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Even the
more recent breakthroughs such as personal computers, cell phones
and the Internet are items that we cannot live without.
But there was a material developed
in the summer of 1907 that could be considered as important as most
of the above-mentioned products. Its inventor was a Belgian-born
chemist named Leo, who lived in Yonkers, N.Y., with his wife and two
children.
This revolutionary product wasn't
the Velox mentioned in the headline of this story. Actually, I had
never even heard of Velox before now. Leo crossed paths with another
great inventor whose invention you could not live without.
We'll call him George. It was George
who bought the rights to Velox to use in developing his invention in
the 1890s. George paid Leo $1 million for the rights to Velox, which
was a type of photographic paper that allowed photographers to
develop film with artificial light instead of having to rely on
sunlight. George wanted it for his photography business.
George was George Eastman, founder
of Kodak. It's always interesting when famous people cross paths
with other famous people, like when the inventor of Velox met the
inventor of modern photography.
For example, Alexander Graham Bell
and Thomas Edison knew each other. Samuel Morse's father was friends
with Noah Webster (as in Webster's dictionary). Charles Lindbergh,
who most people don't know was also an inventor, worked briefly for
Henry Ford.
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Tom Baldwin, inventor of the
parachute, knew the Wright Brothers because he was in a race with
them to develop the first airplane. And Joshua Lionel Cowan, the
inventor of Lionel trains, was friends with Conrad Hubert, founder
of the Eveready Battery Company.
But there's more to this story, and
it has nothing to do with George Eastman or Kodak.
You see, Leo used the million
dollars to develop a brand-new product -- actually it was a material
rather than a product -- that most people cannot imagine living
without.
You might not recognize the name of
Leo Hendrik Baekeland, but you might remember his invention of
synthetic plastic by the brand name of Bakelite. It was his
synthetic plastic, not his Velox, that was advertised as "the
material of a thousand uses."
Allow me one more example of famous
people crossing paths with other famous people: Leo Baekeland and
his wife, Celine, bought the Florida house that formerly was owned
by William Jennings Bryan. Bryan was the presidential candidate who
lost to William Taft in the 1908 election.
[Paul Niemann]
Paul Niemann is the author of Invention Mysteries. He can be
reached at niemann7@aol.com.
© Copyright Paul Niemann 2005
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