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Teflon
The Invention of Teflon - Roy Plunkett
The History of Teflon
Dr. Roy Plunkett discovered
PTFE or polytetrafluoroethylene, the basis of Teflon®, in April 1938.
It is one of those
discoveries that happened by accident.
PLUNKETT
DISCOVERS PTFE
Plunkett held a Bachelor of Arts degree, a Master of Science
degree, and his PhD in organic chemistry when he went to work at the DuPont
research laboratories in Edison, New Jersey.
He was working with
gases related to Freon® refrigerants when he stumbled upon PTFE.
Plunkett
and his assistant, Jack Rebok, were charged with developing an alternative
refrigerant and came up with tetrafluorethylene or TFE.
They ended up making about
100 pounds of TFE and were faced with the dilemma of storing it all.
They placed the TFE in small
cylinders and froze them.
When they later checked on
the refrigerant, they found the cylinders effectively empty, even though they
felt heavy enough that they should still have been full.
They cut one open and found
that the TFE had polymerized into a white, waxy powder --
polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE resin.
Plunkett
was an inveterate scientist. He had this new substance on his hands, but what
to do with it?
It was slippery, chemically
stable and had a high melting point. He began playing with it, attempting to
find out if it would serve any useful purpose at all.
Ultimately, the challenge was
taken out of his hands when he was promoted and sent to a different division.
The TFE was sent to DuPont’s Central Research Department. The
scientists there were instructed to experiment with the substance, and Teflon®
was born.
TEFLON®
PROPERTIES
The molecular weight of Teflon® can exceed 30 million, making it
one of the largest molecules known to man.
A colorless, odorless powder,
it is a fluoroplastic with many properties that give it an increasingly
wide range of uses.
The surface is so slippery, virtually nothing sticks to it or is
absorbed by it – the Guinness Book of World Records once listed it as the
slipperiest substance on earth.
It is still the only
known substance that a gecko's feet can't stick to.
THE
TEFLON® TRADEMARK
PTFE was first marketed under the DuPont Teflon® trademark in
1945.
No wonder Teflon® was chosen
to be used on non-stick cooking pans, but it was originally used only for
industrial and military purposes because it was so expensive to make.
The first non-stick pan
using Teflon® was marketed in France as "Tefal" in 1954.
The U.S. followed with its
own Teflon®-coated pan -- the "Happy Pan" -- in 1961.
TEFLON®
TODAY
Teflon® can be found just about everywhere these days: as a
stain repellant in fabrics, carpets and furniture, in automobile windshield
wipers, hair products, lightbulbs, eyeglasses, electrical wires and infrared
decoy flares.
As for those cooking pans,
feel free to take a wire whisk or any other utensil to them – unlike in the old
days, you won’t risk scratching the Teflon® coating because it's been improved.
.
Dr.
Plunkett stayed with DuPont until his retirement in 1975.
He died in 1994, but not
before being inducted into the Plastics Hall of Fame and the National
Inventors’ Hall of Fame.
https://www.thoughtco.com/invention-of-teflon-4076517
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