How Gore-Tex Went From Accident to Outdoor Essential

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Dwight Eschliman

Before Gore-Tex was invented, there were plenty of materials to protect you from harsh weather, but they all came with trade-offs. Waxed cotton was heavy. Vinyl could drown you in your own sweat. Seal intestine (gut parka!) was favored by the Inuit but hardly made sense for mass production. That said, Bob Gore wasn’t attempting to improve outerwear when he created Gore-Tex^[1]. Working in his father’s Teflon factory in the late 1960s, he was simply trying to make more efficient use of the plastic by stretching it. He accidentally found that yanking Teflon filled it with air pockets. And not only that: The micropores that appeared in his “expanded polytetrafluoro­ethylene” were 700 times larger than a water vapor molecule but 20,000 times smaller than a droplet. Gore reasoned that if you made a fabric out of ePTFE, you could block out rain while still venting steamy...