#2 – Plastic

At the beginning of the 20th century, people used shellac if they wanted to insulate any type of material. Shellac is a hydrocarbon secretion secreted by the female lac bug, which lives in the forests of Thailand and India. Because of where these bugs lived, the material was very expensive to import. This is exactly why a chemist named Leo Hendrik Baekeland saw the opportunity to produce a cheap replacement for shellac in order to get rich. However, after numerous tries, he ended up creating a material that you could heat to extreme temperatures without it being distorted – plastic.