Gore-tex

A plastic that you can wear both inside and outside the body

Wilbert 'Bill' Gore (Meridian, Idaho, January 25, 1912 - Wind River Range, Wyoming, July 26, 1986)
Robert 'bob' Gore (Salt Lake City, Utah, April 15, 1937)

One of the ads shows a bear in a tie, staring sadly at a TV set against a mountain backdrop. The text says: 'Attention! Gore-Tex can change your life. We were all free once. Our home was the forest, the mountain and the ocean.

Then something happened. We only lived indoors. We became pen pushers, TV junkies and party numbers. But our soul is still out there. GoreTex can change your life and bring you back to nature. It's more than a warning.

It's a promise.'

What is so special about the synthetic fabric gore-tex?

When the American chemistry concern DuPont disbanded its 20-strong Teflon research team in 1957 and spread it to other departments, there was one man who couldn't live with it: Wilbert 'Bill' Gore, a chemist who mainly worried about the field.
use of teflon for the ordinary consumer. For example, he came up with a way to use strips of Teflon to insulate electronic cables.

DuPont didn't listen to it and Gore started experimenting on his own in 1958 in the basement of his home in Newark, Delaware. From Teflon polymers he bought from DuPont, he developed flexible cables with magical insulation properties.

When the demand for protective layers for computer cables increased in the 1960s, only Bill Gore could respond immediately. The flow of orders allowed him to establish two factories. The family business grew into a thriving business.

It was Bill's son Bob who discovered in 1969 that you could turn the special substance into a fabric when heated strongly. A fabric with 1.4 billion microscopic holes per square centimeter.

The new product was not only strong, but also had the advantage of being waterproof and breathable at the same time.

The pores were large enough to allow air molecules to pass through and small enough to hold back water molecules or, in numbers, each pore is 20,000 times smaller than a raindrop but 700 times larger than an air molecule.

For many years it was not possible to achieve the right balance between thickness and elasticity.

One day, when Bob Gore took a small stick of the stuff out of the oven in frustration and gave it an exasperated slap, what he had always looked for sprang up spontaneously: the substance itself, like syrup, took on the length of an arm .

Now the Gores had the fabric, but what could you make with it? A tent was obvious: the air had to get out - everyone knew how humid a tent can be in the morning - and the rain was not allowed in. It was Bill and his wife Vieve who took the tent on a trek. The first night was already hit. It was raining and pouring. They examined the tent to the smallest corners, it did not leak anywhere. They were delighted. Later that night, however, a hail storm set in that punched holes in the tent, so that they ended up under the water. There was still work to be done.

They found the solution in lamination, in applying the Teflon membrane to other fabrics, in combination with traditional textiles afterwards. From 1976 the boots, tents, gloves and snow suits came on the market. Only in the 1980s would all teething problems disappear.

Gore-tex initially only supplied manufacturers. So that today you often see a well-known raincoat brand X or hiking boots brand Y, with the extra Gore-Tex logo on it. Eventually, the Gores would develop their own clothing lines.

Meanwhile, on a ski vacation in Vail, Colorado, father and son Gore had met Denver doctor Ben Eiseman. During an après-ski, Bob Gore took a stick of gore-tex out of his pocket and told the surgeon about the wonderful properties of the product.

Among other things, that it was inert, namely that no other substance reacted to it. Eiseman, looking for a material that wouldn't repel the body, suggested implanting the tube into a pig to see what would happen.

A few weeks later he called excitedly to say that the experiment was a success, that the pig did not reject the material.
Since then, millions of people with artificial body parts, from veins to ligaments, have been helped out of the gore-tex factories.

The pores form an ideal base for the natural tissue to grow in and the inert properties of Teflon mislead the body, which does not regard gore-tex as a foreign element. So that gore-tex can be worn on the inside and outside of the body.

Bill Gore died in 1986 of a heart attack while hiking in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming.

In addition to the better-known Gore-Tex applications in outdoor sportswear, the approximately 45 factories of the Gores today manufacture products for the medical industry, the telecommunications sector (the cables of the first hour), aerospace (space suits) and industry (special filters).

The company also prides itself on working without a hierarchical structure, with a grid system of many small branches (less than 200 people per branch, in total 8000 people) that are completely self-contained, without bosses or directors, within which no one has a title wear.

Except chairman Bob Gore. Employees as such do not exist. Everyone is an associate, a companion. The group is 75 percent owned by these associates.
(See also: Teflon, Tupperware, Nylon, Kevlar)