Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist settled in the USA, develops in 1907, in the laboratory of his home in Yonkers (New York), a process to control the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde using heat and pressure, obtaining a hard, insoluble, infusible material he calls Bakelite. He files his patent application on July 13, 1907 (granted December 7, 1909) and officially announces the invention before the American Chemical Society in February 1909. Bakelite is the first plastic made entirely from synthetic components — unlike earlier materials such as cellulose or celluloid, derived from natural sources — and gives rise to the modern plastics industry, with applications ranging from electrical insulation to jewelry and components for early automobiles. Almost simultaneously, the British electrical engineer James Swinburne, who was researching insulating materials via an independent route, filed his own patent application for a similar phenolic product just one day after Baekeland, thereby losing priority by the narrowest of margins.