Well-informed journalism

This was on the comment page of the /Times/, today. I encourage people
to play "spot the misconception"...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...865733,00.html

--
-Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray wrote:
(quoting the Times)

Yet there was more. Everybody knows the unexpectedly useful discoveries
of space travel, like the Teflon on our saucepans.

Teflon was invented in Dupont labs well before Sputnik, no?



--
Hop David
http://clowder.net/hop/index.html

Hop David wrote:


Andrew Gray wrote:
(quoting the Times)


Yet there was more. Everybody knows the unexpectedly useful discoveries
of space travel, like the Teflon on our saucepans.

Teflon was invented in Dupont labs well before Sputnik, no?

It was invented before the second world war. It was first used to
coat cookware in the mid 1950s, by a french company.

Paul

On Fri, 24 Oct 2003 19:26:29 -0500, "Paul F. Dietz"
wrote:

It was invented before the second world war. It was first used to
coat cookware in the mid 1950s, by a french company.

....IIRC, teflon was invented in 1937, the same year as either lexan or
lucite.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

In article ,
Hop David wrote:
Yet there was more. Everybody knows the unexpectedly useful discoveries
of space travel, like the Teflon on our saucepans.

Teflon was invented in Dupont labs well before Sputnik, no?

Correct; before WW2, in fact. If it's a spinoff of anything, it's a
spinoff of the Manhattan Project -- it was an obscure laboratory curiosity
until the uranium-enrichment plants needed a fluorine-resistant plastic
badly, and hastily spent a bunch of money figuring out how to make the
stuff in quantity.
--
MOST launched 30 June; first light, 29 July; 5arcsec | Henry Spencer
pointing, 10 Sept; first science, early Oct; all well. |