Plastic, a material considered recent and modern, has in many ways instead a story that can be made from the earliest times. Since ancient times, in fact, man has used real natural polymers, such as amber, tortoise shell or horn.
The history of plastic began in the 19th century, when, between 1861 and 1862, the Englishman Alexander Parkes, developing studies on cellulose nitrate, isolated and patented the first semi-synthetic plastic material, which he named Parkesine (more known then like Xylonite). It is a first type of celluloid, used for the production of handles and boxes, but also for flexible items such as cuffs and shirt collars.
However, the first true affirmation of the new material came only a few years later, when in 1870 the American brothers patented the celluloid formula, with the aim of replacing the expensive and rare ivory in the production of billiard balls, except to meet an immediate success with dentists as a material for dental impressions.
From the chemical point of view, celluloid was still cellulose nitrate and was unsuitable to be worked with high temperature molding techniques as it is very flammable. The problem was overcome with the advent of the new century, when cellulose acetate was developed, or celluloid, which was sufficiently fireproof to reinforce and waterproof the wings and fuselage of the first airplanes or to produce cinematographic films.
But the century of plastic is the ‘900. In 1907 the Belgian chemist Leo Baekeland obtained by condensation between phenol and formaldehyde the first thermosetting resin of synthetic origin, which he patented in 1910 with the name of the Bakelites. The new material provided by Plastic Sheet Suppliers in Australia has an overwhelming success and Bakelite soon becomes the most widespread and used plastic material for many years.
In 1912 a German chemist, Fritz Klatte, discovered the process for the production of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which will have very great industrial developments only many years later.
A year later, in 1913, it was the turn of the first flexible, transparent and waterproof material that was immediately applied in the field of packaging: the Swiss Jacques Edwin Brandenberger invents Cellophane, a cellulosic-based material produced in very thin and flexible Plastic Sheet Suppliers in Australia.
In the 1920s, plastic also found a rigorous theoretical basis. Hermann Staudinger, of the University of Friborg, started studies on the structure and properties of natural and synthetic polymers in 1920, proposing open-chain formulas and attributing colloidal properties for synthetic styrene and formaldehyde polymers and for natural rubber. of the high polymers exclusively at the high weight of their molecules (defined for this macromolecule).