Roy Plunkett, a chemist at the Jackson Laboratory of the Du Pont Company, located in New Jersey across the Delaware River from Wilmington - at the site of one of the world's largest chemical complexes - is given credit in the textbooks for having discovered Teflon, the "slippery polymer," in the 1930's. While Plunkett was certainly "present at creation" and deserves credit for recognizing what he had and developing it into a commercial entity, the history of the discovery has an interesting twist, which illustrates prevailing sentiments within Du Pont and probably most other companies in that era. The story I got from a couple of sources in Du Pont is that Plunkett was investigating chemical reactions of the gas perfluoroethylene (which had just become available in pure form) in order to synthesize new types of Freon refrigerant. He was not trying to polymerize the gas, perhaps because he and his supervisor didn't realize it could be done (and weren't looking for polymers). One day when Plunkett's technician, Jack Rebok (whose name I learned after preparing the first version of this writeup), hooked up a fresh cylinder of the gas and opened the valve at the top, no pressure was found. Plunkett assumed the gas in this cylinder must have leaked out while it was in storage, and told his technician to discard it and get another one, which he did. But some time later, the technician weighed the "defective cylinder" to see whether the gas was actually gone, since it bothered him that this may have happened, as he and Plunkett had filled these cylinders themselves. When he found the cylinder had not lost any weight, he suggested sawing it open to see what had happened - potentially hazardous if it were still pressurized. Although somewhat reluctant to do so, Plunkett finally allowed him to do so, and the technician discovered the interior was coated with a slippery white powder. Plunkett found this powder had quite unusual properties, was a wonderful solid lubricant in powdered form, was chemically inert and had a very high melting point. It was only then that he began to suspect what had happened, and began work to reproduce and understand the unexpected polymerization. This work ultimately led to the commercial success, Teflon. Roy Plunkett's name became identified with this technical breakthrough, and I'm quite sure he received a handsome bonus for his work, possibly in the hundreds of thousands of dollars based on the ultimate financial benefits to Du Pont.
Many years later, when the technician retired, a high level manager in another department, who had been a young scientist in Jackson Laboratory when the original research was done, heard the man was retiring and stopped around to say good bye. After reminiscing about old times, he asked the technician what reward he had received for his astute observations which led to the discovery of Teflon. The man replied, "Nothing. I never got a penny for it!" The manager was shocked, and on his own intitiative originated a special bonus for him, paid for by his own department, with "doing the right thing" as the sole justification. I'm not sure I can recall the exact amount, but I think it was either twenty five or fifty thousand dollars.
I've always thought this story deserved more publicity. Several points are illustrated here. Although Du Pont had a generous "reward system" in place for many decades, designed to encourage and reward people for their technical and business contributions, this system only worked as well as the managers who used and administered it. According to sources in Employee Relations, the reward system was actually applied quite unevenly across the company, depending on the personal philosophies of the heads of the various departments. And in general, I found that Manufacturing managers were much less apt to grant awards than those in R&D or Marketing. Some hard nosed managers (and most people in Accounting) seemed to feel that "occasional breakthroughs" were the only justification for paying scientists such high salaries in the first place! (And it goes without saying that non-technical people rarely got large financial awards, probably because it was thought they would be thrilled to receive even small amounts of money!) Finally, the fact that this technician's key contribution was overlooked all those years makes me wonder how many other valuable contributions by "uneducated employees" may not have received adequate recognition. The story illustrates a general tendency of technically trained people to discount the opinions and contributions of wage and non-exempt employees - because they hadn't gone to college - which I observed over my entire career. Technicians were thought of as "another pair of hands" for the trained technical person. Happily this prejudice has softened considerably in recent years, as "teamwork" and contributions by all have become recognized and encouraged. Personally, I was always impressed by the many contributions of talented technicians, secretaries, and other "non degree holding people" I knew and worked with. While training can undoubtedly sharpen the mind, ingenuity and common sense are pretty much inborn characteristics.
Since writing the above account, I've run across an "official" Du Pont writeup on Teflon's discovery in the book, "Science and Corporate Strategy, Du Pont R&D, 1902-1980," by David A. Hounshell and John Kenly Smith, Jr., (Cambridge Press, 1988), which names the technician, Jack Rebok, but indicates that Plunkett himself took the lead in investigating the cause of the pressure loss in the tetrafluoroethylene cylinder which led to discovery of the polymerized contents (on April 6, 1938). This writeup also mentions that the Organic Chemicals Department, where Plunkett worked, had little interest in polymers, instead remained focused on refrigerants, so that followup work to develop a polymerization process was not begun until early 1941, in another department, Plastics. Commercial development was undertaken there on a crash basis once it was realized that Teflon's unique properties made it valuable in the war effort. After the war, Teflon became highly profitable, especially after it became used in "non stick" cookware.
After reading this account, I'm still inclined to credit my "unofficial" Du Pont sources with the authentic account of Teflon's discovery. To claim the date of April 6, 1938 (as I suspect was done in the composition of matter patent) it was probably thought advisable to maintain that the chemist doing the work was responsible for all the key observations, otherwise the technician would have to have been named a co-inventor - going against all the conventions of the time. Also, what was claimed in the patent application was presumably supported by notebook records made by Plunkett. Mr. Rebok probably had no written records of his work, since technicians didn't ordinarily keep signed notebooks. But an interesting and important discovery, in any event!
As a belated footnote to the above, in mid-2002 I received an e-mail from a descendant of Jack Rebok, the technician in question, who had read my account of Teflon's discovery and confirms its essentials. This unexpected new information makes it seem almost certain that the "official" story of Teflon's discovery is incomplete.
(Last rev. 7/3/02)