(263): Bakelite: Fascinating Early Plastic and the Beauty of Chemistry

Betta Tryptophan
Jul 20, 2017 · 3 min read
Look at that marbling, and those colors! I sent these away today.

I recently sold a whole bunch of backgammon chips made of Bakelite, and I was taken with the beauty of the coloring in the chips, the fact that they were rather heavy, unlike any other plastic I know. They came from an old backgammon set, and were more than an inch in diameter and probably a quarter inch thick. So solid and substantial one might think they could be used as currency, like money proxies, gambling chips, poker chips.

Interestingly, Bakelite was considered for use in the manufacture of coins during World War II, owing to a shortage of materials. But they opted for zinc coated steel instead. I used to have a bunch of the steel wartime pennies.

Old time telephone made of Bakelite. Elegant. Image CC0 Pixabay.

Bakelite was created by Leo Baekeland in 1907; plastic was really the material for the 20th century. Bakelite isn’t used much anymore, although it has been made into modern “retro” jewelry reproductions or fakes that might have been indistinguishable from the vintage stuff, if not for some clever identification methods.

Making the stuff itself isn’t hard, although it is rather dangerous unless you have a hood and a lot of protective coverings. Basically, it is a cross-linked polymer created by mixing phenol with formaldehyde and catalyzing a reaction between the two with strong acid or base (usually hydrochloric acid).

Ain’t it something? The formaldehyde preferentially reacts with the ortho (adjacent to the -OH) and the para (opposite position from the -OH) positions on phenol, so it’s basically like making the phenols join hands with up to three partners. It’s quite a dance! Image by JohnSRoberts99 via Wikimedia Commons.

If you’re interested in watching the process for making the Bakelite polymer, the guys at Periodic Videos have a jolly good video:

Of course, the stuff they make comes out porous, heavy and pink. In order to be useful, it must be put under pressure and heat treated to harden it, and in some cases, as in uses for pot handles and the like, wood fibers are used to create a composite. I have a ton of old radios with Bakelite cases; unfortunately many of them are cracked or broken. Bakelite can be rather frangible.

They’ve made more useful plastics since then, but there is nothing like handling the old original!

Some more Bakelite loveliness. The mark of the early-mid part of the 20th century. Image(cropped) by Ann-Dabney via Flickr. License.

Night night, y’all! Dream sweet dreams, and go out looking for some Bakelite stuff at antique shops or even yard sales sometime. It’s cool stuff!


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Betta Tryptophan

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Blue-haired middle-aged lady with a tendency to say socially and politically incorrect things and to make inappropriate jokes. Awkward and (sort of) proud of it

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