Everyone is familiar with Teflon, that nonstick surface no self-respecting housewife can do without. If’n it works so well slippin’ and slidin’ yer flapjacks, how do they get it to stick to the pan in the first place?
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A favorite question of smart-aleck drive-time radio hosts, and to tell you the truth it gave (and gives) the folks who make Teflon pans some trouble too. Teflon, known to science as polytetrafluoroethylene, is a pain to work with because it’s nonsticky in all directions, the pan side (the bottom) as well as the food side (the top). Teflon is a fluorinated polymer, a polymer being a passel of identical building-block molecules linked together to make a long chain–the stuff of most plastics. Fluorine, due to certain electrochemical properties you’ll thank me for not explaining now, bonds so tightly with the carbon in Teflon that it’s virtually impossible for other substances, e.g., scrambled egg bits, to get a chemical-type grip or, for that matter, for Teflon to get a grip on anything else. In addition, the finished Teflon surface is extremely smooth, giving said egg bits little chance to get a mechanical-type grip.
Scientists continue to search for something better, and recent reports say they may have succeeded. Dow Chemical researcher Donald Schmidt has come up with another fluorinated polymer that can be used like paint and cured with moderate (as opposed to high) heat. Even better, you wind up with a coating that’s nonsticky on only one side, presumably the outside. The only drawback: Schmidt’s coating won’t withstand heat. That doesn’t matter if you’re trying to make, say, graffiti-proof wall tile, but don’t look for Schmidtlon-coated frying pans anytime soon.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
