The staement "There is a link between the development of the Atom Bomb and the development of teflon has a high truth value. I am not toally sure of the details but depending on how one wants to classify it teflon is either a secondary or tertiary spinoff of “The Manhatten Projecty”. I know of no evidence that NASA had need of a non stick surface.
The story behind the devolpment of Velcro is well known. Basically a Siis scientist went through of burrs and instead a swearing noticed how a burr cling to clothing and decide that it could make a useful fastener. The problem was crating the male or hook party.
If I remember correctly: TANG was introdued about the time that Sputnik I was launched. General Foods ran ads about the fact that TANG would be abord the Mercury flights butthe notion that TANG waqs developed for NASA is absurd.
The main connection between Teflon and the Bomb is as follows.
In order to make a bomb or a pile, you need fissionables. The most available fissionable in nature is U-235, but it is mixed in with a great deal of U-238. The only way to separate U-235 from U-238 is by distillation. In order to do that, you need a chemical chiefly composed of uranium that is a gas at reasonable temperatures. The only good option is uranium hexafluoride. And you can’t make uranium hexafluoride in bulk unless you can handle fluorine in bulk, an art that had not, before the bomb, been mastered.
After the Bomb, chemists could play with fluorine, which had thitherto been nearly impossible. After that, Teflon was only a matter of time.
Just one minor nit, John. The usual means of separating U-235 from U-238 is through centrifugal separation of the uranium hexafluoride gas, as opposed to fractional distillation. This does not otherwise detract materially from your spot-on analysis.
Actually polytetrafluoroethylene (the generic name of Teflon) was discovered in 1938, well before the Manhattan Project started. And while its discovery was purely an accident (the discoverers weren’t looking for a material that would help them manipulate fluorine) it was probably just a matter of time before someone polymerized perfluoroethylene and discovered the stuff anyway. Whether that would have been in time for the Manhattan Project (which used it mainly for gaskets and seals) is hard to say.
Or did you mean Teflon-coated pans were just a matter of time? Yes, certainly, but DuPont was slow to bring them to market because they weren’t sure the stuff was safe in a kitchen environment.
The point I was trying to make is that NASA has zero claim to the creation of Teflon, Velcro, or TANG which were mentioned as manned spaceflight spinoffs by the writer of the “Why are we in Space?” letter.