That reflex, the kind that would get you thrown out of any lab today, is the actual origin of aspartame. No white-coated eureka moment, no deliberate hunt for a sugar substitute. Just a chemist named James M. Schlatter, a beaker of leftover research chemical, and an old habit of licking his fingertip to grab a stuck piece of paper.

Quick answer

Aspartame was discovered by accident in December 1965 by James M. Schlatter, a chemist at G.D. Searle & Company, while he was researching an anti-ulcer drug. The compound spilled on his hand, and when he licked his finger to pick up a piece of paper, he noticed an intense sweet taste.

A drug that wasn’t supposed to taste like anything

Schlatter was working on gastrin analogs, peptide compounds meant to help treat ulcers, not sweeten anything. A colleague at Searle, chemist Robert Mazur, had synthesized aspartyl-phenylalanine methyl ester, one of many intermediate compounds in that research chase. Schlatter was heating a batch of it in methanol as part of the synthesis process.

At some point the mixture bumped and a bit of it splashed onto the outside of the flask, and from there onto his fingers. It was a minor, unremarkable lab mishap, the kind that happens dozens of times a week in any organic chemistry lab. He didn’t think much of it and kept working.

The taste that shouldn’t have been there

Later, reaching for a piece of weighing paper, Schlatter licked his fingertip out of habit. What he noticed, as he later described it, was a very strong, sweet taste, nothing like the bitter or chemical notes he’d expect from a research compound. Curious rather than alarmed, he went back and deliberately tasted a small amount of the aspartyl-phenylalanine methyl ester he’d been synthesizing, confirming the sweetness wasn’t a fluke.

That compound is aspartame. Searle recognized the commercial potential almost immediately. The company filed for a patent, and in 1970 was granted U.S. Patent 3,492,131 covering the sweetening use of the compound. The timing helped: cyclamate, then a leading artificial sweetener, had just been banned by the FDA in 1969 over cancer concerns, and saccharin was facing its own safety questions. A new, intensely sweet compound that used a fraction of the quantity of sugar to achieve the same effect looked like a golden ticket.

The part most people miss

The accidental discovery is the fun part of the story, but the more revealing chapter is what happened after Searle tried to bring aspartame to market. The FDA approved it in 1974, only to have that approval challenged almost immediately by objectors, including attorney Jim Turner and neuroscientist Dr. John Olney, who raised concerns about brain effects and pointed to irregularities in Searle’s own testing data. By 1976, the FDA had stayed its approval and launched an investigation into Searle’s lab practices, which turned up sloppy and, by some accounts, manipulated records. A formal Public Board of Inquiry then convened and, in 1980, voted to keep aspartame off the market, citing unresolved questions about brain tumors in lab animals.

Aspartame stayed in regulatory limbo until a very political moment arrived: Searle’s chief executive at the time was Donald Rumsfeld, who joined Ronald Reagan’s transition team after the 1980 election and reportedly told a Searle sales meeting he intended to push hard to get the additive approved. Reagan’s newly appointed FDA commissioner, Arthur Hull Hayes Jr., took office in April 1981 and had no prior background in food-additive regulation. Rather than accept the Board of Inquiry’s ruling, Hayes convened his own advisory panel of FDA scientists and a lawyer, who identified what they called errors in the board’s reasoning. In July 1981, Hayes used his authority as commissioner to personally overrule the Public Board of Inquiry and approve aspartame for dry foods. Approval for use in carbonated drinks followed in 1983, and Hayes left the agency later that year amid conflict-of-interest questions before taking a position with a public relations firm that counted Searle among its clients. Whatever you make of aspartame’s safety record since, which regulatory bodies worldwide have continued to review and uphold, the path from spilled beaker to supermarket shelf ran through a genuinely contested regulatory fight, not a straight line from lab bench to soda can.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on James M. Schlatter documents his biography and the December 1965 discovery circumstances at G.D. Searle & Company.

Wikipedia’s entry on NutraSweet covers the aspartame patent (U.S. 3,492,131), Searle’s commercialization, and the compound’s regulatory timeline.

Wikipedia’s entries on the Aspartame controversy and on Arthur H. Hayes Jr. detail the 1980 Public Board of Inquiry decision and Hayes’s 1981 overruling of that board as FDA commissioner.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

aspartame FAQs

Who discovered aspartame and when?

James M. Schlatter, a chemist at G.D. Searle & Company, discovered aspartame’s sweet taste in December 1965 while researching an anti-ulcer drug.

Was aspartame really discovered by accident?

Yes. Schlatter wasn’t looking for a sweetener at all. A research compound spilled on his hand, and he tasted it by chance when he licked his finger to handle a piece of paper.

Why was aspartame’s approval controversial?

A Public Board of Inquiry voted in 1980 to keep aspartame off the market over unresolved safety questions. In 1981, newly appointed FDA commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes Jr. overruled that board and approved it, a decision that drew scrutiny given Searle CEO Donald Rumsfeld’s political ties to the incoming Reagan administration.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Ben Mills / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Aspartame: The Accidental 1965 Lab Discovery appeared first on FYI Tales.

The sweetness wasn’t in the bread. It was on his hands, left over from a day spent testing coal-tar compounds at Johns Hopkins University. Fahlberg spent the next several hours tasting his way through the dishes on his own lab bench until he found the source: a compound nobody had named yet, hundreds of times sweeter than sugar and with zero calories. He called it saccharin. But the full story of who really discovered it — and who got rich off it — is messier, and more interesting, than the tidy ‘eureka’ version most people know.

Quick answer

Saccharin was discovered in 1878 by chemist Constantin Fahlberg, who noticed an unexplained sweetness while eating dinner after a day of coal-tar research in Ira Remsen’s chemistry lab at Johns Hopkins University. He traced it to a compound he’d spilled on his hands, later named saccharin — though Remsen, whose lab and research made the find possible, never shared in the profits.

