Skip to main content

Gore-Tex and Serendipity

 In the NYT, I read the obituary of Robert Gore, the inventor of Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is a porous material made of teflon (made of carbon and fluorine atoms; it repels water very easily). If you have used a hiking equipment, from tents to shoes to jackets, chances are that you've used Gore-Tex.

He discovered the material by happenstance:

"Mr. Gore sought to make more efficient use of the material by stretching it, not unlike Silly Putty. But each time he heated and stretched a rod of PTFE in his lab, it broke in two.

“Everything I seemed to do worked worse than what we were already doing,” he told the Science History Institute in a short film. “So I decided to give one of these rods a huge stretch, fast — a jerk. I gave it a huge jerk and it stretched 1,000 percent. I was stunned.”"

It's a story that appeals to the chemist in me. It takes a tinkerer to test unlikely scenarios — it's not easy to acknowledge the limit of one's knowledge. For a chemical engineer, his adopted business motto is perfect: “Jump in and see if you can swim.”

R.I.P. Mr. Gore. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quotes from "The Social Leap"

These are the lines from William von Hippel in his book “The Social Leap” that I found to be incisive and insightful. “The ability to kill at a distance is the single most important invention in the history of warfare, because weaker individuals can attack stronger individuals from a position of superior numbers and relative safety.” “As if division of labor were not enough, Homo erectus then sealed the deal with the single most important innovation in human history: the control of fire.” “Long before the invention of writing (which is only about five thousand years old), human culture had become cumulative by virtue of our oral storytelling traditions .” “When we weigh up the costs and benefits, we see that farming afforded our ancestors some assurances against starvation, but at the cost of various new illnesses, reduced stature and longevity, excruciating halitosis, and often a far longer working day. The end result was that early farmers worked harder to achieve a worse life than
Post a Comment
Read more

Quotes from "Atomic Habits"

 Here are the quotes from James Clear's "Atomic Habits" that I found insightful: “When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you anticipate it.” “Once we fit in, we start looking for ways to stand out.” “When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment.” “… the costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.” “… avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain” “When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out. ”
Post a Comment
Read more

The Upside of Disaster

In the previous post , I talked about the tactics rational optimists use to deal with uncertainty: explore and exploit. There are situations where an utter disaster and the resulting uncertainty can change the history for the better. An amazing example is the story of human evolution from chimp-like apes. Here's a brief review of the story told by William von Hippel in “ The Social Leap .” These apes lived in the rainforests of eastern Africa, around 6 million years ago. They ruled the canopy. But then disaster struck. Eastern Africa was tearing away from the rest of the continent, due to plate tectonics. The climate changed. The rainforests disappeared. These apes had to adjust to living in the savannah, at the mercy of great predators. Humans reacted to this disaster by innovating and inventing. Human distinctions — from bipedalism, persistence hunting, to the use of language and tools and our social structure — ultimately are the results of that disaster. They learned to be grea
Post a Comment
Read more