Forty years ago, when “Mr. McGuire” leaned over to say “one word … just one word” to Dustin Hoffman in the 1967 film The Graduate, that word - plastics - had already come to suggest everything phony and cheap in the modern world. But when “the material of a thousand uses” was invented 100 years ago, plastic promised our ancestors a future as bright and shiny as the newfangled substance itself: As Jeffrey L. Meikle puts it in American Plastic: A Cultural History (Rutgers University Press), plastic “would transform the world from a crude, uncertain place into a stable environment of material abundance and startling artificial beauty.”

The material that ushered in the “Plastics Age” was Bakelite, the first completely synthetic manmade substance. It was created in 1907 by Leo Baekeland, a New York chemist. Baekeland, born in 1863 in Ghent, Belgium, had become a professor of chemistry by age 26. But he didn't take to the academic life and in 1890 immigrated to the United States in search of broader horizons. He quickly found them, inventing a photographic paper, Velox, which he sold to Eastman Kodak for the princely sum of $1 million. Though Baekeland could've comfortably retired, he kept inventing. He developed a pot like apparatus that could precisely control the heat and pressure applied to volatile chemicals, using it to create a resin that, when cooled, hardened into the shape of its mold and was virtually indestructible. Bakelite was born.