Teflon

Teflon is DuPont's trademark name for polytetrafluoroethylene, a synthetic fluoropolymer made entirely of carbon and fluorine atoms, valued for its extreme resistance to heat and chemical attack and its exceptionally low surface friction. The American chemist Roy J. Plunkett discovered the material by accident in 1938 at a DuPont laboratory in New Jersey, when a cylinder of refrigerant gas he was working with had polymerized on its own into an oddly slippery, waxy white solid; DuPont patented the discovery in 1941 and registered the Teflon trademark in 1945. The material is manufactured by the free-radical polymerization of tetrafluoroethylene gas and today coats non-stick cookware and industrial machinery parts, with roughly half of production going into insulating wiring for aerospace and computer applications.