Have you ever looked at your refrigerator and thought I wonder whether it's going to kill me?

Probably not, but for a lot of people in the early 1900s, refrigerators were in fact a deadly menace.

You see, refrigerators back then often used toxic gases as coolings,

including ammonia and sulfur dioxide. These gases worked well to keep food cold, but given the

primitive state of manufacturing them, the seals on refrigerator pumps often

broke.

These toxic gases within leak out and flood people's homes.

Every year dozens of poor families would go to bed

happy and healthy, only to be found suffocated and dead in the morning.

So to protect against toxic fridge gases,

scientists in the United States

began developing new non-toxic coolants. But this pursuit of non-toxic coolants let us down some

unexpected paths. In particular, it led to the discovery of Teflon, the famous

non-stick coating on frying pans, which is all pretty neat, a

gee whiz story of scientific serendipity, except for one thing.

After its discovery, Teflon was not initially used in frying pans.

In fact, it probably never would have appeared in your kitchen

had not found a much more sinister use.

That's because Teflon was a key ingredient in the making of the first atomic bombs. Hi, I'm Sam Keene, and you're listening to the disappearing spoon, a topsy-turvy

sciencey history podcast, where footnotes become the real story.

The story of Teflon and Atomic Bomb starts in 1938 with Roy Plunkett, a young chemist in New Jersey working for the DuPont Company.

By that point, toxic fridge gases were starting to be replaced with new coolants,

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