Bakelite Museum

The Bakelite Museum in Somerset shows the first fully synthetic plastic ever made. It stands in a converted 19th-century cider mill beside the River Tone, its red-brick walls still holding the original presses. Inside, the air smells of warm resin and polished wood. Visitors step past vats once used for apple juice that now hold trays of early Bakelite samples. The museum occupies a single long room lined with glass cases and workbenches. The material was invented by Leo Baekeland in New York in 1907 and patented two years later. It could be shaped while hot and then hardened permanently, making it ideal for radios, telephones and electrical fittings. By 1922 the Bakelite Corporation had merged three firms and marketed the plastic as having “a thousand uses.” In the UK a factory at Tyseley, Birmingham, became the heart of production until it closed in 1987. The museum keeps catalogues listing colours from black and brown to translucent blues and greens. Among the exhibits are jewellery, pipe stems and children’s toys cast in the warm amber tones of early Bakelite. A workbench displays tools used to polish finished pieces. Along one wall runs a counter of radio cabinets and telephone bodies, their dark surfaces still smooth after decades. Outside, the riverside path offers views of willows bending over the water, while inside the quiet click of the museum’s old clock marks the slow passage of time.