"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 Haas to produce an acrylic that could be used in paint. In 1947 Bocour began selling "Magna," the first acrylic paint and the first significant change in paint technology for artists since the fifteenth century.
Acrylic paint has many advantages over oil paint. It does not peel, crack, or fade, and can be applied to many different surfaces. It also dries quickly, which can be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the artist's goal. In 1953 Rohm and Haas introduced water- based acrylic paint for interior walls. The new paint was easier to apply, dried faster, and was easier to clean up than the solvent-based paint it replaced.
