This story begins in the United States at the end of the 19th century, the vigorous "Gilded Age". Leo Hendrik Baekeland was born in Belgium in 1863. He came from an ordinary background, his father was an ordinary craftsman and his mother was a servant. But with his love for knowledge, he went to college and continued his studies, and finally became a professor of chemistry. In 1889, he immigrated to the United States and entered the industrial manufacturing industry.
In 1905, he synthesized a product called "phenolic resin" for the first time.It is the world's first completely synthetic plastic.
He subsequently registered a patent for this plastic, named it after himself (Bakelite, translated as "Bakelite" or "Bakelite" in Chinese), and put it into mass production. He was also called the "Father of Plastics" by Time magazine on May 20, 1940.
So, how does this process work? What can we learn from this? Let’s talk about it below.
Some ancient telephones are made of Bakelite. Image source: pixabay
New materials are calling
Plastic, a cheap industrial product, has broken through the limitations of natural materials and is insulating, stable, and corrosion-resistant, making it a universal material. With this invention, Baekeland himself became an industrial tycoon.
At first glance, this story is one of transformation of knowledge into application and great success. However, the birth of plastic was not smooth sailing. And Baekeland was able to synthesize plastic because of quite a few coincidences.
At that time, people involved in the chemical materials industry generally had two purposes.One is to replace natural materials and the other is to develop insulation materials.
After the industrial revolution, the middle class rose and the demand for high-end consumer goods greatly increased. Some people want to use artificial materials to replace natural materials, such as ivory, agate, amber, etc., so that they can be mass-produced.
For example, the demand for billiard balls in the consumer market at that time was very high, but if they were made of ivory, eight billiard balls could be made from one ivory, and the output could be imagined, so it became profitable to develop new materials.
Image source: pixabay
Through continuous exploration, people discovered that natural fiber-containing materials, such as wood, cotton, etc., after some treatment, adding nitric acid and camphor and heating, can form plastic materials, which can be molded into different shapes, and the texture is very similar to ivory. This material is called "celluloid".
However, this material has a very fatal shortcoming:Flammable.
Billiard balls were constantly being hit, and the flammable celluloid material was a time bomb. It was no wonder that suspicious explosions were occasionally heard in the billiard halls at that time.
After all, the main component of celluloid is nitrocellulose, which is indeed very unstable. If you don’t believe me, you can light a ping pong ball (mainly composed of celluloid) with a lighter in a safe and open place with no flammable objects around, and you can feel how quickly this thing burns.
Another demand comes from the emerging power industry.
The rise of electricity has brought about a desire for synthetic materials. People want to find a synthetic material that can be produced cheaply and in large quantities to meet the insulation needs of wires and lines.
Something similar to rubber was their "model," but even if the rubber plantations in the tropical colonies were operating at full capacity, they could not keep up with the expansion of electricity. But at that time, the "skill points" of synthetic materials were not that far away, and people's imagination of good materials was also very limited.
The more critical problem is that at that time, whether it was looking for substitutes for natural materials or insulating materials, they were actually far away from real chemical research. So what were chemists doing at that time?
The answer is close at hand, but...
In fact, chemists at that time were very close to the "right answer." As early as 1872, the German chemist Adolf von Baeyer discovered thatAfter the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde, there will be some colorless, resinous, turbid residue left behind.But these residues were discarded as garbage by chemists at the time.
This cannot be blamed on chemists for being blind. This is because the chemical industry at that time focused a large part of its attention on dyes. Even the later pharmaceutical industry was derived from the manufacture of dyes.
The famous "Prontosil", the world's first synthetic antibiotic, was formerly a red dye. The company that developed it is called Farben, which also means "color" in German.
Chemists who are dedicated to finding pure dyes are certainly not too interested in this seemingly useless residue.
Let’s get back to Baekeland himself. Before he entered the manufacturing industry, he did have a background in chemical research. Even though the development of chemistry as a subject at that time was not as systematic as it later was, he was systematically trained to be sensitive to the subject, especially to attach great importance to experiments.
Before he came to the United States, he taught chemistry at the University of Ghent in Belgium, where he studied photochemistry, which is how to optimize imaging techniques using various means. The content of his research isStudy catalysts and conditions for various chemical reactions, and control various variables to observe differences in the finished product.
