What was the first synthetic polymer?
Polymer science
celluloid and cellulose acetate
The first modern example of polymer science is Henri Braconnot's work in the 1830s.  Henri, along with Christian Schönbein and others, developed derivatives of the natural polymer cellulose, producing new, semi-synthetic materials, such as celluloid and cellulose acetate.  The term "polymer" was coined in 1833 by Jöns Jakob Berzelius, though Berzelius did little that would be considered polymer science in the modern sense. In the 1840s, Friedrich Ludersdorf and Nathaniel Hayward independently discovered that adding sulfur to raw natural rubber (polyisoprene) helped prevent the material from becoming sticky.  In 1844 Charles Goodyear received a U.S. patent for vulcanizing natural rubber with sulfur and heat.  Thomas Hancock had received a patent for the same process in the UK the year before. This process strengthened natural rubber and prevented it from melting with heat without losing flexibility.  This made practical products such as waterproofed articles possible. It also facilitated practical manufacture of such rubberized materials. Vulcanized rubber represents the first commercially successful product of polymer research.  In 1884 Hilaire de Chardonnet started the first artificial fiber plant based on regenerated cellulose, or viscose rayon, as a substitute for silk, but it was very flammable.[1] In 1907 Leo Baekeland invented the first synthetic plastic, a thermosetting phenol–formaldehyde resin called Bakelite.[2]