Teflon

Teflon is the registered trademark name for polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a synthetic fluoropolymer with remarkable chemical inertness, heat resistance, and nonstick properties. Although its discovery in 1938 was an accident at a DuPont laboratory on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River, the compound's entire commercial and legal history has been shaped by Wilmington, Delaware—the longtime headquarters of DuPont, and now the home of Chemours, the Delaware-based spin-off company that owns and controls the Teflon trademark today. Few industrial inventions are as thoroughly woven into Delaware's economic and corporate identity, and few have generated as much environmental controversy at the state and national level.

Discovery and Early Development

Teflon was discovered by Roy J. Plunkett (1910–1994) at the DuPont Company's Jackson Laboratory in 1938, and it was an accidental invention—unlike most other polymer products of its era. In 1936, Plunkett had been hired as a research chemist by E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company at its Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey, and in 1938, while attempting to make a new chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant, his laboratory team discovered polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), better known as Teflon.

Plunkett and his research assistant, Jack Rebok, had produced a hundred pounds of tetrafluoroethylene gas (TFE) and stored it in small cylinders at dry-ice temperatures before chlorinating it. On the morning of April 6, 1938, when he and his helper prepared a cylinder for use, none of the gas came out, yet the cylinder weighed the same as before. To their surprise, when they opened it up, they found a white powder, which Plunkett had the presence of mind to characterize for properties other than refrigeration potential. He found the substance to be heat resistant and chemically inert, and to have very low surface friction so that most other substances would not adhere to it.

He realized that the TFE gas had polymerized—something not predicted by prevailing theory at the time—into a waxy solid known as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), with the iron surface inside the container acting as a catalyst. The connection to the state of Delaware was immediate: polytetrafluoroethylene was first discovered by DuPont scientists at Chambers Works in the 1930s and was the first member of the PFAS family.

Kinetic Chemicals patented the new fluorinated plastic in 1941, and registered the Teflon trademark in 1945. In 1946, the first products using this nonstick, high-heat material were sold—machine parts for military and industrial applications—and in the early 1960s, Teflon found its most famous use as a seemingly miraculous nonstick surface for cookware.

Plunkett was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1985. He retired from DuPont in 1975 after a long career guiding the development of numerous fluorochemical products across virtually every field of manufacturing.

DuPont, Wilmington, and the Teflon Legacy

The story of Teflon cannot be separated from the story of DuPont, one of Delaware's most consequential institutions. DuPont de Nemours, Inc., commonly shortened to DuPont, is an American multinational chemical company first formed in 1802 by French-American chemist and industrialist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont de Nemours, and the company played a major role in the development of the U.S. state of Delaware. DuPont developed many polymers such as Vespel, neoprene, nylon, Corian, Teflon, Mylar, Kapton, Kevlar, Zemdrain, Nomex, Tyvek, Sorona, Viton, Corfam, and Lycra in the 20th century.

The company's corporate headquarters and experimental station were located in Wilmington, Delaware. It was within this institutional structure that Teflon grew from a laboratory curiosity into one of the most commercially valuable materials of the twentieth century. For DuPont, Teflon, which was used to coat pots and pans, proved to be a gold mine, with sales peaking at roughly a billion dollars a year in 2004, according to the company's SEC filings.

An early and pivotal use of the material came through the Manhattan Project. An early use was in the Manhattan Project as a material to coat valves and seals in the pipes holding highly reactive uranium hexafluoride at the vast K-25 uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The military demand helped DuPont justify large-scale production; by 1948, DuPont, which founded Kinetic Chemicals in partnership with General Motors, was producing over 910,000 kilograms (2,000,000 lb) of Teflon-brand polytetrafluoroethylene per year in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

The cookware revolution that Teflon is best known for began in Europe. In 1954, Colette Grégoire urged her husband, the French engineer Marc Grégoire, to try the material he had been using on fishing tackle on her cooking pans, and he subsequently created the first PTFE-coated nonstick pans under the brand name Tefal (combining "Tef" from "Teflon" and "al" from aluminium). A meeting between a French cookware importer and a DuPont executive in Wilmington, Delaware, helped establish that cookware could be a valuable new market, and the executive agreed to market imported French pans under the name T-fal.

Chemours and Delaware's Continued Stewardship

When DuPont restructured its business operations, the Teflon brand did not leave Delaware. The Chemours Company is an American chemical company that was founded in July 2015 as a spin-off from DuPont, with its corporate headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, United States. Chemours is the manufacturer of Teflon, the brand name of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), known for its anti-stick properties.

