Summary
Alexander Parkes, from Birmingham, made the first plastic, according to the record books, from a factory at the Parkesine Co, Hackney Wick, London E9. The year was 1866, but attempts to make a plastic material had been going on for centuries using natural polymers, and Charles Goodyear had managed to vulcanise rubber as early as 1839. He had had no connection with the company making tyres, incidentally, though the spelling is the same.
The first plastic material to be created from a synthetic polymer appeared in 1907. It was named Bakelite and was the work of Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian chemist from Ghent. America beckoned quite soon, and after university he left for the States in 1889 and eventually produced the artificial plastic from phenol and formaldehyde that almost took his name.See the full content of this document
Extract
Radio a Part of Bakelite Breakthrough
It was a revolutionary substance, and by the time the Ferguso...
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