We will get to the topic of Teflon. But first, some background on the thymological landscape.
I’ve taken a strong interest in two related categories of phenomena: the tendency of humanity to forget what we once knew and the rush to embrace any new technology on the presumption that it is necessarily a better replacement for the old. Both stem from a quasi-religious attachment to the idea of progress—not just in the sense of desiring it and working for it, but in the sense of believing progress to be baked into the fabric of history itself.
In the category of lost knowledge, my favorite example is the disease called scurvy, famously contracted by long-distance sailors. It is easily prevented and cured by lemons or other citrus. This knowledge was lost and rediscovered fully three times in history: in the ancient world, in the Middle Ages, and in the 18th century. The reason: Once the cure made the problem vanish, people forgot the cure. It kept having to be rediscovered.
The very existence of such lost knowledge flies in the face of the great modern presumption that all knowledge of the past is carried into the future because we always know more than our ancestors did. However, too often, it turns out that we might know less because we tend to take for granted the solutions to problems once they are no longer problems.
Another example might be natural immunity. In spring 2020, I was truly astonished to discover that an entire generation or two of people had no idea of the connection between immunity, health, and exposure. The prevailing assumption in 2020 and following was deeply primitive: Stay away from the bad pathogen. There seemed to be very little knowledge that this does not make a virus go away. Only an upgraded immune system does that, and this requires exposure and recovery.
Why might this once-common knowledge come to be forgotten by many? I suspect that it has something to do with chicken pox. Like everyone of my generation, we were exposed at kids’ parties. We learned from that experience that getting sick is essential to staying well. When the vaccine came along, kids, along with so many others, were no longer presented with this essential lesson. This might have created several generations of germophobes who are inclined to believe that health comes from shots.
All of which speaks to the second puzzling feature of modern life: the presumption that whatever is new is better and that anything it replaces is surely retrograde and needs to be repudiated.
My favorite example here is waterbeds. I was briefly in the furniture-selling business when these were hot items. Somehow everyone was convinced by advertising that sleeping on water was more natural and maybe more sexy, even though there is no record in all of history of people sleeping on water. It makes no sense, really. Still, many people believed that waterbeds were the future and that all other beds would be deprecated.
Yes, I sold many of them. Many were returned by people who reported that they did not like sleeping on waves of water. Imagine that! They wanted a version that was more firm. This just kept happening, to the point at which there was ever less water in the mattress. It’s all so silly in retrospect.
Another recent example is the virtual reality headsets pushed by major tech companies. It was bad timing. They hit a market that was saturated with virtual everything instead of real experiences. Then it turned out that these hugely heavy goggles inflicted terrible headaches and eye pain while the experience was rather boring overall. People bought them and marched back to the store to return them. The market for these remains only in highly specialized professions.
There is a lesson here. New is not necessarily improved. The next great thing might in fact become tomorrow’s joke. Humanity simply does not have an infallible instinct for knowing for sure what does and does not constitute progress. We make mistakes all the time.
I vaguely recall a time when polyester was advertised as the inevitable replacement for all natural fibers. Men were buying suits made out of the stuff, made to go into the washing machine and then dried in another machine. I’m sure that those still exist, but they are for a small, niche market and certainly not highly regarded by knowing customers.
Does anyone even remember when the “leisure suit” was going to replace the regular suit?
It seems like the postwar period of the 1950s through the 1970s gave rise to many of these fads. As a child, I saw endless ads for small kitchen appliances. Here is your burger maker. Here is your sandwich warmer. Here is your hot dog machine. Here is your can opener. And so on it went, to the point at which these electric gadgets were taking over the kitchen entirely.
Nowadays, you hardly see these things at all except at the thrift store, where people buy them ironically.
There was a dramatic cultural shift that happened after World War II, a deeply painful experience that shattered community and demoralized a generation. Following the war—and this happened after World War I, too—there was a rush to forget it all and forge a future unmoored from the past.
You could see it in interior design. The molding went away. Ceilings were left undecorated. Traditional furniture was out. Everything had to have a new and modern shape and way about it. I will never forget when my grandmother, as a middle-aged woman, suddenly had chairs hanging from chains attached to the ceiling. That was a thing back then.
These days, there is a fashion for mid-century modern because we are rather enthralled with the goofiness of it all. It looks strange to us, but you can understand it if you think about a generation of designers who sought to create everything but what once was.
Things do in fact come and go. The latest is not always the best. Save your money and avoid the fads. Clinging to traditional ways is often the best overall life strategy.
Finally, to the subject of this piece, which is Teflon. It was invented accidentally in a lab by Roy Plunkett, a 27-year-old DuPont chemist in New Jersey. He was trying to develop a new safe refrigerant gas. One morning, he and his assistant Jack Rebok opened the valve on a pressurized cylinder they had prepared the day before, and nothing came out.
The cylinder felt oddly heavy for being “empty.” Instead of panicking, they carefully sawed it open (risking explosion) and found a slippery white powder inside: The gas had spontaneously polymerized. Plunkett immediately recognized its weird properties—slippery, heat-resistant, chemically inert—and it became Teflon. Pure lab accident turned world-changer.
By the 1960s, Teflon was in everything. It was coating all the pans. No more scrubbing. Everything stayed clean no matter what. It was ideal for visual advertising. Look at how this egg just slides off the pan! Whatever you cook goes easily from pan to plate, but use this plastic spoon so as not to damage the pan.
There was no sense at the time that there might be a downside, but that emerged in time. The stuff emitted potentially dangerous chemicals that you don’t really want in your house. Also, Teflon pans don’t last long. They chip and fray and the chemicals get in your food. It took time, but eventually Teflon went the way of chairs hanging from the ceiling, a generational marker.
These days, people are back to the basics: iron skillets and copper pans, while Teflon cookware fills up the thrift stores. The future became the past, while the deep past became our future. Once again, humanity had fallen for a mistaken innovation, perceiving it to be better than all that came before, before it failed the test of time and we reverted.
To be sure, Teflon has not disappeared. It occupies a niche but decidedly low-end market in cookware, but the hype is gone. It was not the be-all and end-all after all.
This just keeps happening. To be sure, progress is not a myth, but it requires discernment to separate the real thing from the fakes. We are probably surrounded by fakes today but do not entirely know it. For example, there is every reason to believe that artificial intelligence is wildly overhyped. It has its uses, to be sure, but it is not a replacement for human intelligence and judgment. I suspect that we will figure this out over the next five years.