A late night in Ira Remsen’s lab

Fahlberg, born in Russia in 1850, was working as a research assistant to Ira Remsen, a chemistry professor at the newly founded Johns Hopkins University. Remsen’s lab wasn’t chasing candy — they were systematically studying the chemistry of coal-tar derivatives, standard organic chemistry work for the era. In one experiment, Fahlberg reacted a compound called o-sulfobenzoic acid with phosphorus chloride and ammonia, and the mixture boiled over on his bench.

He cleaned up as best he could, went home for dinner, and — without washing his hands first — picked up his bread. It tasted unmistakably sweet. So did his water glass. So, when he touched a finger to his tongue, did his own skin. Something from the lab was doing this, and it wasn’t spoiled food. It was chemistry.

One name on the paper, one name on the patent

Fahlberg hurried back to the lab and tasted the residue in dish after dish until he traced the sweetness to that overboiled beaker. The compound turned out to be benzoic sulfinide — later renamed saccharin, from the Latin saccharum, ‘sugar.’ In February 1879, Fahlberg and Remsen published their findings jointly in the American Chemical Journal, describing two methods for synthesizing the new compound. For a few years afterward, they kept working together as collaborators.

Then in 1884, without telling Remsen, Fahlberg filed patents in Germany and the United States on a cheaper way to manufacture saccharin — listing himself as the sole inventor. He built a factory, began selling ‘Fahlberg’s Saccharin’ commercially, and got rich. Remsen, who’d never cared about the commercial angle, was less upset about the money than about being erased: he’d supplied the lab, the research direction, and the training that made the discovery possible, and his name had vanished from the business entirely. In a letter to fellow chemist William Ramsay, Remsen didn’t hold back: ‘Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him.’

The part most people miss

The ‘forgot to wash his hands’ detail makes a great punchline, but it undersells how normal what Fahlberg did actually was. Nineteenth-century chemists routinely tasted and smelled unknown compounds as a basic diagnostic tool — reckless by modern lab-safety standards, but standard practice before instrumental analysis existed. Fahlberg wasn’t sloppy; he was working the way he’d been trained, and it happened to make his dinner roll suspiciously delicious. The bigger twist came decades later: saccharin’s popularity spiked during the sugar shortages of both World Wars, when companies like Monsanto marketed it as a patriotic sugar substitute, and it became a staple for diabetics who had no other sweet option. Then in 1977, the FDA moved to ban it after a study linked it to bladder cancer in rats, triggering a backlash so intense that Congress passed a law blocking the ban and requiring warning labels instead. It took until 2000 for U.S. health authorities to formally clear saccharin, concluding the rat studies didn’t apply to humans and pulling the warning label for good — more than 120 years after one chemist’s dirty hands started the whole thing.

Sources

This account draws on the Science History Institute’s history of artificial sweeteners, the Wikipedia entry on Constantin Fahlberg, and Mental Floss’s history of saccharin’s rise, fall, and eventual rehabilitation by U.S. health regulators.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

saccharin FAQs

Who actually discovered saccharin?

Constantin Fahlberg gets the popular credit for noticing saccharin’s sweetness in 1878, but the discovery happened inside Ira Remsen’s chemistry lab at Johns Hopkins, using Remsen’s research program. The two published the finding jointly in 1879, though only Fahlberg later patented and profited from it.

Is it true Fahlberg discovered saccharin because he forgot to wash his hands?

Yes, by most historical accounts — residue from a spilled lab compound stayed on his hands, and he noticed his bread tasted sweet at dinner that night. He then traced the sweetness back to a specific beaker in his lab.

Is saccharin still considered safe today?

Yes. After decades of warning labels stemming from a 1977 rat study, U.S. health agencies concluded in 2000 that saccharin poses no meaningful human cancer risk, and it’s sold today in products like Sweet’N Low without a cancer warning.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Ben Mills / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Chemist Who Forgot to Wash His Hands—and Invented Saccharin appeared first on FYI Tales.

But the same crews had also figured out an off-label use for the stuff — smearing it on cuts and burns, because it seemed to help wounds heal faster and cleaner than leaving them exposed. A 22-year-old chemist named Robert Chesebrough noticed the same thing, and instead of shrugging it off, he took a jar of the gunk home to Brooklyn. What he did with it became a drugstore staple that’s still selling more than 150 years later.

Quick answer

Vaseline started as “rod wax,” a waxy residue that gummed up oil-drilling equipment near Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. Chemist Robert Chesebrough noticed rig workers using it to treat cuts and burns, spent years refining it in his Brooklyn lab, and patented the purified product as “Vaseline” in 1872.

A nuisance no one wanted

Chesebrough wasn’t in the oil business — he clarified lamp oil from sperm whale oil, a trade that was suddenly worthless once Edwin Drake struck petroleum in Titusville and cheaper fuel started flooding the market. Rather than fight it, Chesebrough went to see the oil fields for himself, hoping he could find something useful to make from this new substance everyone was drilling for.

What he found wasn’t the oil itself, but the stuff nobody wanted: a paraffin-like wax that coated the pumping rods and clogged the wellheads, forcing crews to stop work and scrape it away. It was a maintenance headache — except riggers had also learned it was decent first aid. Smear a little on a scrape or a burn, and it seemed to speed up healing. There was no science behind the habit, just years of oilfield trial and error.

From rig grease to miracle jelly

Chesebrough carried samples of the rod wax back to his Brooklyn laboratory and spent the better part of a decade figuring out how to turn a drilling byproduct into something you’d actually want to put on your skin. He filed his first purification patent in 1865, refining the raw wax with heat and filtration to strip out the darker, impure components and leave behind a clear, stable jelly. He named the finished product Vaseline, reportedly blending the German word for water, wasser, with the Greek word for oil, elaion.

To sell it, Chesebrough leaned into showmanship. He’d burn or cut his own skin in front of onlookers — sometimes with acid, sometimes with an open flame — then coat the wound in his jelly to show it healing. He loaded a horse-drawn wagon with free sample jars and handed them out across New York, a free-sampling strategy that was unusual for the era. He opened a Brooklyn factory in 1870, secured a U.S. patent (No. 127,568) for the finished product on June 4, 1872, and by 1874 stores were reportedly moving more than 1,400 jars a day.

