The 20 most fascinating accidental inventions

17. Plastic

Jacob Turcotte

Chances are that, right now, you can spot a half dozen plastic items without even having to turn your head. In fact, if you're wearing glasses with lightweight or scratch-resistant lenses, chances are that everything you see is, in a sense, plastic-wrapped.

Leo Baekeland, the Belgian-born chemist who in 1907 developed the first plastic, probably did not set out to dominate your visual field with his creation. His original goal was much more modest: to find a replacement for shellac, a resin secreted by a South Asian scale bug.  

Baekeland's "Novolak," a combination of formaldehyde and phenol – an acid extracted from coal tar – failed to catch on as a shellac substitute. But he noticed that by controlling the temperature and pressure applied to the two compounds (using a massive iron cooker that he called a bakelizer) and by mixing it with wood flour, asbestos, or slate dust, he had created a material that was moldable yet robust as well as non-conductive and heat-resistant. He dubbed his invention Bakelite, and referred to it as "the material of 1,000 uses." 

He underestimated its potential by several orders of magnitude. In the following decades, Bakelite was used to make electronics components, auto parts, cameras, telephones, buttons, letter openers, clocks, radios, toys, telephone casings, billiard balls, kitchenware, rosary beads, chess pieces, and tens of thousands of other items. 

Over the 20th century, Bakelite and its descendants – plexiglass, polyester, vinyl, nylon, polyurethane, polycarbonate, and so on – transformed the stuff that our world is made of, from natural to synthetic. Items that were crafted from wood, ivory, or marble, are now affordable for almost everyone.

Yet at the same time, the ersatz topography that Baekeland brought forth does not always sit easily with us. As everyone who's seen "The Graduate" knows, "plastic" is a powerful synonym for "inauthentic." What's more, most petroleum-derived plastics will remain in the environment for centuries, if not millennia. We've replaced materials that are timeless with one that simply lasts a really long time. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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