Celluloid is more plastic and elastic than bakelite.  It is therefore more easily worked in sheets and small objects.  Celluloid can be made perfectly transparent and colorless while bakelite is confined to the range between a clear amber and an opaque brown or black.  On the other hand bakelite has the advantage in being tasteless, odorless, inert, insoluble and non-inflammable.  This last quality and its high electrical resistance give bakelite its chief field of usefulness.  Electricity was discovered by the Greeks, who found that amber (electron) when rubbed would pick up straws.  This means simply that amber, like all such resinous substances, natural or artificial, is a non-conductor or di-electric and does not carry off and scatter the electricity collected on the surface by the friction.  Bakelite is used in its liquid form for impregnating coils to keep the wires from shortcircuiting and in its solid form for commutators, magnetos, switch blocks, distributors, and all sorts of electrical apparatus for automobiles, telephones, wireless telegraphy, electric lighting, etc.

Bakelite, however, is only one of an indefinite number of such condensation products.  As Baeyer said long ago:  “It seems that all the aldehydes will, under suitable circumstances, unite with the aromatic hydrocarbons to form resins.”  So instead of phenol, other coal tar products such as cresol, naphthol or benzene itself may be used.  The carbon links (-CH_{2}-, methylene) necessary to hook these carbon rings together may be obtained from other substances than the aldehydes, for instance from the amines, or ammonia derivatives.  Three chemists, L.V.  Kedman, A.J.  Weith and F.P.  Broek, working in 1910 on the Industrial Fellowships of the late Robert Kennedy Duncan at the University of Kansas, developed a process using formin instead of formaldehyde.  Formin—­or, if you insist upon its full name, hexa-methylene-tetramine—­is a sugar-like substance with a fish-like smell.  This mixed with crystallized carbolic acid and slightly warmed melts to a golden liquid that sets on pouring into molds.  It is still plastic and can be bent into any desired shape, but on further heating it becomes hard without the need of pressure.  Ammonia is given off in this process instead of water which is the by-product in the case of formaldehyde.  The product is similar to bakelite, exactly how similar is a question that the courts will have to decide.  The inventors threatened to call it Phenyl-endeka-saligeno-saligenin, but, rightly fearing that this would interfere with its salability, they have named it “redmanol.”