The part most people miss

The detail that gets repeated most about Chesebrough — that he ate a spoonful of Vaseline every single day and credited it for his long life — actually checks out, according to a fact-check by Snopes that traced it to a letter Chesebrough himself wrote on March 2, 1933, describing his daily habit of ingesting more than a teaspoon of the jelly. He died that September at 96, still crediting it. But a second, equally popular add-on to the legend — that he once cured a bout of pleurisy by having a nurse coat his entire body in Vaseline — has shown up in books, blogs, and even Ripley’s Believe It or Not! without ever being traced back to a real primary source. It’s a good reminder that even a well-documented invention story can pick up unverifiable flourishes the more times it gets retold.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entries on Robert Chesebrough and on Vaseline, covering his biography, the 1865 and 1872 patents, and the product’s name origin and corporate history.

The American Oil & Gas Historical Society’s account of the sucker rod wax discovery and Chesebrough’s early years in the Pennsylvania oilfields.

Snopes’ fact-check on Chesebrough’s claim to have eaten petroleum jelly daily, which cites his own March 2, 1933 letter and notes the unverified pleurisy story.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

vaseline FAQs

What is “rod wax”?

Rod wax, also called sucker rod wax, is a waxy, paraffin-like residue that built up on the pumping rods of early oil rigs, clogging equipment and forcing crews to stop and scrape it off.

Did the inventor of Vaseline really eat it every day?

According to a 1933 letter Chesebrough wrote shortly before his death, yes — he claimed to eat more than a teaspoon daily and credited it with his long life. A separate story about him curing pleurisy with a full-body Vaseline coating is unverified.

When was Vaseline patented?

Robert Chesebrough received U.S. Patent 127,568 for his petroleum jelly product on June 4, 1872, after first patenting a petroleum purification method in 1865.

Where does the name “Vaseline” come from?

It’s generally attributed to a blend of the German word wasser (water) and the Greek word elaion (oil).

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Kiyok / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Sticky Oil-Rig Nuisance That Became Vaseline appeared first on FYI Tales.

But something else kept happening in that trial, something nobody had put on the clipboard. The compound, known only by the lab code UK-92,480, was relaxing blood vessels somewhere else in the body too — with results the volunteers noticed immediately, even if the doctors took a little longer to catch on. Pfizer had accidentally built the wrong drug for the right job, and it would go on to become one of the most famous pharmaceuticals on Earth: Viagra.

Quick answer

Sildenafil (later branded Viagra) was developed by Pfizer chemists in the late 1980s as a treatment for angina and high blood pressure. Clinical trials in Wales in the early 1990s showed it barely helped the heart, but male volunteers kept reporting erections — a side effect Pfizer’s medical team eventually decided was the actual product.

A pill built for the wrong organ

The story starts in 1986 at Pfizer’s research center in Sandwich, Kent, England, where a team of chemists led by Simon Campbell went looking for a compound that could inhibit an enzyme called phosphodiesterase type 5, or PDE5. Blocking PDE5 lets a molecule called cGMP stick around longer in smooth muscle tissue, which relaxes blood vessels — exactly what you want in a drug meant to widen the coronary arteries and ease angina.

In 1989, Pfizer chemists synthesized the specific compound that would matter: UK-92,480. The company moved it into Phase I human trials in 1991, dosing healthy volunteers at escalating doses in Wales. Early safety trials ran through Simbec, a contract research firm in Merthyr Tydfil, in 1992, recruiting local volunteers like former steelworker Idris Price. Pfizer then followed up with further studies at Morriston Hospital in Swansea around 1993–94, this time in men with diabetes and heart disease. As a treatment for chest pain or blood pressure, the drug’s effects were unimpressive — nowhere near strong enough to justify pushing it through the enormously expensive path to approval as a heart medicine.

The side effect nobody could ignore

What saved the compound from the trash bin was the thing it was doing that nobody had designed it to do. Physicians overseeing the trials, including Dr. David Brown, started hearing about erections. How exactly this got noticed depends on who’s telling the story — and this is where the popular version and the documented version start to diverge.

The tidier, more-retold version, repeated for years in outlets like NPR, holds that trial volunteers simply stopped returning their unused pills, a detail that’s become Viagra folklore. Brown has described male participants in the Merthyr Tydfil trial reporting an unusual side effect for weeks — one he initially felt too awkward to write up in a formal report — until he finally mentioned it to Pfizer headquarters on a conference call: men were asking if they could keep taking the pills after the trial ended. John LaMattina, Pfizer’s former head of research and development, has offered a related account, of nurses noticing male participants unusually reluctant to turn over for physical exams. Whichever detail is the more literal truth, both point to the same real outcome: Pfizer’s medical team, under physician Ian Osterloh, recognized the pattern and made the unusual call to redirect a failed cardiovascular drug into a trial for erectile dysfunction instead.

Pfizer patented sildenafil in 1996. The FDA approved it on March 27, 1998, as Viagra — the first oral medication ever approved specifically to treat erectile dysfunction in the United States. It became a cultural phenomenon almost overnight and, at its commercial peak in 2008, generated close to $2 billion a year in sales.

The part most people miss

Here’s the twist most retellings skip: sildenafil eventually did become a heart-and-lung drug after all — just not the one Pfizer originally set out to build. The same PDE5-blocking mechanism that failed to meaningfully help angina turned out to be genuinely effective at relaxing blood vessels in the lungs of patients with pulmonary arterial hypertension, a rare and serious condition where blood pressure in the lung arteries runs dangerously high. In June 2005, the FDA approved sildenafil for exactly that use, sold under a second brand name, Revatio, so patients wouldn’t confuse a heart medication with an erectile dysfunction pill picked up at the same pharmacy counter. The ‘failed’ heart drug had been right about its own chemistry all along — it just wasn’t right for the disease Pfizer first pointed it at.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on sildenafil documents the compound’s development timeline, the Sandwich, Kent research origins under Simon Campbell, the 1991 Phase I trials, the follow-up trials at Morriston Hospital, and the March 27, 1998 FDA approval.

Wikipedia’s entry on Ian Osterloh confirms his role as the Pfizer clinical physician who led the trials and identified the drug’s redirection toward erectile dysfunction treatment.

