The thought obviously pleases Bill Gore; he smiles faintly and says: "Opening plants costs money, but it makes money." Then he goes on to say that his goal in the next five years is to become one of the country's biggest companies. Almost impishly he waits for the message to sink in. Obviously growth of that magnitude means a cloudburst of new plant openings. "Yes, I know," he says contentedly."We've already got seven under construction. Now do you see why profits are essential?"
The middle '60s marked a period of transition for W. L. Gore & Associates. By 1969, as the company approached $6 million in sales, Bill Gore had confronted the problem of growth and had found some innovative solutions consistent with his vision of a lattice organization. The sponsorship system, for example, preserved both order and individual freedom. And the realization that size had a measurable impact on group dynamics was another theoretical and then practical breakthrough. As a result, the lattice itself was evolving. These developments couldn't have been better timed. Bob Gore was about to have another brainstorm.
In the fall of 1969, Bob was troubled by a growing suspicion that the company's wire and cable business was slowing down because of market saturation and increasing competition. The anxiety made him restless and soon he found himself working nights in the lab toying with PTFE. If he could stretch PTFE, he reasoned, he could introduce air into its molecular structure, giving a greater volume per pound of raw material without affecting its performance. This, in turn, could sharply reduce the company's fabricating costs and ultimately increase profit margins on coated wire and cable products. That way, any sales slowdown could be offset by increasing profitability. The scientific community had already determined that PTFE couldn't be stretched very far. But since he had proven conventional wisdom wrong once before, Bob decided to go ahead.
For three days, he took slender rods of PTFE about a foot long and preheated them in the lab's ovens. Then, ever so gently, he pulled on both ends of the rod. Each time, the rod snapped in two. He tried again and again. He tried different temperatures. He tried to adjust the force of his easy pull. Nothing worked.
Finally, the days of futile, frustrating effort caught up with him.One evening in October, Bob Gore, dressed in a white lab coat and heavy asbestos gloves, took a rod from the oven, grabbed each end, and angrily yanked his clenched fists apart. The foot-long rod stretched the full length of his extended arms. "I couldn't believe it," he says. "I went right home. I didn't say anything to anybody because I thought it might be a fluke. I knew what I had done, but I just couldn't believe it. I always entered my results in a journal, but that night I didn't write anything. I must've been really worked up."
Early the next morning, Bob hurried to the lab so he could repeat his experiment before anyone else arrived. After several successful attempts, he called in his father and colleagues. With a quick flourish of his arms, he revealed the fruits of his labor. "We were all very quiet," Bill Gore says. "We were all trained scientists so we recognized the importance of what Bob had done. I was very proud."
Word spread rapidly throughout the company that Bob Gore had discovered a "miracle product." Even today, associates who were there recall the time with a certain breathless sense of wonder. "Everybody seemed to have an idea how to use it," says Burt Chase, business leader of the wire and cable division. "Bob kept a small gray file-card box in his office so people could drop off their ideas. I remember one that said we should string tennis racquets with expanded PTFE. We were all caught up in the excitement." The list of suggested ideas was so exhaustive that when the patent was filed on May 21, 1970, it correctly anticipated every product application that would be introduced during the next 12 years, with the sole exception of vascular grafting. In only six months, the miracle product, now called Gore-tex, had totally reshaped the company's future. A wire and cable company had been transformed into a multi-faceted high-technology company reaching for a tantalizing variety of markets. At least that is how it appeared in the white heat of the moment. Translating imagination into viable commercial products was another matter.
Gore's first product using expanded PTFE was made by a process that didn't bathe the company in the glory of hightech precision but was, nonetheless, a fitting example of the resourcefulness that would characterize the development of Gore-tex. This product was, and is, a joint sealant that is put on pipe flanges to ensure a tight fit.
Bob Gore affectionately describes the sealant's method of manufacture as the "sneaker process." Two men would come to work wearing sneakers; they would each grab an end of a preheated length of PTFE; they would nod to each other when ready, and then they would run like crazy to opposite ends of the warehouse. Voila, they had made Gore-tex sealant tape. "Now that was something to see," Bob Gore says. "I guess it was about 100 feet, wall to wall, and those guys really flew. It wasn't fancy, but it worked."
While the boys were sprinting out in the warehouse, Bob and his colleagues were creating machines that could mass-produce the Gore-tex membrane in wide sheets and then bond it to fabrics. But it was slow work, and to keep the miracle product alive and growing, the associates foraged for new applications wherever and whenever they could.
