Who Invented Plastic and When?

Plastic is a material so common in today’s world that it is taken for granted, but it is a fairly recent invention. Until about one hundred years ago, plastic was not a common material.  In fact, plastic only became widely used around the 1920s in industrialized countries around the globe.

The first plastic was invented in the mid-1800s:

• In 1855 Alexander Parkes invented an imitation ivory out of cellulose that he deemed Parkesine. This material, the first cellulose-based plastic ever invented, would later be known as celluloid.
• In 1909 synthetic plastics made from chemicals such as formaldehyde and phenol, are more common today. They were invented by the Belgian-American inventor Leo Baekeland, and would eventually be known as Bakelite.

Celluloid and Bakelite were the first plastics ever invented, but the history of plastics as we know them extends into the 20th century.

Invention of Parkesine

When Alexander Parkes began experimenting with nitrocellulose in the 1850s, little did he know that his product would revolutionize manufacturing throughout the world.  Parkes, an inventor and metallurgist, unveiled his creation at the World’s Fair in London in 1862, and was awarded a bronze metal for his efforts.  Although Parkes would die in 1890 without having seen his invention reach the level of ubiquity that it now possesses, he can rightly be called the inventor of plastic.

It was not until John Wesley Hyatt began experimenting with cellulose nitrate that this new plastic would achieve a level of commercial success.  Looking for a way to create imitation billiard balls, Hyatt added camphor to nitrocellulose in order to make it hard enough for his purposes. It worked, and Hyatt was in business.

Although he started out with billiards balls, Hyatt is more widely known for pioneering the use of celluloid in film making when, in the late 1800s, he manufactured a version of his plastic for use in still photography and in motion pictures.

Bakelite Makes it Better

One of the problems with celluloid was that it is extremely flammable, and when it comes into contact with a flame, burns very easily. A cheap method of creating a similar synthetic polymer was invented by Leo Baekeland, whose experimentation with formaldehyde and phenol resulted in the creation of the first fully synthetic plastic. Bakelite, as it came to be known, possessed numerous advantages over celluloid. It was much less flammable, more durable, and easier to produce.

Bakelite often comes up when one asks who invented plastic and when because it can be considered the first “true” plastic. Unlike celluloid, it is entirely synthetic. Not a single molecule found in Bakelite can be found occurring naturally in nature.  While other plastics can be melted and remolded, the structure of Bakelite is such that the plastic is destroyed if it is melted. It is therefore known as a “thermoset” plastic—tough and durable, at much higher temperatures than its predecessors.

Modern Plastics Come into View

As with celluloid, Bakelite also had its drawbacks. It was brittle, and although it was cheaper and easier to produce than the plastics that came before it, many believed that plastics could be developed even more inexpensively.

Several products throughout the 1900s satisfied the need for cheap, easy-to-produce plastics. Nylon in the 1930s was the first fully synthetic fiber, introduced by the DuPont Corporation at the World’s Fair in New York in 1939.

Styrofoam was invented in the early 1940s. PVC, often used to make pipes, was first plasticized in the mid-1920s and became a popular replacement for other plastics in the decades that followed. Chemically treated, this plastic can be made thin and extremely pliable, for use in products such as shrink wrap.

Under the various definitions of plastic, many people and companies deserve the credit for the range of plastic products enjoyed by consumers today.