ABSTRACT

Although polymers have existed naturally on Earth since well before the dawn of humans, the ubiquitous role they play in today’s society is much more recent. e modern plastics industry is oen dated from the mid-nineteenth century, with John Hyatt’s invention of celluloid (a synthetic modication of natural cellulose). e rst wholly synthetic polymer was phenolic, invented by Leo Baekeland by condensing phenol with formaldehyde in 1906. In the decades following 1930, industrial research by Wallace Carothers and others produced a great outpouring of new polymers: nylon, polyethylene terephthalate, polystyrene, and many others. e bar graph in Figure 13.1 shows how polymers now rank alongside metals, ceramics, and natural materials in terms of annual tonnage (a graph using volume rather than weight would show polymers even more prominently, due to their low density).