I'm not sure if I've learnt something new, or I'm in the Twilight Zone !
I've been an Elect/Tech for nearly 50 years, and love the smell of Bakelite being cut.
Hang in there...
this gets wild...Bakelite, or
Polyoxybenzylmethyleneglycolanhydride, was the first plastic made from synthetic components.
It is a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin, formed from a condensation reaction of phenol with formaldehyde.
Anyway... partially unrelated to this, I was looking at a YouTube Video about a very old Bakelite-Bodied Mouse-Trap.
It was initially
in-effective, but that's
beside the point !! In the Video, (pointed to later), he showed the
'trap' in action somewhere, using only Infra-Red for the filming. It was not until drilling down through the Comments,
that someone mentioned about how/why the Bakelite appeared TRANSPARENT in Infra-Red
WHAT !!
I reviewed it, and found the following. Here's the original video for now, but ignore it for the moment, except for
the part at 4:06 later, for what I am referencing...
1st, here's a picture of the Bakelite 'device' in normal light...
Now here's a picture from 4:06 in the video, under Infra-Red light...
The Bakelite 'body' is now transparent ??, and you can see the mouses head/snout come into view
There is very little I can find on the Internet for some reason, but i did find this from a book (image created)...
Which was from this site ref...
Materials: engineering, science, processing and design...
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=sqaH1CNY2isC&pg=PA462&lpg=PA462&dq=bakelite+transparent+infrared&source=bl&ots=f4IKd1G2tO&sig=CwhZD-ShFObADZPsZg536J6MDiA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiKyqORspLeAhXUT30KHfcfBWkQ6AEwEXoECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=bakelite%20transparent%20infrared&f=falseThis has blown my mind...