de Nemours and Company (Du Pont). He had earned a PhD from Ohio State University in 1936, and in 1938 when he stumbled upon Teflon, he was still only 27 years old. Plunkett's area was refrigerants. Many chemicals that were used as refrigerants before the 1930s were dangerously explosive. Du Pont and General Motors had developed a new type of non-flammable refrigerant, a form of Freon called refrigerant 114. Refrigerant 114 was tied up in an exclusive arrangement with General Motor's Frigidaire division, and at the time could not be marketed to other manufacturers. Plunkett endeavored to come up with a different form of refrigerant 114 that would get around Frigidaire's patent control. The technical name for refrigerant 114 was tetrafluorodichloroethane. Plunkett hoped to make a similar refrigerant by reacting hydrochloric acid with a compound called tetrafluoroethylene, or TFE. TFE itself was a little known substance, and Plunkett decided his first task was to make a large amount of this gas. The chemist thought he might as well make a hundred pounds of the gas, to be sure to have enough for all his chemical tests, and for toxicological tests as well. He stored the gas in metal cans with a valve release, much like the cans used commercially today for pressurized sprays like hair spray. Plunkett kept the cans on dry ice, to cool and liquefy the TFE gas. His refrigerant experiment required Plunkett and his assistant to release the TFE gas from the cans into a heated chamber. On the morning of April 6, 1938, Plunkett found he could not get the gas out of the can. To Plunkett and his assistant's mystification, the gas had transformed overnight into a white, flaky powder. The TFE had polymerized.