Reason magazine’s 20th-anniversary retrospective on Viagra lays out the two competing accounts of how the side effect was discovered — the widely repeated ‘unreturned pills’ story and John LaMattina’s nurses-and-embarrassment account — making clear that both versions circulate without a single definitive origin anecdote.

Explore more: More accidental inventions.

Viagra FAQs

Was Viagra really discovered by accident?

Yes, in the sense that it was developed as a treatment for angina and high blood pressure, not sexual dysfunction. When the heart benefits proved too weak during clinical trials in Wales in the early 1990s, Pfizer noticed the erectile side effect and redirected the whole program toward erectile dysfunction instead.

What was Viagra originally developed to treat?

Angina pectoris, the chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart, and related cardiovascular conditions. Pfizer chemists were trying to build a PDE5 inhibitor that would widen coronary arteries.

Does sildenafil ever get used for heart problems today?

Yes. In 2005, the FDA approved sildenafil under the brand name Revatio for pulmonary arterial hypertension, high blood pressure in the lungs’ arteries — a legitimate cardiovascular use for the same compound found in Viagra.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Ben Mills / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Viagra Was a Failed Heart Drug No One Would Return appeared first on FYI Tales.

The product wasn’t built for your garage, either. It was built to keep a missile from rusting. And the man history usually credits for inventing it may not be the man who actually did. That’s the part that makes this one worth telling.

Quick answer

WD-40 stands for “Water Displacement, 40th formula” — the label came directly from a San Diego lab notebook in 1953. It was developed for the aerospace industry, not consumers, and only reached store shelves in 1958 after factory workers started sneaking cans home to use around the house.

A missile-skin problem in 1953

On September 23, 1953, three men — Norman B. Larsen, Gordon Dawson, and John B. Gregory — founded the Rocket Chemical Company in San Diego, California, with a three-person staff and one goal: make rust-prevention solvents for the aerospace industry. Their first real client was Convair, the aerospace contractor building the Atlas missile, which needed something to stop the missile’s bare metal skin from corroding.

Getting a formula that would actually displace water off metal and hold a protective film took 40 attempts. The 39 before it apparently didn’t make the cut. When the 40th one worked, someone wrote “WD-40” in the log, and that notebook shorthand became the entire brand. There’s no evidence — despite the story circulating — that the company ever floated or rejected a fancier consumer-style name. It simply never occurred to anyone that it needed one, because the product wasn’t headed for a store shelf. It was headed for a missile factory.

Lunchboxes, not marketing, put it on shelves

WD-40 worked so well at Convair that employees started smuggling cans out in their lunchboxes to use at home — on squeaky hinges, rusted tools, stuck bolts. Company president Norm Larsen noticed the pattern and put the formula into aerosol cans for the public. It hit San Diego store shelves in 1958, five years after it was invented, still carrying the exact same industrial designation. By 1969, the company had sold nothing else for so long that it renamed itself the WD-40 Company.

The formula has never been patented, and that’s deliberate: a patent expires and forces you to publish your ingredients. WD-40 chose to protect it as a trade secret instead, which can last forever as long as nobody leaks it. The original handwritten formula still exists on a notepad, and in 2018, for the company’s 65th anniversary, it was moved to a Bank of America vault in San Diego under armed escort — with the CEO reportedly handcuffed to the case during the transfer.

The part most people miss

Company lore credits president Norman B. Larsen with cracking the formula. But San Diego historian Iris Engstrand, writing in the Journal of San Diego History, makes the case that the real inventor was a different man entirely: Iver Norman Lawson, a mechanical engineer — not a chemist — who worked out the water-displacing mixture in his own home garage and sold it to the fledgling company for $500, with no stock and no royalties. Two men with strikingly similar names, both roughly the same age, appear to have gotten swapped in the retelling over the following decades. Because the formula was never patented, there’s no filed paperwork naming an inventor to settle the question — Wikipedia itself now flags Larsen’s credit as “not certain.” If Engstrand is right, the man who actually got the 40th try to work was written out of his own invention’s history, while a colleague with a similar name became the face of it.

Sources

WD-40 Company’s official corporate history page, which documents the 1953 founding, the founders’ names, and the 40-attempt story as the company tells it.

Wikipedia’s entries on WD-40 and on Norman Larsen, both of which cite historian Iris Engstrand’s research disputing the standard invention credit and noting the confusion between Larsen and Iver Norman Lawson.

KXAN News reporting on the WD-40 formula’s storage in a San Diego bank vault, including the 2018 transfer and background on Lawson’s role in developing it for the U.S. Navy’s corrosion problem.

Explore more: More accidental inventions.

WD-40 FAQs

What does WD-40 actually stand for?

Water Displacement, 40th formula — the name comes directly from a 1953 lab notebook entry for the fortieth attempt at a working formula, the one that finally succeeded.

Who really invented WD-40?

Officially, Rocket Chemical Company co-founder Norman B. Larsen gets the credit. But San Diego historian Iris Engstrand argues the actual inventor was engineer Iver Norman Lawson, whose name was later confused with Larsen’s, leaving him largely uncredited.

Has the WD-40 formula ever been patented?

No. The company has always protected it as a trade secret instead of a patent, since a patent would eventually expire and require the recipe to be published. The original handwritten formula is now kept in a bank vault in San Diego.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: ZooFari / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post WD-40 Took 40 Tries to Perfect — And Nearly Stayed a Lab Secret appeared first on FYI Tales.

That part of the story gets told at every dinner table and toy museum in America. The part that usually gets left out is what happened fifteen years later, when the man who invented one of the best-selling toys in history gave away the company’s money, walked out on his wife and six kids, and moved to Bolivia to join a religious mission — leaving Betty James to build the empire everyone actually remembers.

Quick answer

The Slinky was invented by accident in 1943 when naval engineer Richard James, testing torsion springs meant to steady sensitive equipment on Navy ships, knocked one off a shelf and watched it ‘walk’ instead of fall. His wife, Betty James, named it, helped launch it at a Philadelphia department store in 1945, and later ran the company alone for nearly four decades after Richard left.

