TEFLON
Wednesday, April 6 — For much of history, a cooked meal was followed by the drudgery of scrubbing the pans used to prepare it. But something was discovered this week in 1938 that changed all that, a solidified refrigerant gas that we now know as Teflon. Developed by Roy Plunkett of the DuPont Company and tested for about 10 years, slippery Teflon revolutionized cooking utensils in the 1960s. By the time he died in the early 1990s, most new cooking pans in the nation where coated with his invention.
Today, Teflon is used in everything from semiconductors to communications cables and even clothing. The nation’s 13,000 chemical manufacturers employ almost 715,000 workers, and generate annual sales of nearly $790 billion.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau
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