Recycling - Teflon

I'm going to throw up a couple of my old posts that have held up, just to keep myself amused.

I just read something about Dale Hauk yarn. I find the idea of it mystifying. Not even addressing the idea of calling a yarn by a name that sounds like that when you attempt to pronounce it, why would someone put Teflon on yarn??? Has anyone ever felt this stuff? What does it feel like? I imagine it to be kind of weirdly greasy feeling – not the lanolin greasy feeling, but – just ew. Why Teflon on yarn? Why not Gore-Tex? Oh! Guess what! Gore-Tex IS Teflon.

The really weird synchronicity (there’s an ear worm for you) part of this, is that Kidlet and I just got a book called They All Laughed . . ., by Ira Flatow, lately of NPR fame. You might remember him from a PBS show called Newton’s Apple. This book is about inventions, and the first section we read was about – yep, Teflon. Teflon was one of those lucky accident type of inventions – in 1938, Roy Plunkett and Jack Rebok (aren’t those great names?) were trying to come up with a non-toxic refrigerant. They had mixed up a batch of Freon gas, and when they opened the canister, nothing came out. But the canister still weighed the same as it would if it were full of Freon. When they cut open the canister, it contained a white powder – after they messed with it for a while, they figured out it was the slipperiest stuff on earth. It was a military secret until 1948 – they used it to make gaskets for nuclear bombs. The name came from the chemists’ nickname for tetrafluoroethyline (Freon), which was tef, combined with Du Pont’s favorite suffix, lon. (Ny-lon, Or-lon – if it’s something totally unnatural that ends in lon, it’s probably made by Du Pont) It was used for lots of stuff, but fast-forwarding to 1957, Du Pont lost interest in it, and Wilbert Gore, with his son Bill, figured out how to make a fabric out of it, and Gore-Tex was born. So there’s your science for the day.