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Leo Baekeland

A portrait of Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-American chemist wearing glasses, a suit, and a tie, with a neatly groomed beard and mustache.

Belgian-American chemist (1863-1944) who invented Bakelite in 1907, the first fully synthetic plastic. Baekeland had already made a small fortune selling his photographic paper Velox to George Eastman before turning to phenolic resins. He worked from a converted carriage house in Yonkers and patented the process the following year. Time magazine put him on its cover in 1924 with the caption: 'It will not burn. It will not melt.'

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