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Leonardo, Godfather of Tupperware
Courtesy of the Archive of the Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci |
Intrigued, Vezzosi tried out the recipes and ended up with a compound resembling Bakelite, one of the first synthetic polymers, which was widely used in the early 1900s. But whereas the production of Bakelite involves intricate molds and chemical processing, making Leonardo’s natural plastic required nothing more than painting layers of pigmented animal or vegetable glue onto various templates, including cabbage leaves, lettuce, and ox tripe. “It is ‘plastic material’ in the classical meaning of the word,” Vezzosi says. “It is extraordinary on an aesthetic, scientific, and technological level—and this was over 500 years ago.”