All Things Bakelite: The Age of Plastic, a film by John Maher, is a virtual periodic table of elements that combine to create a joyous and provocative story about the “father of modern plastics”. In 1907, Leo Hendrik Baekeland, a Belgian-born American chemist, made one of the most transformative discoveries of the 20th century: Bakelite. It was the first wholly synthetic plastic and it ushered in an explosion of new man-made materials that marked the beginnings of our modern industrial age.