Teflon Day

Teflon Day is April 6th

Teflon was invented by chemist Dr. Roy Plunkett by accident while working for DuPont. This slippery substance became the popular product used in nonstick cookware and other applications. 

April 6th is a day that should stick in your mind. Unless of course, you’re thinking about Teflon Day! Teflon is used on almost every nonstick cooking utensil such as pots, pans, and cooking sheets. Thanks to teflon you can now spend less time scrubbing and scraping what you cooked off and more time enjoying what you made. Polytetrafluorethylene, the chemical that makes up teflon, is used in many other products that we use in our daily lives. This chemical is found in rug protection, nail polish, and windshield wiper blades! Today is a day to celebrate and appreciate this great invention. So be sure to grab your nonstick pots and pans and make your stickiest dish. It will come off. 

History of Teflon

Like with most discoveries, teflon was discovered by accident. Teflon was discovered by Roy J. Plunkett in 1938. Plunkett was trying to find a new refrigerant when the gas in the pressure bottle stopped floating before the bottle’s weight had dropped, signaling that it was empty. At the time Plunkett was measuring the amount of gas used through the weight of the bottle. He began to grow curious as to how the gas was contributing to the weight of the bottle and eventually sawed the bottle in half to find out the answer. When he opened the bottle he found that the inside of the bottle was coated with a white, waxy material that was slippery. Plunkett knew that he had found something special and the teflon trademark was registered in 1945. By 1948 over 2 million pounds of teflon were being produced per year from their manufacturing plant in West Virginia. One more famous use of teflon was in the Manhattan Project in which they used teflon to coat the valves and seals in the pipes that held the reactive uranium. 

In 1954,  the use of teflon changed. The wife of French engineer Marc Gregorie, Collette Gregoire, asked her husband to use the teflon he had been using on his fishing tackle on her cooking pans. Due to her idea he created the first teflon coated non-stick pans using the brand name Tefal. In the United States, a man named Marion A. Trozzolo created the first teflon coated pan.