Making Bakelite - Periodic Table of Videos

that ready already here in the lab we're going to make a plastic called bakelite bakelite was one of the first plastics that became widespread and it was made about 100 years ago for the first time by a guy called baekeland baekeland was built in the quite complicated way with A's and E's but the material he invented quite soon became much more simply called bakelite and it became very popular when people making telephones and toys and all kinds of things if you remember we didn't have telephones in our pockets there was a telephone in a place of honor usually in the hall of a house the telephone was made out of bakelite and because it was brittle if you dropped the telephone it broke have you ever owned any bakelite product not that I know of I think it might be slightly before my time particularly the radios which in those days occupied the sort of place that TVs are occupying now people used to sit around the radio to hear the news and again they had bakelite cases so we're going to make it is actually a very easy synthesis it's a reaction between phenol and from aldehyde Daren is doing the chemical part of making bakelite to make real bakelite you have to add so-called wood flour which is a powder made from wood particularly the part of wood called lignin which is what gives wood its strength so we have in here if you can see in there a reaction vessel we have the phenol already kind of a crystalline kind of material and we have here some from aldehyde so I'm just going to add this in a little bit what's that dog you don't just turn the heat up a little bit and I'm gonna put in some acetic acid all right we're gonna have this we can manage it just like full-time have you ever had this many cameras at well now they go all the way we're gonna leave this for a while just so we have a nice intimate mixture between the phenol and the yum aldehyde and that will hit sit there happily and nothing will happen until we add this which is concentrated hydrochloric acid if you heated it up it was then sufficiently flexible that you could push it into a mold and mold all sorts of objects ashtrays people used to smoke a lot then and particularly knobs for putting on all sorts of electrical equipment you know that on-off switches things like that so usually when we do this nothing happens until we after the last couple of meals I am adding the acid quite slowly I think we might be seeing some pink come in there we go we've made a plastic what Daren is making is called a phenol formaldehyde resin quite heavy it's it's it's tough it is it's quite tough material actually I've got a rather crude model down here of phenol this is a benzene ring with five hydrogen's and this is an oxygen atom with another hydrogen on here I like that I put this on and it squeaks but that's not part of the scientific explanation formaldehyde consists of carbon and oxygen and two hydrogen's but in the chemical reaction the oxygen goes away and so in the chemical reaction which is surprisingly violent and which requires a catalyst you can either use a base that's an alkali or an acid in Darrin's case he used hydrochloric acid because he's really fond of hydrochloric acid he used it to dissolve a cheeseburger but he used this acid which makes the formaldehyde attack the pheno I in this position or that position there's a call the ortho positions or the position here para and so essentially it joins a whole series of these rings together one formaldehyde goes in here then you get another ring and so you get a complicated network of these phenol molecules joined by ch2 groups and if you look at the chemical structure written down it quickly looks like my hair okay so we're going to give this another go and the difference this time is we're going to apply a bit more heat and see if there's any difference ready what was discovered by baekeland was that this mixture could be molded and it led to a large number of different objects being made nowadays they're much better plastics and so bakelite is not used very much though their whole group of people who collect bakelite objects for nostalgia sake hey hey well we're a bit disappointed actually because it's not as good as yesterday's yesterday's we coated the inside of the fume hood with bakelite and we don't really know why it's different yet so we'll have to think about that one we do have footage from yesterday's so maybe we'll look at the footage again and see if we feel that yeah so the quality may not be as good yeah okay this thing isn't doesn't need a student so how do we avoid that

Channel: Periodic Videos

Views: 459,987

Keywords: chemistry, periodicvideos, periodic table, periodic table of videos, professor, martyn poliakoff, nottingham, chemicals, elements, Bakelite (Invention)

Id: Vlh0YDRmZ0I

Length: 7min 43sec (463 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 20 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/mooglinux]

How would you form that neatly into a mold? It looks like it expels a LOT of gas.

[u/[deleted]]

Is it safe to make bakelite at home?

[u/Pinkhippo11]

Awesome experiment! How many moles of the plastic were produced?

[u/btcprox]

Cool! It's like foof and cotton candy appears!

Though is there a way to change the colour of the Bakelite produced?