Tank man

As with most matters related to the Tiananmen Square protests, the Tank Man topic is still a political taboo in mainland China, where any discussion of it is regarded as inappropriate or risky. In 1978, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Besides the person who risked his life stepping in front of the war machine, there is the tank driver who disobeyed his orders and refused to overrun his compatriot and was later arrested. Baekeland's great-grandson, Anthony Baekeland spent several years in a psychiatric hospital after murdering his mother, Barbara Daly Baekeland; ironically, he suffocated himself with a plastic bag in 1981. As one of the Chinese pro-democracy movement's leaders remarked, there is more than one hero in the Tank Man picture. Baekeland is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, New York. In April 1998, Time Magazine included "The Unknown Rebel" in its list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in a sanatorium in Beacon, New York.

Jiang replied "I think never killed [sic].". He sold the General Bakelite Company to Union Carbide in 1939, at his son's prompting, retired, and eventually became a recluse, eating all of his meals from cans and becoming obsessed with developing an immense tropical garden on his Florida estate. In a 1992 interview with Barbara Walters, then-Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin was asked what became of the man. As Baekeland got older, he became more eccentric, getting into fierce battles with his son (and presumptive heir) over salary and other issues. The People's Republic of China government, if it knows, isn't saying much. Baekeland appeared on the cover of TIME Magazine on September 22, 1924. In Red China Blues: My Long March from Mao to Now, Jan Wong writes that the man is still alive in hiding in mainland China. Baekeland made Swinburne the chairman of the new Bakelite Limited, his British subsidiary.

In a speech to the President's Club in 1999, Bruce Herschensohn — former deputy special assistant to President of the United States Richard Nixon and a member of the President Ronald Reagan transition team — reported that he was executed 14 days later; other sources say he was killed by firing squad a few months after the Tiananmen Square protests. Baekeland visited England in 1916 and met James Swinburne, who almost ten years earlier had coincidentally experimented with and created a material identical to Bakelite only to find that Baekeland had been awarded the patent the day before. What has happened to Wang following the demonstration is equally obscure. Baekeland became a multimillionaire as a result of the explosion in the manufacture and use of Bakelite. Shortly after the incident, British tabloid the Sunday Express named him as Wang Weilin, a 19-year-old student; however, the veracity of this claim is dubious. The official name of Bakelite was polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. Little is publicly known of the man's identity. By controlling the pressure and temperature applied to phenol and formaldehyde, he could produce his dreamed hard moldable plastic: bakelite.

It headlined hundreds of major newspapers and news magazines and was the lead story on countless news broadcasts around the world. Then he turned to developing a binder for asbestos, which at that time was molded with rubber. The striking still and motion photography of the small man standing alone before a line of very large tanks reached international audiences practically overnight. He first produced a soluble phenol-formaldehyde shellac (called "Novolak" that never became a market success). Finally, anxious onlookers pulled the man down and absorbed him into the crowd and the tanks continued on their way. Baekeland began to investigate the reactions of phenol and formaldehyde. Reports of what were said to the driver vary, including "Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you"; "Go back, turn around, and stop killing my people"; "Go away". Chemists had begun to recognize that many of the natural resins and fibers were polymers.

After about half an hour of blocking the tanks, the man climbed up onto the top of the lead tank and had a conversation with the driver. His first objective was to find a replacement for shellac (at that time made from the shells of lac beetles). In response, the front tank attempted to drive around the man, but the man repeatedly stepped into the path of the tank. When asked why he entered the field of synthetic resins, Baekeland answered "to make money". As the tanks came to a stop, he appeared to be trying to wave them away. Soon it penetrated nearly all branches of industry. He appeared to be holding two bags of some sort, one in each hand. Radios, telephones and electrical insulators were made of Bakelite due to its properties of insulation and heat-resistance.

The man stood unwavering and alone in the middle of the road as the tanks approached him. Bakelite was the first plastic invented that held its shape after being heated. The incident ironically took place on the Chang An Da Dao, or "Great Avenue of Everlasting Peace", just a minute away from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, which leads into the Forbidden City, Beijing, on June 5, 1989, the day after the Chinese government began cracking down violently on the protests. Bakelite took the industry by storm after 1907. The photo was taken by Jeff Widener, a member of Associated Press. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry winning German Adolf von Baeyer had experimented with this material in 1872, but did not complete its development. Tank man or The Unknown Rebel is the nickname of the anonymous man who became internationally famous when he was filmed and photographed standing before a line of seventeen or more tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 in the People's Republic of China. These can be mixed, heated, and then either molded or extruded.

Bakelite was made from phenol (then known as carbolic acid) and formaldehyde. The invention of Bakelite is considered the beginning of the Age of Plastics. Baekeland sold his patent for Velox photographic paper to the president of Kodak, George Eastman, for $750,000. After completing his doctorate at the university of his native city, he emigrated to America in 1889, inspired by the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

Born in Ghent, Belgium, Baekeland was the son of a cobbler and a maid. Leo Hendrik Baekeland (November 14, 1863 - February 23, 1944) was a Belgian-born American chemist who invented Velox photographic paper (1893) and Bakelite (1907), an inexpensive, nonflammable, versatile, and popular plastic.