Malcolm Renfrew, found uses for Teflon, dies

Chemist Malcolm Renfrew never imagined that his work would one day become synonymous with the nonstick frying pan. As a young man in the 1930s he dreamed of acting and joined a traveling tent show.

The tent, however, burned down, which sent Renfrew back to studying chemistry and, in 1938, a job researching plastics at DuPont laboratories in New Jersey.

When a colleague investigating refrigerants accidentally invented a substance resistant to chemicals and heat, DuPont gave Renfrew and his team the task of figuring out what to do with it.

Renfrew, who oversaw the development of that compound -- polytetrafluoroethylene resin, later trademarked as Teflon -- died in Moscow, Idaho, on Saturday, his 103rd birthday.

Teflon was the inadvertent discovery of Roy J. Plunkett, a DuPont chemist who was trying to develop a nontoxic refrigerant. What he wound up with was a slippery white powder with unique properties: heat, electricity, acids, solvents -- nothing seemed to react with it.

Its first use outside the laboratory was top secret. Scientists at the Manhattan Project, building the atomic bomb, used the resin to coat the valves and seals of pipes that would hold a chemical necessary for the enrichment of uranium 235, the key ingredient in a nuclear chain reaction.

Renfrew was often referred to as Teflon's inventor, a mistake he was always quick to correct. Nor did he have any involvement in the invention of the product that made it famous: the nonstick frying pan introduced in the early 1960s.

He did, however, help develop other uses for Teflon, including a material used in dental repairs, said Ray von Wandruszka, who chairs the University of Idaho chemistry department. Teflon became one of the wonders of the 20th century, used to protect cars, boats, fabric, eyeglass lenses and space shuttles.