotone, it became the first synthetic musk. The Carothers group also continued to work on another happy creation, a polymer that became neoprene--synthetic rubber. For all his dour intensity and shyness in groups, Carothers could be charming when among close acquaintances. And even impish. Once, after being teased about becoming a bit of an epicure, he served "rare Pacific mollusks" to friends. They soon spit out what were revealed to be pieces of synthetic sponge freshly harvested by Carothers for DuPont.

In 1934, Carothers's handlers coaxed him into returning to the task of producing a strong, elastic fiber that would not melt below 195 degrees Centigrade. He formulated a new strategy for synthesizing giant molecules. In just a few months, he got the result he wanted. He marched into the office of one DuPont executive matter of factly, squirted a couple drops of the compound onto the man's desk--"There's your synthetic fiber"--and strode out. The new super-polymer reached the market in 1937 in the form of toothbrush bristles advertised as superior to anything plucked from the hide of an animal. It was identified only by the mysterious name of "Exton."

Then, in 1938, DuPont went public, announcing the invention of "the first man-made organic textile fabric prepared entirely from new materials from the mineral kingdom." The name nylon had been picked just two days earlier. Modeled by leggy ladies at the New York World's Fair in 1939 and put on sale in 1940, nylon stockings were a huge hit. Except with the Japanese. Silk made up two thirds of Japan's exports to the United States. During World War II, most of America's nylon went into parachutes, mosquito nets, flak jackets, shoelaces, aircraft fuel tanks (to make them self-sealing), and many other military items. Synthetic rubber replaced the natural rubber no longer available from Asia. At war's end, with the debut of Orlon and Dacron, synthetic fabrics would swiftly revolutionize the rag trade.

The catalyst of all this did not live to see it. Carothers began unraveling almost as soon as he achieved his breakthrough with nylon. Unaccountably, he felt used up, a failure. His DuPont bosses lessened his burdens, worked around him, urged him to take a sea voyage. He responded by walking the streets of Wilmington, Del. Although he had never before shown much interest in women, he married a co-worker half his age in 1936. He suffered a complete breakdown several months later and was confined in a sanitarium for five weeks. His beloved sister died unexpectedly the following winter; rumors went around of an affair between Carothers and a married woman who ultimately spurned him. In April 1937, two days after he turned 41 (and 19 days after filing DuPont's patent application for nylon), Wallace "Doc" Carothers checked into a Philadelphia hotel room, took out a vial of cyanide laced with lemon juice, and did just what he had said he would do some day.