Part5 |
| Half-inch Teflon tubing being extruded, 1955. |
Secret of PTFE Teflon
Next Hardie met with an executive at Du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware. By describing the success of nonstick pans in France, he was able to convince the executive that cookware could be a valuable new market. When the executive objected that the name Tefal was too close to Teflon, Hardie agreed to market his imported French pans under the name T-fal. Later a Du Pont salesman was assigned to accompany Hardie on a visit to Macy’s in New York City. There, in a tiny basement office, a buyer named George Edelstein placed a small order. Hardie was so excited that he sent a victory cable to the French factory. On December 15, 1960, during a severe snowstorm, the T-fal “Satisfry” skillets went on sale for $6.94 at Macy’s Herald Square store. To almost everyone’s amazement, the pans quickly sold out.
Shortly afterward Hardie made his second sale when he telephoned Roger Horchow, a buyer for the Dallas department store Neiman Marcus. Horchow agreed to test a sample skillet even though his store didn’t have a housewares department. He gave the skillet to Helen Corbitt, a cookbook editor who ran a popular cooking school in Dallas. Corbitt loved it, prompting Neiman Marcus to place a large order and run a half-page newspaper advertisement. The store sold 2,000 skillets in a week. Hot-chow later recalled, “Skillets were piled up, still in the shipping crates, as in a discount house, with the salesladies handing them out to customers like hotcakes at an Army breakfast.” The news spread to other department stores. Buyers jumped on the nonstick bandwagon, and Hardie was swamped with orders.
The inventory in Hardie’s barn was quickly exhausted. He phoned France daily to ask for more pans, but the French plant couldn’t work fast enough to supply both sides of the Atlantic. Hardie flew to France to press his case with Grégoire. He even lent Tefal $50,000 to expand its facilities, but it still could not meet the American demand. To cope with the avalanche of orders, which reached a million pans per month in mid-1961, Hardie built his own factory in Timonium, Maryland.
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| Starting with Apollo, NASA used Teflon cloth and Teflon-coated fibers in its space suits. |
Unfortunately for him, around the same time, several major American cookware companies decided that the time was right to start making Teflon pans. Suddenly the market was saturated with nonstick cookware. Because the American companies had no experience with Teflon coatings, much of it was inferior to the French product, and nonstick pans soon acquired a bad name. Just as quickly as the U.S. demand for nonstick pans had soared, it plummeted, and warehouses were filled with unsold stock. Hardie sold his factory and focused on his family’s business. (T-fal cookware, the standard of quality in the, early 1960s, is still being manufactured and is sold in stores in the United States and abroad.)
Despite the problems with early Teflon cookware, Du Pont’s managers still believed that it had enormous potential. So the company commissioned some research. Six thousand consumers, along with a sampling of professionals in the cookware business, were asked what was wrong with Teflon products. The respondents overwhelmingly liked the idea of Teflon cookware; the problem lay with faulty production methods that turned out shoddy pans whose coatings scraped off much too easily.
Du Pont knew that cookware could be more than just a way to sell lots of Teflon. It could also be an invaluable marketing tool, a vehicle to familiarize vast numbers of consumers with Teflon and its properties. Conversely, low-quality merchandise could only harm the product’s reputation. As a result the company established coating standards for manufacturers and initiated a certification program, complete with an official seal of approval for Teflon kitchenware. To verify compliance with its standards, Du Pont performed more than 500 tests per month on cookware at its Marshall Laboratories in Philadelphia.
The Du Pont certification program was so successful that a marketing survey in the mid-1960s found that 81 percent of homemakers who had purchased nonstick pans were pleased with them. By 1968 Du Pont had developed Teflon II, which not only prevented food from sticking to the pans but was also (supposedly) scratch-resistant. Later generations of Teflon cookware, with thicker coatings and improved bonding, would be introduced under the trade names Silverstone in 1976 and Silverstone Supra in 1986.
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