Degrading our planet, one nanoparticle at a time

Plastic is everywhere, and so is photography now. Leo Baekeland’s association with both is legendary. Around 1894, Leo perfected a photographic paper that would allow enlargements to be printed by artificial light, which he named "Velox". It was the first commercially successful photographic paper. To make up for the lack of an investor, he found a partner and established the Nepera Chemical Company in New York. In 1899, Leo and his partner sold Nepera to George Eastman of the Eastman Kodak Co. for $750,000, signing a non-compete clause: Leo agreed not to do research in photography for at least 20 years. So he set out to find another promising area of research. In 1907, Leo invented bakelite, the world’s first fully synthetic plastic and coined the term ‘plastic’.