Editing Roy J. Plunkett (section)

==Career==
[[File:EL-1994-00019.jpeg|thumb|right|Teflon thermal cover showing impact craters, from NASA Ultra Heavy Cosmic Ray Experiment (UHCRE)]]

In 1936, he was hired as a research chemist by [[DuPont|E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company]] at its Jackson Laboratory in [[Deepwater, New Jersey]].<ref name="transcript"/>

In 1938, while attempting to make a new [[chlorofluorocarbon]] refrigerant, Plunkett's laboratory team discovered [[polytetrafluoroethylene]] (PTFE), better known as Teflon. In [[New York City]] in April 1986, Plunkett shared the story of his accidental discovery at the spring meeting of the [[American Chemical Society]] national meeting in the History of Chemistry section. His story was published in the Symposium Proceedings:<ref>Plunkett, RJ ''The History of Polytetrafluoroethylene: Discovery and Development'', pages 261-266 in "High Performance Polymers: Their Origin and Development.  Proceedings of the Symposium on the History of High Performance Polymers at the American Chemical Society Meeting held in New York, April 15–18, 1986." Seymour RB and Kirshenbaum GS, Editors, Elsevier, New York, 1986. {{ISBN|0-444-01139-0}}</ref>

<blockquote>On the morning of April 6, 1938, Jack Rebok, my assistant, selected one of the TFE cylinders that we had been using the previous day and set up the apparatus ready to go. When he opened the valve — to let the TFE gas flow under its own pressure from the cylinder — nothing happened...We were in a quandary. I couldn't think of anything else to do under the circumstances, so we unscrewed the valve from the cylinder. By this time it was pretty clear that there wasn't any gas left. I carefully tipped the cylinder upside down, and out came a whitish powder down onto the lab bench. We scraped around some with the wire inside the cylinder...to get some more of the powder. What I got out that way certainly didn't add up, so I knew there must be more, inside. Finally...we decided to cut open the cylinder. When we did, we found more of the powder packed onto the bottom and lower sides of the cylinder.</blockquote>

The [[tetrafluoroethylene]] in the container had [[polymerization|polymerized]] into [[polytetrafluoroethylene]], a waxy solid with that was found to have had properties such as resistance to [[corrosion]], low surface [[friction]], and high [[heat]] resistance. 

Later in his career, Plunkett was the chief chemist involved in the production of [[tetraethyllead]], an [[Engine knocking|antiknock]] agent that made gasoline "leaded," later discontinued over concerns about the toxic effects of [[lead]]. After that, he directed the production of [[Freon]], DuPont's brand name for chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant. He retired in 1975.<ref name="OH">{{cite web|author=Center for Oral History| title= Roy J. Plunkett |url=https://oh.sciencehistory.org/oral-histories/plunkett-roy-j|website= [[Science History Institute]]|access-date=21 February 2018}}</ref>