Plastic — you are swimming in it.
But, where did it all come from?
It's an environmental problem, sure.
But back in the day, it was a miracle solution.
It was invented in this guy's garage.
His name is Leo Baekeland, and as you'll see, he loved naming things after himself.
The story starts in the early 1900s,
when the science world was facing a crisis.
Scientists had started messing around with electricity, and it was about to make life
better for pretty much everyone.
The only problem was that electricity tended to start a lot of fires.
They had all these sockets and wires, and they needed some kind of insulation.
So they turned to nature for ideas.
Specifically, bugs.
Consider the lac bug.
This miracle of nature secrets a resin that can be collected and turned into shellac.
A high quality electrical insulator.
Though, it'll take six months and 15,000 of these bugs to get just a pound of the resin.
They were not going to be able to electrify a nation with bugs.
Leo Baekeland was the chemist who would solve that problem.
As far as we can tell, this was a guy who thought about chemistry all the time.
Today, we have all kinds of synthetic materials.
But Leo's world was an all-natural one.
The clothes Leo would have worn
would have been made of some
kind of natural fiber like cotton.
His toothbrush handle would have been made of sterling silver,
and his comb was probably tortoiseshell.
But not everyone could afford these things.
Everyday items had the same problem as shellac.
They were just too expensive to mass-produce.
At the time, there were lots of chemists looking for some alternative to the shellac bug.
And there was this one very abundant substance — oil.
It was mostly being used to make kerosene for lighting purposes.
But after you made the kerosene, there was all this gunk left over that seemed like it
should be useful somehow.
So, chemists were playing around with this oil and also coal waste,
but the results were always a mess.
"Useless gunk," they called it.
So Leo decides, "I'm going to do them one better."
He starts doing his own experiments in his garage.
For five years Leo tinkers, but the stuff he's getting is still a mess.
And then he realizes he needs a special oven that will give him precise control over the
temperature and the pressure, but nothing like that exists.
This might have stopped other chemists, and actually did stop other chemists,
but it doesn't stop Leo Baekeland.
Out in his garage, he builds his special oven.
He calls it the Bakelizer.
One day in 1907, he prepares his latest mixture.
He takes phenol, which you can get from oil or coal tar, adds formaldehyde, and combines
them in a test tube and puts them in the Bakelizer.
When he opens it up, he finds this hard amber-colored material molded in the shape of the test tube.
He had just made plastic in a lab for the first time, and he calls it Bakelite.
Then he starts shopping it around.
He talks to people making these newfangled electrical things, and he tells them,
"You don't have to mess around with those bugs anymore.
You can use this new thing I've made from fossil fuels.
It doesn't melt, and it doesn't burn.
You can use it for insulating those electrical sockets or whatever!"
He also talks to the Ford company.
The Model T had just come out, and Ford needed something heat resistant for things like
spark plugs and distributor caps.
Bakelite was it.
The world was poised for a plastic revolution where everyone could finally get one of everything.
And when World War II came, the government demand for plastic skyrocketed,
and consumer demand followed.
Plastics were here to stay.
Leo had cracked this big chemical mystery and made life more affordable for everybody,
and soon other chemists joined in.
It's like, we add this molecule here — we get Ziploc bags.
You add this molecule — you get your kid's Legos.
We add this molecule — we get Styrofoam.
Basically today, a lot of things you own are made in part of fossil fuels.
That's the world Leo Baekeland made.
And everybody lived happily ever after.