Plastics are excellent materials with unique and very useful properties. You can produce just about anything you can imagine using plastics.

Characteristics of Plastics

History Of Plastics:

1. Before Plastics—Age of the Natural Resins

• Rubber—Tough elastic substance (light cream or dark amber
  colored) from the milky juice (sap) of rubber tree
• Ebonite—Hard black rubber; natural rubber + sulfur
• Gutta-Percha—Dark brown substance like natural rubber
• Shellac—dark-brown material from lac insects

2. Bakelite—The First True Synthetic Plastics

• Leo Hendrik Baekeland invented Bakelite from coal
• Bakelite helped make 20th century “The Age of Electricity”

3. Industrialization of Major Plastics

4. Concept of High Molecular Weight Compounds & Polymers

• Herman Staudinger, German chemist, proposed a new theory that several thousands of reactive units bonded together in chains and form giant molecules to make up cellulose and rubber
• In 1920, Staudinger proposed calling such materials: high molecular weight compounds, macromolecules, or polymers.

5. Nylon—The First Tailor-Made Plastics

• 1931 – Fiber 66 was produced, later called Nylon 66 in 1938