Chemist Leo Baekeland

In the opening scene of The Graduate, Benjamin (played by a young Dustin Hoffman) is awkwardly working an affluent Southern California crowd at a graduation party arranged for him by his parents when a family friend offers one of the century's most famous pieces of cinematic advice: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics."

Millions of moviegoers winced and smiled. The scene neatly captured their own late 60's ambivalence toward the ever more synthetic landscape of their times. They loved their cheap, easy-to-clean Formica countertops, but envied—and longed for—the authentic touch and time-lessness of marble and wood.

The chord struck by that line in The Graduate under-scored how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907, when Leo Baekeland made the laboratory breakthrough that would change the stuff our world is made of. A Belgian-born chemist-entrepreneur, Baekeland had a knack for spotting profitable opportunities.

He scored his first success in the 1890s with his invention of Velox, an improved photographic paper that freed photographers from having to use sunlight for developing images. With Velox, they could rely on artificial light, which at the time usually meant gaslight but soon came to mean electric.

It was a far more dependable and convenient way to work. In 1899 George Eastman, whose cameras and developing services would make photography a household activity, bought full rights to Velox for the then astonishing sum of $1 million. Starting around 1904, Baekeland and an assistant began their search.

Three years later, after filling laboratory books with page after page of failed experiments, Baekeland finally developed a material that he dubbed in his notebooks "Bakelite". The key turned out to be his "bakelizer", a heavy iron vessel that was part pressure cooker and part basement boiler.

With it, he was able to control the formaldehyde phenol reaction with more finesse than had anyone before him. Initial heating of the phenol and formaldehyde (in the presence of an acid or base to get the reaction going) produced a shellac-like liquid good for coating surfaces like a varnish.

Further heating turned the liquid into a pasty, gummier good. And when Baekeland put this stuff into the bakelizer, he was rewarded with a hard, translucent, infinitely moldable substance. In a word: plastic.