Word: teflon
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...amazingly slippery, heat-resistant plastic known as Teflon was discovered purely by accident by DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett in 1938. By 1950, the company was making a million pounds annually as a low-friction coating for bearings and gears. In 1960 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved it for use in cookware. Today some 60% of all pots and pans in American kitchens are nonstick--to say nothing of muffin pans, cookie sheets, cake pans, deep fryers and waffle irons...
...York City. But for all its uncertainties, the Putin era seems less erratic than the tumultuous years of the previous decade, spanning the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the Yeltsin-era crisis in 1998, which wiped out most people's savings. "Putin's our Teflon President," says Milekhin, pointing to a chart that shows how even potentially damaging events like the Beslan school hostage crisis in 2004 haven't dented Putin's popularity...
...will be punished as a party but they've been able to isolate Lula and make him a Teflon president," says David Fleischer, the author of Brazil Focus, a weekly political report. "That he knew nothing about the scandals has been accepted by the poor and lower middle class and that, together with his reserves of charisma built up over the years, could be enough...
...TEFLON In 1938 Roy Plunkett, a young Du Pont chemist, was trying to find a new kind of refrigerant for manufacturers and filled a tank with a gas related to Freon. When he opened it later, he found he had accidentally created a slippery white powder. General Leslie Groves, heading the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb, heard about the substance from a Du Pont friend when his scientists were looking for a material for gaskets that could resist the bomb's corrosive gas, uranium hexafluoride. Groves had Du Pont make Teflon for the bomb, but it wasn...
Reagan is now clearly the world's pre-eminent leader. He has five successful years as President under his belt. That is too long to dismiss as mere luck. The derisive labels of "amiable dunce" and "the Teflon President" lie shattered and discredited. The open contempt that the likes of Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill had for Reagan's limited grasp of the issues and his lack of understanding about his programs looks irrelevant these days. The endless reports about staff conflicts and personality clashes within the Administration, however true, turn out to be footnotes. The vaunted foreign...