A dropped spring in a wartime workshop

James was a mechanical engineering graduate of Penn State working on a real Navy problem: how to keep delicate instruments from being shaken apart by rough seas aboard ships. Torsion springs were one option under test, and while handling one on a shelf, he knocked it off. Instead of landing in a heap, it stepped down in a controlled series of arcs — shelf to a stack of books to the tabletop to the floor — then coiled itself upright, ready to do it again.

Betty James later recalled her husband coming home and saying, in effect, that with the right steel and the right tension, he could make a spring walk on command. He spent roughly the next year testing different gauges and grades of wire until he found one that performed the trick reliably. Betty is the one who named it: flipping through a dictionary, she landed on ‘slinky’ — a word for something sleek, sinuous, and stealthy — and it stuck.

Four hundred springs and a sold-out department store table

The Jameses founded James Industries and, for the 1945 Christmas season, set up a demonstration table at Gimbels department store in downtown Philadelphia with 400 units priced at $1 each. Accounts differ on exactly how long it took, but every version agrees on the outcome: the entire stock sold out in under two hours, with shoppers reportedly buying extras as gifts on the spot.

Richard James filed for a patent on the toy, and U.S. Patent 2,415,012, titled ‘Toy and Process of Use,’ was granted on January 28, 1947 — describing a spring made of roughly 80 feet of wire coiled into a two-inch spiral, tuned so it could ‘walk’ down steps or an incline under its own weight, the same basic geometry that still defines a Slinky today.

The part most people miss

By the late 1950s, Richard James had grown deeply involved with an evangelical missionary organization, Wycliffe Bible Translators, and began funneling large sums of the company’s money into it. In 1960, with the business sliding toward bankruptcy, he liquidated assets, gave much of the money away, and left for Bolivia to join the group full-time — leaving behind Betty, their six children, and a company with unpaid bills. Betty later described it, in effect, as losing her husband to a cult; he asked her to leave the children behind and join him. She refused, moved the family back to her hometown of Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, and took over as president and CEO of a company she had never planned to run alone.

Betty James spent the next roughly 40 years rebuilding it — cutting costs, keeping the original toy affordable, and eventually launching the ad campaign built around the now-famous Slinky jingle. She bet the company’s future (and reportedly the family’s mortgage) on a 1963 toy fair appearance that revived flagging sales, and decades later rode a second wave of popularity when the Slinky Dog appeared in Toy Story. Richard James died of a heart attack in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 1974, having never returned to the business or, by most accounts, reconciled with his family. Betty ran James Industries until she sold it in 1998, was inducted into the Toy Industry Hall of Fame in 2001, and died in 2008 — by which point more than 300 million Slinkys had been sold worldwide. The toy people remember as a happy accident survived because of the person almost nobody mentions in the same breath as the invention.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entries on Richard T. James and Betty James, drawn from period reporting and toy-industry histories, detail the 1943 accident, the 1945 Gimbels launch, Richard James’s 1960 departure for Bolivia with Wycliffe Bible Translators, and Betty James’s four-decade leadership of the company.

Smithsonian Magazine’s feature on the accidental invention of the Slinky corroborates the 1943 workshop accident, the January 28, 1947 patent, the Gimbels debut, and the company’s later sales milestones. U.S. Patent 2,415,012, ‘Toy and Process of Use,’ filed by James Industries and viewable via Google Patents, confirms the official patent title and technical specifications of the spring.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

Slinky FAQs

Who really invented the Slinky?

Richard James, a naval engineer, discovered the walking-spring effect by accident in 1943 while testing torsion springs. His wife, Betty James, named the toy, helped launch it commercially, and later ran the company for decades.

What is the Slinky’s patent number?

U.S. Patent 2,415,012, titled ‘Toy and Process of Use,’ was granted to Richard James on January 28, 1947.

Why did Richard James leave the Slinky company?

In 1960, he gave away large sums of company money to the missionary group Wycliffe Bible Translators and moved to Bolivia to join them full-time, leaving his wife, six children, and a near-bankrupt business behind.

How many Slinkys have been sold?

More than 300 million units had been sold worldwide by the time Betty James died in 2008.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Roger McLassus / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Slinky Was an Accident. Its Survival Wasn’t. appeared first on FYI Tales.

That small, startled moment in 1826 is, as far as the surviving evidence shows, the birth of the friction match — the first stick you could strike anywhere and get fire, no flint, no vial of acid, no bellows. Walker never patented it. He barely profited from it. And for nearly two centuries afterward, his hometown couldn’t even get his memorial statue right.

Quick answer

The friction match was invented by accident in 1826 by John Walker, an English chemist and druggist in Stockton-on-Tees, who discovered that a stick tipped with a dried chemical paste would ignite when scraped against a rough surface. His ledger records the first documented sale on 7 April 1827.

A druggist’s workaround for a vial of acid

Before Walker, ‘instant fire’ already existed — it was just miserable to use. In 1805, the French chemist Jean Chancel had shown that a splint tipped with potassium chlorate, sugar, and gum would burst into flame if you dipped it into a small bottle of sulfuric acid. It worked, but the acid was expensive, corrosive, and gave off a foul, choking smell. Carrying a vial of acid in your coat pocket wasn’t exactly convenient fire-starting.

Walker, who ran a chemist and druggist’s shop at 59 High Street in Stockton-on-Tees, was tinkering with his own version of a fire-starting paste — a mixture of antimony sulfide, potassium chlorate, and gum — hoping to find something that didn’t require dousing a stick in acid every time. He worked over his stone hearth specifically because his experiments were prone to small fires and mishaps. It turned out to be exactly the right place for the accident that mattered.

The scrape that changed everything

While cleaning a stick with a dried blob of his paste stuck to the tip, Walker scraped it against the hearthstone to knock the excess off. The stick ignited on contact — no acid, no spark, just friction. He’d found, by accident, that the same chemical mix that ignited by dipping would also ignite by scratching, if you got the recipe right.