On the one hand, this gave him a sensitivity to various conditions and elements that people in the chemical products industry did not have. On the other hand, he also had access to some cutting-edge and new materials at the time, and mass-produced laboratory products. For example, he participated in the invention of a photographic paper called Volex, and the patent was eventually bought by Kodak.
To sum it up,Baekeland not only understands research, but also pays attention to what newly discovered substances can be used for.
With his dual sensitivity to chemical reactions and synthetic material manufacturing, he keenly discovered the potential of the "by-products" of the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde. Through constant trial and error, he finally synthesized phenolic resin plastic and applied for a patent.
Baekeland's inspiration
If we only see Baekeland's success, it would fall into the cliché of scientific "inspirational and refreshing articles". Let's analyze it in a little more depth.
Baekeland's success is somewhat accidental, but it also reveals an important element in technological innovation:Breakthrough innovation often comes from breaking the existing framework.
Science and technology research scholar and Dutch sociologist Wiebe E. Bijker used the term "technological frame" to explain this phenomenon: When people explore new technological inventions, they are not without direction, and they often come from an existing framework.
This framework defines "what is the goal", "what is the current problem", and the logic of how to solve the problem, and then develops corresponding strategies, adopts corresponding means, and applies corresponding technologies on this basis. Such a framework can help focus resources and solve problems, but sometimes it can also cause us to miss important new discoveries.
Going back to the invention of plastic, we can also see such a framework.
First of all, people didn’t know what “plastic” was at that time. During the invention process, people just stood on their existing framework and explored a solution from the already defined problems and solutions.
People in the materials industry at that time, because celluloid already existed, focused on making celluloid less flammable. They solved the problem by changing solutions, adjusting reaction and molding temperatures, incorporating stabilizers, and so on.
At that time, their imagination of materials was only based on natural materials, and then added considerations such as production costs and production processes. This framework was mature at the time, but it had an unsolvable bottleneck: it could only be improved, but it was difficult to break through.
As for the chemists on the other side, their technical framework is completely different.
The goal of synthetic dyes and related preparations is to find and extract as pure a compound as possible, while other products are just garbage or "by-products". The resinous "plastic" prototype produced in the reaction of phenol and formaldehyde was difficult to purify and therefore ignored by most chemists at the time.
This existing framework provides clear goals and behavioral paths, which can help people continuously optimize existing inventions and products.
But the key to a breakthrough new invention lies in its "newness" and its unpredictability. The famous historical sociologist Thomas Kuhn also proposed a similar concept, namely "paradigm" in his study of scientific development.
Paradigms can help the development of conventional science, but the birth of new scientific concepts such as relativity and quantum mechanics requires a completely different paradigm to break the original explanation framework.
Image source: pixabay
Opportunities are always reserved for those who are prepared and those who can break the existing framework and engage in open-ended imagination and observation. Baekeland's plastic empire is a hero created by the times, and it is also the result of courageous and flexible thinking.
This kind of thinking is often interdisciplinary and cross-field. And our innovation is not the pursuit of "standard answers". It cannot be limited to calculations of scale and investment, nor should it be limited to fields and frameworks.
Nowadays, many scientific and technical fields are extremely specialized, and communication between majors is particularly important. Technological innovation cannot be promoted by one person or one invention. Future scientific and technological progress will require confrontation and discussion among different social groups and different cognitive frameworks in order to continuously break the constraints of existing frameworks.
References
[1]Bijker, W.E. (1997). Ofbicycles,bakelites,andbulbs: Towardatheoryofsociotechnicalchange.MITpress.
[2]Sovacool, B.K.(2006).Reactors,Weapons,X-Rays,andSolarPanels:UsingSCOT,TechnologicalFrame,EpistemicCulture,andActorNetworkTheorytoInvestigateTechnology.JournalofTechnologyStudies,32(1),4-14.
[3]Kuhn, T.S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. University of Chicago press.
Planning and production
This article is a work of Popular Science China-Starry Sky Project
Produced by Science Popularization Department of China Association for Science and Technology
Producer｜China Science and Technology Press Co., Ltd., Beijing Zhongke Galaxy Culture Media Co., Ltd.
Author丨Zheng Li Popular Science Creator
Review丨Li Zongpeng, senior engineer of National Light Industry Plastic Products Quality Center
Planning｜Ding'ao