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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. 

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