At Its 50th Birthday, Teflon Still as Slick as Ever
It has been slipped into everything from frying pans to space suits to the nation’s political vernacular, and now Teflon, still the slickest solid on Earth, is sliding into its second half-century.
Discovered accidentally on April 6, 1938, by a young chemist named Roy J. Plunkett, the waxy white plastic turns 50 years old this week, still dominating dozens of scientific and consumer uses with no hint of a higher-tech replacement.
It keeps the eggs from sticking to frying pans, for sure. But it also coats electrical wires, chemical tanks, jogging suits and light bulbs. It is used to patch human hearts. It keeps the Statue of Liberty from rusting.
“The applications, as far as I can tell, are no smaller than our imaginations,” says Plunkett, now a septuagenarian retiree from the Du Pont chemical company. “I’m amazed at the impact. And there’s more to go.”
The reason for Teflon’s endurance is simple: Nothing else is so slippery, so tough and such a good insulator, all at the same time. Even after five decades, “It is unique in these qualities,” says Prof. Fred McGarry, a specialist in such materials at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
It’s a discovery that almost slipped away. Plunkett, two years out of college, was working with refrigeration gases in a Du Pont lab in Deepwater, N.J., when an assistant pulled a cylinder of Freon out of a dry ice storage bin, turned it on--and nothing came out.
A Freon Compound
Someone else might have assumed the cylinder had leaked and tossed it away. Plunkett didn’t. He weighed the cylinder. He shook it. He cut it open.
“A white solid material was obtained, which was supposed to be a polymerized product” of the Freon compound, Plunkett recorded laconically in his lab notebook entry of April 6, 1938.
Voila.
“People describe it as a lucky chance, a bit of serendipity or a flash of brilliance,” says Plunkett, an inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. “I like to think of it as a combination of all three.”
The serendipity, he notes, extended beyond the discovery itself. It soon was found that the chance chemical reaction that produced Teflon can have unhappy consequences. “If there was any luck involved in the discovery,” says Plunkett, “probably part of it was that we didn’t get blown up.”
Du Pont testers gradually established Teflon’s extraordinary properties. It is “damn near inert,” says McGarry; it won’t react with chemicals or break down in the environment. It withstands temperatures from 400 degrees below zero to 500 degrees above. Energy passes through it without heating it up. It holds together in a vacuum, meaning it’s perfect for use in space.
Lawrence English, editor of Materials Engineering magazine, likens the effect of Teflon to that of the transistor. “There’s nothing quite like it,” he says. “It’s pervasive in technical environments--all over the place, in a lot of really curious and diverse applications.”
Main Industrial Uses
At the beginning, it was under wraps, restricted to government defense work from 1941, when Du Pont first was able to produce it, until 1948. It was used in the Manhattan Project for gaskets and vessel linings to contain a highly corrosive chemical needed in the production of the atom bomb.
It also coated wires in electronic devices, making them considerably fire resistant. Today, the greatest commercial use of Teflon is in wire coating, followed by gaskets and shaft seals and pipe and tank coatings.
Teflon didn’t reach the public eye until May, 1956, when a store in Nice, France, put the first Teflon-lined pan on its shelves. The idea stuck, and an estimated 500 million pots and pans coated with Teflon have been sold since.
It wasn’t until 20 years later that Teflon moved from kitchen to clothes closet. Robert Gore, who was in the wire coating business, found that a piece of stretched Teflon has pores big enough to let water vapor out but too small to let water droplets in. He stuck it to fabric and called it Gore-Tex, the first waterproof-breathable clothing.
Teflon’s next frontier was the language. That breakthrough came the morning of Aug. 2, 1983, as Pat Schroeder was cooking eggs for the kids. Schroeder happens to be a Democratic member of Congress, and as she slid the eggs out of a frying pan, she reflected on the way political accountability, in her view, slid off President Reagan.
“I said, ‘He’s just like this pan,’ ” the Colorado representative recalled. “Nothing sticks.”
Members of Congress may start the day’s session with one minute speeches, and this is how Schroeder started hers that day: “Mr. Speaker, after carefully watching Ronald Reagan, he is attempting a great breakthrough in political technology--he has been perfecting the Teflon-coated presidency.”
The phrase, picked up by the papers, caught on within weeks. “Americans love shorthand descriptions of things,” Schroeder reflects. “The only problem was that it didn’t work. Still nothing stuck to him.”
Political efficacy aside, one outfit that didn’t appreciate the publicity was Du Pont, which holds the Teflon trademark even though the patent on the formula has long expired.