He refined the formula into thin wooden splints coated in sulfur and tipped with the antimony-chlorate paste, packaged them in tin cylinders with a piece of sandpaper for striking, and started selling them as ‘Friction Lights.’ His shop ledger shows a credit sale dated 7 April 1827, and an earlier batch number on that entry suggests he’d already been making and selling them since 1826. Offered the chance to patent his invention, Walker reportedly waved it off, saying he doubted not it would be a benefit to the public — so let them have it.

The part most people miss

Letting the public ‘have it’ meant, in practice, letting someone else get rich off it. Once Michael Faraday publicized the friction light in his 1829 London lectures, a London chemist named Samuel Jones copied Walker’s formula outright, undercut his prices, and sold his version as ‘Lucifer’ matches — no ethical scruples, and considerably more marketing savvy. Priced out of the trade he’d started, Walker stopped making friction lights by 1830. But that wasn’t the end of him as a businessman: he kept his chemist and druggist shop running for nearly three more decades, only retiring in 1858 — a rival Stockton chemist, William Hardcastle, later wrote that he’d bought up Walker’s remaining stock and his old day-book that same year. Walker died the following year, in 1859, largely unrecognized, while ‘Lucifers’ had become the household word for matches across Britain. Stockton-on-Tees even put up a plaque in 1893 crediting Walker with inventing the Lucifer match — technically wrong, since that was Jones’s product, not Walker’s. The mix-ups didn’t stop there: in 1977 the town commissioned a bust to finally honor its overlooked inventor properly. Decades later, someone noticed the statue depicted the wrong John Walker entirely — a stage actor who had died before matches were even invented. The error sat unresolved for years before the council owned up to it and went looking for an actual likeness of the chemist who never asked for credit in the first place.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on John Walker (inventor) details the 1826/1827 timeline, his shop ledger, the chemical formula, and his refusal to patent the friction light.

The Pharmaceutical Journal’s profile ‘John Walker, pharmacist and inventor of the match’ describes the hearth accident, his shop at 59 High Street, and his eventual retirement from the druggist business some years before his 1859 death.

Phillumeny.com’s record of Walker’s original Day Book ledger, drawing on an 1880 letter from Stockton chemist William Hardcastle, documents that Hardcastle bought Walker’s stock, chemicals, and papers in 1858 when Walker retired.

Mental Floss’s report on Stockton-on-Tees’s 39-year statue mix-up documents the 1977 bust of the wrong John Walker, the 1893 plaque error crediting him with the Lucifer match, and the council’s later effort to correct the record, including comments from Stockton Borough Council’s Reuben Kench.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

the friction match FAQs

Did John Walker really invent the match by accident?

Yes — historical accounts agree he discovered the friction-ignition principle in 1826 while scraping a chemically-coated stick against his hearth to clean it, not while deliberately trying to invent a new fire-starting method.

Why isn’t John Walker more famous for inventing the match?

He never patented his ‘Friction Lights,’ reportedly wanting the public to benefit freely. A London chemist, Samuel Jones, copied the formula, sold it cheaper as ‘Lucifer’ matches, and became the name people associated with matches instead.

Did John Walker keep working after he stopped making matches?

Yes. He stopped producing friction matches by 1830 once cheaper ‘Lucifer’ matches undercut him, but he kept running his Stockton-on-Tees chemist and druggist shop for nearly three more decades, retiring in 1858, a year before his death in 1859.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Sebastian Ritter (Rise0011) / CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Druggist Who Invented Matches by Accident (and Lost Credit) appeared first on FYI Tales.

Röntgen didn’t publish a triumphant announcement that night. He didn’t tell his wife. He barely left the room for the next several weeks, eating and sleeping in the lab while he tried to figure out what he’d stumbled onto — and whether it was real.

Quick answer

X-rays were discovered by accident on November 8, 1895, when German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen noticed a barium platinocyanide screen glowing across his darkened lab while he tested a covered, energized vacuum tube — light that shouldn’t have been able to reach it. He spent weeks investigating the mysterious rays in secret before publishing his findings that December.

A shimmer he wasn’t looking for

Röntgen was investigating cathode rays — streams of particles produced inside vacuum tubes when high voltage passes through them, a hot topic among physicists like Heinrich Hertz and Philipp Lenard at the time. To study the effect cleanly, he’d wrapped his Crookes-Hittorf tube in black cardboard so no visible light could escape and confuse his observations.

He darkened the room, switched on the current, and caught a faint shimmer coming from a bench several feet away. When he struck a match, he found the source: a small screen coated in barium platinocyanide, a chemical he happened to have sitting out for an unrelated experiment, glowing faintly in the dark. The covered tube was somehow throwing off something invisible that traveled through the air, and even through solid objects, to make that screen light up.

The hand, the ring, and the skeleton on the wall

Not knowing what he was dealing with, Röntgen called the phenomenon ‘X-rays’ — using the mathematical symbol for an unknown quantity — and spent weeks testing what could and couldn’t stop them. Paper, wood, and flesh let the rays pass through; dense materials like bone and lead blocked them.

On December 22, 1895, he asked his wife, Anna Bertha, to place her hand on a photographic plate for about fifteen minutes while he aimed the rays at it. What developed was a ghostly image of the bones in her hand, with her wedding ring floating clearly around one finger. According to the story that’s been retold ever since, Bertha looked at the picture of her own skeleton and said, ‘I have seen my death.’ A few days later, Röntgen submitted his paper, ‘On a New Kind of Rays,’ to the Würzburg Physical-Medical Society, and the image of Bertha’s hand became the first X-ray photograph of a living person’s body ever published.

The part most people miss

The world didn’t wait politely. Within weeks of Röntgen’s announcement in January 1896, newspapers and magazines were running poems and cartoons about the ‘new photography,’ an English company was advertising X-ray-proof underwear for the modest, and portrait studios opened up offering paying customers a picture of their own bones. Serious medicine moved just as fast in the other direction: by June 1896, only six months after the announcement, battlefield surgeons were already using X-ray machines to locate bullets in wounded soldiers. What took much longer to arrive was the version most people actually remember — the shoe-store fluoroscope that let kids wiggle their toes and watch the bones move inside a new pair of shoes. Those machines didn’t show up until the 1920s, built on a fluoroscope Boston physician Jacob Lowe developed to check World War I veterans’ foot injuries before repurposing it for shoe fitting in 1920. Decades of children irradiating their feet for fun followed, until rising awareness of radiation risk phased the machines out of stores by the 1950s.