On August 2, 2016, Chemours announced that it would locate its global headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware. Recent changes to the state's corporate tax structure brought about by the Delaware Competes Act, which was approved earlier that year with overwhelming, bipartisan support of the Delaware legislature, were key components in Chemours' decision.

In January 2019, Chemours reopened its newly renovated corporate headquarters in The DuPont Building, a registered historic landmark in downtown Wilmington, Delaware. The Teflon trademark is today managed from Wilmington, with the legal registration address on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office listed at a Wilmington, Delaware post office box belonging to Chemours' Legal Department.

Chemours also maintains a research and production presence within Delaware itself. A Newark, Delaware facility operates as part of Chemours' North American footprint, alongside production sites in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Washington, West Virginia, and other locations across the United States.

Delaware Distributors and the Fluoropolymer Industry

Beyond the corporations that invented and trademarked Teflon, Delaware has also been home to businesses built around the distribution of DuPont's fluoropolymer products. Delaware Specialty Distribution was the premier U.S. distributor of DuPont Teflon brand fluoropolymer resins and other DuPont fluoropolymers. The firm was originally founded by David Jones in 1993 as Delaware Marketing Services, Inc. (DMS) and later operated under the name Delaware Specialty Distribution.

The company, rebranded as Fluorogistx, became the exclusive full-spectrum distributor for all DuPont high-performance fluoropolymer products and the largest non-DuPont source for Teflon brand fluoropolymers in the United States. With more than 20 years of experience in the fluoropolymer industry and deep ties to the DuPont organization, Fluorogistx delivers service to clients in fields such as telecommunications, automotive, aviation, pollution control, and electronics. The company is headquartered in Greenville, Delaware.

Environmental Controversy and Delaware's Legal Response

The prosperity that Teflon brought to Delaware-based companies has been matched by serious and lasting environmental controversy. Teflon was first created in a laboratory accident, and in 1938, Roy J. Plunkett, a DuPont chemist, was experimenting with refrigerants when he discovered a white waxy material that seemed very slippery—the material turned out to be an inert fluorocarbon, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), with superior nonstick properties. But the chemical processing aids used to manufacture Teflon at scale proved deeply troubling.

Starting around 1951, DuPont began using another laboratory-formed chemical known as Perfluorooctanoic (PFOA) acid, or C8, to smooth out the lumpiness of freshly manufactured Teflon. C8 has since been linked to a variety of health risks including cancer, liver disease, developmental problems, and thyroid disease, and it escapes into the air easily. Because it is an extremely stable chemical, C8 does not biodegrade; instead, it bioaccumulates, building up in people's blood over time, and due to its ubiquitous use, the chemical can now be found in trace amounts in the bloodstream of more than 98 percent of Americans, and even in umbilical cord blood and breast milk, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

In 1984, DuPont held a meeting at its corporate headquarters in Delaware, and the minutes from that meeting confirm executives were well aware—but did not disclose to the community—that PFOA was in the drinking water. This disclosure gap became one of the central issues in decades of litigation.

In Wilmington, Delaware, where DuPont is headquartered, the water was found to have a higher concentration of fluorochemicals than that in some of the districts included in a class-action suit against DuPont. Delaware's state government eventually moved to address these harms directly. The State of Delaware reached a landmark $50 million settlement with three local chemical giants—DuPont, Chemours, and Corteva—over water pollution and related contamination from the toxic class of compounds known as PFAS. Also known as "forever chemicals" because they do not break down in the environment, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances have been around since the 1940s and include thousands of compounds used in the production of such household and personal items as nonstick (Teflon) cookware, water-repellent clothing, and carpeting, among many others.

Of the $50 million committed, DuPont spinoff Chemours paid $25 million, and DuPont and Corteva paid $12.5 million each. The three companies, all headquartered in Delaware, also agreed to pay the state an additional $25 million over the following years if similar claims in other states were settled for more than $50 million.

Internationally, in September 2023, a court in The Netherlands declared Chemours liable for pollution caused by the Teflon-producing plant in the city of Dordrecht, South Holland, with the court stating that Chemours' predecessor DuPont had willingly withheld crucial information between 1984 and 1998 about the harmful effects of the substances it used and emitted.

See Also

• DuPont
• Chemours
• Wilmington, Delaware
• Chemical Industry in Delaware
• PFAS Contamination in Delaware