Mono Monday: Inventions

The final Mono Monday theme for this month is ‘Inventions’, but without a specific century as in previous weeks.  You’re probably thinking I’ve chosen the telephone but you’d be wrong.  It’s what it’s made of which is the invention which has probably changed our life even more than the telephone and not necessarily for the better.

It’s Plastic.  Or, in the case of this phone, the first plastic; Bakelite.  It was invented by Leo Hendrik Baekeland, who first invented a photographic printing paper called Velox.  He sold the rights to this to Kodak in 1899 for $1m and with his new fortune set up a laboratory in Yonkers, New York, where he invented Bakelite in 1907.  It was immediately successful and used for all sorts of products including telephones, electrical sockets and car engine parts, to name but a few.  However, whilst successful it could be brittle so once other more flexible plastics were invented, Bakelite fell out of favour. 

It has undoubtedly been the success story of the last century but as we are now seeing, it comes with a huge environmental cost.