Through all of it, Röntgen could have made a fortune. Doctors and instrument makers wanted the technology immediately, and it would have been trivial for a physicist of his stature to patent the process. He refused, on the same principle later followed by Marie and Pierre Curie with radium: he believed a discovery this useful to humanity shouldn’t be locked behind a license. When he won the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901, he donated the prize money to his university, and true to form, he skipped giving a speech at the ceremony. The man who accidentally handed the world a way to see inside itself walked away from the payday almost as quickly as he’d found the glow.

Sources

Nobel Prize outreach materials and the Nobel Foundation’s official history of the 1901 Physics Prize, covering Röntgen’s award, his declination of a Nobel lecture, and his refusal to patent the discovery.

The American Physical Society’s ‘This Month in Physics History’ retrospective on November 8, 1895, corroborating the barium platinocyanide screen, the tube setup, and the timeline of Röntgen’s first paper.

The Oak Ridge Associated Universities’ Health Physics Museum and Wikipedia’s entry on the shoe-fitting fluoroscope, documenting Jacob Lowe’s 1919-1920 development of the shoe-store X-ray machine and its spread through the 1920s-1950s, well after Röntgen’s original 1895-96 discovery and its immediate commercial and medical fallout.

Explore more: more accidental inventions that changed the world.

X-rays FAQs

Who discovered X-rays and when?

German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered X-rays on November 8, 1895, at the University of Würzburg, while testing a covered vacuum tube and noticing an unrelated screen glow across the room.

Why are they called ‘X-rays’?

Röntgen used ‘X’ because it’s the mathematical symbol for an unknown quantity — he had no idea what kind of radiation he’d found, so the placeholder name stuck permanently.

What was the first X-ray image of?

The first X-ray photograph of a living person was taken on December 22, 1895, of the bones in the hand of Röntgen’s wife, Anna Bertha, wedding ring included.

Did shoe stores really have X-ray machines?

Yes, but not right away. Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes let customers view the bones in their feet inside new shoes, but the technology wasn’t developed for that purpose until 1919-1920, roughly a quarter century after Röntgen’s discovery, and stayed common in stores into the 1950s.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Erwin Hanfstaengl / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Glow in an Empty Lab That Became the X-Ray appeared first on FYI Tales.

What came out wasn’t the sheet of dough they expected. It broke apart into flakes — thin, crisp, and, once toasted, strangely good. That kitchen mistake became the recipe for Corn Flakes, a product that would eventually split a family, trigger a courtroom fight over a last name, and put flaked cereal into breakfast bowls worldwide.

Quick answer

Corn flakes were invented in 1894 at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his brother Will Keith Kellogg accidentally let a batch of boiled wheat go stale before rolling it into sheets. Rather than a flat dough, the stale grain came out as individual flakes. The brothers patented the flaking process in 1895–96, and Will later built it into the company that became Kellogg’s.

A sanitarium kitchen looking for a miracle grain

John Harvey Kellogg was superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium starting in 1876, a Seventh-day Adventist health resort where guests followed a strict vegetarian diet with no alcohol, tobacco, or caffeine. Kellogg treated food as medicine and was constantly experimenting — he’s also credited with early versions of peanut butter and a grain-based coffee substitute for patients who wanted something easier on the digestion than the heavy, meat-forward breakfasts of the era.

His younger brother Will Keith Kellogg worked as his business manager and lab assistant, running the sanitarium’s day-to-day operations while John chased new food ideas. Historical accounts also credit John’s wife, Ella Eaton Kellogg, with suggesting the technique of rolling dough into thin sheets in the first place — a detail that gets left out of the tidy “two brothers” version of the story.

The batch nobody meant to ruin

The brothers were boiling wheat berries to make a flattened wheat-meal product for sanitarium patients when they got pulled away and left the batch sitting too long. By the time they returned, the wheat had staled. On a tight budget, they ran it through the rollers anyway instead of tossing it — and instead of a solid sheet of dough, the flakes separated on their own. Toasted, they held their shape and crunch.

John Harvey Kellogg filed a patent for “Flaked Cereals and Process of Preparing Same” on May 31, 1895; it was granted April 14, 1896, as U.S. Patent No. 558,393, and covered flaking grains generally, not just wheat. John was the only name on the patent, but Will spent years afterward refining the process — including the eventual switch from wheat to corn, which flaked more reliably and tasted better toasted.

The brothers’ partnership didn’t survive success. In 1906, Will split off to found the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, adding sugar, malt, and salt to make the cereal more appealing to a mass market — over John’s objections, since sweetened food ran against his health principles. The rift over credit and the family name became a legal fight that reached the Michigan Supreme Court, which ruled in Will’s favor in 1920, cementing his control over what became the Kellogg Company.

The part most people miss

The popular internet claim is that corn flakes were invented specifically to stop people from masturbating — that’s an overstatement, and fact-checkers have pushed back on it. But the exaggeration sits on top of something that’s genuinely true and stranger than the meme: John Harvey Kellogg was a fierce anti-masturbation crusader who believed that plain, bland, meat-free food dulled sexual urges, and that belief shaped the entire dietary philosophy behind the sanitarium’s food, corn flakes included. Kellogg wrote and lectured extensively on diet as a tool for curbing what he called “self-abuse,” and his broader methods for the cause were far more extreme than a breakfast cereal. Corn flakes weren’t sold with that pitch, but they were born inside a health program built around it — a piece of context that tends to get flattened into a punchline or dropped entirely.

Sources

Wikipedia’s entry on corn flakes details the 1894 accidental discovery, the disputed roles of John Harvey Kellogg, Will Keith Kellogg, and Ella Eaton Kellogg, and the 1895–96 patent (No. 558,393).

The National Inventors Hall of Fame’s profile of John Harvey Kellogg confirms his patent, his role at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and the forgotten-dough origin of the flaking process.

