Margen
On 6 April 1938, Roy Plunkett, a 27-year-old chemist at DuPont, went to use a refrigerant gas called tetrafluoroethylene and nothing came out of the cylinder. The strange part: it weighed the same as a full one. Instead of throwing it away, he sawed it in half and found a waxy white powder unlike anything known.
The gas had polymerised on its own. That material, polytetrafluoroethylene, turned out to be absurdly slippery and resistant to almost any acid or heat. Its first job was top secret: sealing gaskets in the Manhattan Project.
It reached the frying pan through another twist of fate: in the 1950s, a French engineer was using it on his fishing tackle and his wife suggested trying it on cookware. That is how Tefal was born. A faulty cylinder ended up frying eggs across half the planet.