On February 4, 1941, Roy J. Plunkett received U.S. Patent No. 2,230,654, on Tetrafluoroethylene, assigned to his employer Kinetic Chemicals, Inc.:

Plunkett had earned a PhD in chemistry, but his discovery of Teflon was largely by accident. Plunkett was working in a laboratory in Edison, New Jersey, in 1938 trying to find alternative chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants. He and his assistant made about 100 pounds of Tetrafluoroethylene (TFE), a common precursor of refrigerants. They froze the TFE in a gas cylinder, but the next day no gas came out. They opened the cylinder and found that the TFE had polymerized into a white powdery substance.

Plunket studied the powdery substance further and found its properties to be waxy, very slippery, chemically stable and had a high melting point. DuPont went to work on the new polymer, and by 1941 it had found numerous applications, and given a new name -Teflon.

Teflon became so well known for its slipperiness, that it found use in in common parlance, President Ronald Reagan being dubbed the “Teflon President,” and John Gotti, being called the “Teflon Don.”

On December 19, 1968, U.S. Patent No. 3,415,512 issued on Apparatus Causing Artificial Snowfall:

The principal object of the invention is “to provide apparatus that assures a continuous movement of snow particles, repeatedly blowing them upwardly to a point where they are dispersed and will fall downwardly and thence return to a predetermined point without manual or mechanical assistance, for an indefinite period of time.”

Somewhat surprisingly, there is some prior art: U.S. Patent No. 3,147,175 issued September 1. 1964:

Inventors continued to refine the technology into the 1970’s, see U.S. Patent No. 4,028,830:

However, it was not until 1975 when someone thought to enclose the whole system, as shown in U.S. Patent No. 3,905,140.

U.S. Patent No. 4076234 continued the development of this important decorating technology:

Interest in turning the living room into a snowglobe continued into the ’90’s, as evidenced by U.S. Patent No. 4,962,922

and U.S. Patent No. 5,098,084:

On November 25, 1903, Clyde J. Coleman, received U.S. Patent No. 745,157 on a Means for Operating Motor Vehicles (an electric starter for an automobile engine starter):

Before the electric starter the engine had to be hand-cranked, However hand cranking frequently resulted in broken thumbs, and occassionally a broken wrist, dislocated shoulder, or worse. Furthermore increasing engine size was making hand cranking increasingly physically demanding.

A few years later, Charles F. Kettering and Henry M. Leland, of Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (DELCO), obtained U.S. Patent No. 1,150,523 on an improved design:

Yesterday’s post was about Isaac Van Bunschoten’s U.S. Patent No 11979 on a lamp that burns rosin oil. In today’s world of ubiquitous electricity we take lighting for granted, but not that long ago, safe, reliable lighting was hard to come by. Lamps were fueled by various oils which many of which were dangerously unreliable. The headstone below is a testament to that danger:

Isaac Van Bunschoten’s invention, as short-lived as it was, is all the more notable for providing safe and sufficient light, until the next inventor advanced the technology. Whether ground-breaking or incremental all inventors contribute to the progress of science and the useful arts.