The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [19]
The old form of insulation was shellac, named because it was made from the shell of the lac beetle. To make a pound of shellac took six months and fifteen thousand beetles. Baekeland set to work to find a synthetic alternative. Early on he pinned his hopes on a recipe that combined a sickly-sweet-smelling liquid, phenol, and a pungent, caustic liquid called Formalin, made from formaldehyde. For five years Baekeland tried again and again to cook phenol and Formalin together at high pressure in an oven he had designed. He produced only a series of batches of melted goo. And then one day in 1907, he opened the lid of his Bakelizer oven and found what today we would immediately recognize as a piece of plastic.
No such easy-to-shape, hard-to-damage (“it will not burn, it will not melt”) substance had ever existed. Man had fashioned something unknown in nature. Almost at once it became clear that this new invention had endless uses. By the 1920s, the era of Art Deco, the whole world seemed to be fashioned from the astonishing material that Baekeland dubbed “Bakelite.” The inventor himself retired to Miami, where he delighted in showing his guests his newest “invention,” a way of staying cool on even the hottest days. With his visitors craning to see what he had come up with this time, Baekeland would step fully clothed into his swimming pool and slowly walk down the steps and away from the edge, the water rising past his white shoes, then past his white trousers and white shirt, and finally up to his chin. He would emerge soaked and dripping, with only his sun helmet dry, and quietly return to pouring drinks.
Baekeland had earned his time off, for his invention changed the world. Time could scarcely stop gushing. Bakelite was a miracle substance, its writer proclaimed, “born of fire and mystery,” and destined to spread without limit. Within a few years, “from the time that a man brushes his teeth in the morning with a Bakelite-handled brush, until the moment when he removes his last cigarette from a Bakelite holder, extinguishes it in a Bakelite ashtray, and falls back upon a Bakelite bed, all that he touches, sees, uses, will be made of this material of a thousand purposes.”
Han van Meegeren devised use number 1,001.
10
BARGAINING WITH VULTURES
In occupied Holland, the Jews suffered disproportionately, but almost everyone suffered. Strikes and demonstrations, which had been common at first, soon proved futile. Protests met with mass arrests and wholesale executions. Attacks on the Germans by Dutch saboteurs brought immediate, savage retaliation. On October 1, 1944, after an attack on a German car near the village of Putten, every male in the village was sent to a concentration camp.
In German eyes, Holland was little more than a piece of fruit to grab and suck dry. The Germans rounded up half a million Dutch factory workers and sent them to work in German munitions plants and at similar jobs. They confiscated food, clothes, and scrap metal and sent it home. They ransacked private houses. So many moving vans prowled Dutch streets, especially in Jewish neighborhoods, that the name of the biggest moving company, Puls, gave rise to a new verb, “to puls,” meaning “to steal.” Nearly everything was subject to plunder. When Hitler attacked Russia, Germany snatched a hundred thousand bicycles from their Dutch owners in order to reuse the metal.*
As the war dragged on, shortages grew ever more acute. Prices on the black market rose to a level one hundred times higher than official prices. By the “hunger winter” of 1944, coal and oil and electricity were nearly unavailable. When night fell, only lanterns and candles