"Some guy walked into the shop... with something like white syrup.He said, 'It's an acrylic.'"
Leonard Bocour
Otto Rohm studied acrylic plastics for his 1901 Ph.D. thesis. Six years later, he co-founded the Rohm and Haas Company, which in 1936 began selling shatter- proof acrylic glass (more commonly known by trade names such as Plexiglas®, Perspex®, and Lucite®). Sales were slow until World War II, when the United States began manufacturing tens of thousands of aircraft each year, all with Plexiglas® canopies. Chemists at Rohm and Haas had worked with acrylics for decades, but they were not the ones who invented acrylic paint. Instead, the inventor was an artist turned paint-maker.
In 1941 Leonard Bocour (1910-1993) was making oil paint and selling it to artists when he was shown a sample of acrylic and was impressed by how white it was. After the war ended, Bocour worked with Rohm and
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