Bakelite. History of invention and production

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Bakelite. History of invention and production

The history of technology, technology, objects around us

Directory / The history of technology, technology, objects around us

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Bakelite (named after the Belgian chemist and inventor Leo Baekeland), polyoxybenzylmethylene glycol anhydride - a product of the polycondensation of phenol with formaldehyde in the presence of an alkaline catalyst, resol (from the group of phenol-formaldehyde resins), thermoset. Formed at the initial stage of the synthesis of phenol-formaldehyde resin. Viscous liquid or solid soluble fusible product from light yellow to black.

It is used as a binder in the production of abrasive products of cold and hot pressing and rolling, as well as for other technical purposes. Bakelite is soluble in alcohol, with prolonged heating it becomes insoluble and infusible form. This property of bakelite is used in the manufacture of plastics. Bakelite alcohol solutions are used as varnishes.

Bakelite telephone set

In the first half of the XNUMXth century, the word "bakelite" became a household word - a synonym for quality and progress.

Leo Hendrik Bakeland was born in 1863 in Ghent, Belgium. Young Leo was an inquisitive and diligent student. At the insistence of his mother, he entered the university, where he successfully studied physics and chemistry, and at 24 he became a rising star in science. Leo soon married Celine Swarts, the daughter of his supervisor, and the young family moved to the United States. There, Leo made his first major invention - he developed Velox photographic paper, which did not require the use of daylight during the development process.

For photography, which was actively developing at that time, this was a significant achievement, and in 1899, the founder of Kodak, George Eastman, bought the rights to this technology from Bakeland, paying him a huge amount for those times - a little less than $ 1 million. Bakeland, along with his wife and two children, moved in a prestigious location just north of Yonkers, New York.

Having turned the barn into a laboratory, Leo took up his next project - he decided to find a replacement for shellac. This natural resin, which is secreted by lac bugs, parasitic insects that live on some tropical and subtropical trees, was used as an insulator in the fledgling electrical industry at the very beginning of the XNUMXth century. Demand for hand-harvested shellac far outpaced supply, and its price rose rapidly.

Bakeland drew attention to the result of the experiments of the German chemist Adolf von Bayer - a precipitate obtained by him back in 1872 during the reaction between phenol, extracted from coal tar, and formalin. Von Bayer himself was involved in dyes, and for his purposes this precipitate was of no interest.

Bakeland was looking for something completely different - an electrical insulator. It took him three years of experiments (from 1904 to 1907) before he was able to control the course of this reaction with a precision that had not been possible before. The apparatus, which was a cross between a heating boiler and a pressure cooker and called a "bakelizer", made it possible to obtain from a sticky mass - the initial reaction product between phenol and formaldehyde - a solid transparent material, the world's first fully synthetic plastic that takes on the desired shape when heated.

Spatial structure of bakelite

The inventor called this material bakelite and in 1909 officially presented it at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, and soon founded the General Bakelite Corp. for its production. Bakelite turned out to be good not only for insulation, but also for pipes, buttons, billiard balls, umbrella handles and knives, cases of various devices. Bakeland himself called it the material of a thousand uses.

For a number of properties, plastics based on phenol-formaldehyde resin still remain an unsurpassed material. Groups of materials that can be produced incl. using resol.

Various fillers, such as wood flour, cellulose, fiberglass, rock or metal powder, textile fibers, and the like, are (or have been) added to the resole resin to give shape to the products.

Author: S.Apresov

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