UNSTICKY STUFF

Not all designs stick.

Some last only until the next best thing, some loose adhesion soon after they are loosed on the world.

In honor of this fact of design life, we can look to one inventor in particular who proves that sticking is not always important.

I am referring to an invention so familiar we barely think of it, yet like most design innovations, it was once new and unappreciated.  The invention was the result of work done by Roy J. Plunkett.  Never heard of him?  Of course not, his name did not stick either.  Like most designers who neglect to tag their names to their inventions, Plunkett’s name has been shoved aside by the more familiar one given to his creation.

In the spring of 1938, Plunkett, a 27-year old chemist working for E.I du Pont de Nemours and Company for only two years, was struggling to invent a new gas to replace Freon, the main gas used in refrigeration and air conditioning.  Technically, Plunkett was not designer at all, nor an engineer and not even an inventor.  His breakthrough was not the insight of the prepared mind nor the rational problem-solving we dream of…but instead the creative use of a big fat mistake.

Plunkett had mixed tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) and hydrochloric acid in a cylinder, hoping to hit on a new refrigerant.  But when he tried to extract the gas, nothing came out.  Opening the cylinder up he found only a strange white powder inside.  Plunkett knew that this had to be a polymer (an elaborate web of molecular chains) of the TFE but he had no idea what to do with it.  “That’s the thing about a discovery,” he once said, “even though it [the experiment] did go wrong you go ahead and find out what you got.”

What he got was something that would not react with any reagents, was almost completely inert, and was more slippery than wet ice against wet ice.  Strange stuff indeed.

It would have been discarded as gunk, but for the existence of a crash project to build an atomic bomb.  The bomb designers were looking for a way to make gaskets that would resist the caustic nature of the uranium hexafluoride they used and it turned out that Plunkett’s goop worked fine.  So fine in fact, that it was a military secret until after the war when a whole slew of applications started to emerge.

It was only then that Plunkett came to be known as the man who invented Teflon.  

Teflon is now used in everything from cooking pans to cable insulation to replacement body parts.  Not to mention pop culture in the form of Telfon Dons and Presidents.  Not bad for a throwaway item no one was trying to invent.  In that way it joined the ranks of vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin, Velcro, and silly putty as an example of sticking to your guns even when they misfire.

Plunkett’s experience should teach us to be open to the accident, the inadvertent effect, the wayward goal.  We should not be discouraged by our failures but rather as excited by our mistakes as our successes.  Perhaps all designers could use a little bit of Teflon in the blood.