Perhaps the most significant modern material – in all its forms – has been plastic. Plastic is a general word used to describe a range of synthetic products, made from natural materials such as oil or coal. Celluloid was the first plastic, made in 1870 from wood (cellulose) by US inventor John Hyatt. But it was the invention of Bakelite in 1909, the world’s first synthetic plastic by the US chemist Leo Baekeland that started the modern plastics industry.