Snopes’ fact-check on the corn flakes and anti-masturbation claim lays out what’s documented about Kellogg’s dietary beliefs versus the exaggerated version of the story that circulates online.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

corn flakes FAQs

Did the Kellogg brothers really invent corn flakes by accident?

Yes. Historical accounts and the patent record describe the flakes as the result of a batch of wheat dough that was left out, went stale, and was rolled anyway rather than thrown out — not a planned recipe.

Were corn flakes originally made from corn or wheat?

Wheat first. The accidental discovery in 1894 used wheat berries; the switch to corn, which flaked more reliably, came later through Will Keith Kellogg’s continued experiments.

Is it true corn flakes were invented to stop masturbation?

Not exactly. Corn flakes weren’t created or marketed specifically for that purpose, but they did emerge from John Harvey Kellogg’s broader — and well-documented — belief that a bland, plain diet suppressed sexual urges.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: Th78blue / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Accident That Turned Stale Wheat Into Corn Flakes appeared first on FYI Tales.

Gas doesn’t just disappear. So Plunkett did the only sensible thing: he had the valve sawed off and tipped the cylinder over. Out slid a scoop of white, waxy powder. He was 27 years old, two years out of his Ph.D., and he was looking at what would become one of the strangest and most useful materials of the 20th century—though at that moment, all he had was a ruined refrigerant experiment and a weird lump of solid.

Quick answer

Teflon (PTFE, or polytetrafluoroethylene) was discovered by accident on April 6, 1938, when DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett found that a cylinder of tetrafluoroethylene gas had spontaneously turned into a solid white powder overnight, seemingly making the gas ‘vanish’ from the container.

A refrigerant experiment gone sideways

Plunkett wasn’t trying to invent anything revolutionary. He’d joined DuPont’s Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey in 1936, and his job was to find safer refrigerants—chlorofluorocarbons, the chemistry of the moment, meant to replace toxic gases like sulfur dioxide and ammonia in home refrigerators. As part of that work, he’d manufactured about 100 pounds of tetrafluoroethylene (TFE) gas and stored it in small pressurized cylinders packed in dry ice, planning to react it with hydrochloric acid.

On that April morning, Plunkett and his lab assistant, Jack Rebok, set up one of the TFE cylinders to run the next step of the experiment. They opened the valve. Nothing happened. Given that TFE is a gas under pressure, this should have been impossible unless the cylinder was empty—but weighing it proved otherwise. It still had its gas-filled weight. Something had happened to the TFE that nobody expected, because at the time, chemists didn’t think TFE could polymerize at all.

The powder nobody ordered

Plunkett had the valve removed and turned the cylinder upside down. A whitish, waxy solid fell out onto the workbench. Instead of shrugging it off as a ruined batch and moving on—which many chemists in his position might have done, since it wasn’t what he was being paid to find—Plunkett got curious. He ran tests on the mystery substance and found it was almost unbelievably inert: acids didn’t touch it, solvents didn’t dissolve it, heat barely bothered it, and almost nothing would stick to its surface.

What had happened, chemists later confirmed, was that the fluorine and carbon atoms in the TFE gas had linked together into long, tightly bonded polymer chains under the pressure and cold of the cylinder—forming polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE. DuPont patented the polymer (Plunkett’s patent application was filed in 1939) and, in 1945, trademarked the material as Teflon.

The part most people miss

Teflon’s first real job had nothing to do with kitchens. During World War II, the material was classified and funneled straight into the Manhattan Project, where its extreme resistance to corrosive uranium hexafluoride gas made it essential for seals and gaskets in the gaseous diffusion process used to enrich uranium. The public didn’t hear the word ‘Teflon’ until years later. Nonstick cookware didn’t arrive until the 1950s, pioneered commercially by French engineer Marc Grégoire, whose company Tefal began selling Teflon-coated pans in France in 1956; American cookware followed by the early 1960s. It’s also worth separating two things people often blur together: PTFE itself (the actual nonstick coating) is chemically stable and considered safe for cookware, but for decades it was manufactured using a separate processing chemical called PFOA, one of the ‘forever chemicals’ now linked to serious health and environmental harm. DuPont phased PFOA out of Teflon production by 2013—a real controversy, but a different chemical from the one Plunkett found in his cylinder.

Sources

Science History Institute, biographical profile of Roy J. Plunkett, detailing his background, the 1938 discovery at DuPont’s Jackson Laboratory, and Teflon’s path from refrigerant research to nonstick cookware.

Wikipedia entry on Roy J. Plunkett, cross-referenced for dates (born June 26, 1910; April 6, 1938 discovery; 1936 Ohio State Ph.D.), assistant Jack Rebok’s name, and Plunkett’s later career and honors including the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Additional reporting drawn from The Chemical Engineer’s history of PTFE and coverage of the PFOA ‘forever chemicals’ controversy, used to confirm the Manhattan Project application, the Tefal/Grégoire cookware timeline, and the distinction between PTFE and PFOA.

Explore more: more accidental inventions.

Teflon FAQs

Who invented Teflon and when?

DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett discovered it by accident on April 6, 1938, while researching refrigerants at the company’s Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey.

Why did the gas seem to disappear?

The tetrafluoroethylene gas hadn’t vanished—it had polymerized into a solid white powder (PTFE) inside the pressurized cylinder, which is why the container kept its original weight even though no gas came out.

Was Teflon used for nonstick pans right away?

No. It was first used for wartime industrial purposes, including seals in the Manhattan Project’s uranium enrichment process, and didn’t appear in cookware commercially until the mid-1950s in France and the early 1960s in the U.S.

Is Teflon the same thing as the ‘forever chemicals’ in the news?

Not exactly. PTFE, the nonstick material Plunkett discovered, is considered chemically stable. PFOA, a separate chemical once used in manufacturing PTFE, is the ‘forever chemical’ linked to health risks, and DuPont phased it out of Teflon production by 2013.

Tales You Can Hold

Fun-facts books for curious kids, personalized books that star your child, and more from the FYI Tales Bookstore. Visit the Bookstore.

Photo: NASA / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Teflon: The Gas That Mysteriously Vanished appeared first on FYI Tales.