History
The company was founded in 1958 by Wilbert (Bill) Lee Gore and his wife Genevieve (Vieve) Walton Gore in Newark. Bill Gore had spent 16 years with the DuPont Company in a number of technical positions that included fluoropolymer research when he decided to form his own company. While working in his basement, he set out to develop a process for insulating a series of parallel electrical wires using polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), a fluoropolymer discovered in 1938 by Roy Plunkett, a chemist with DuPont. His son, Robert W. Gore (Bob), in college at the time, suggested a method for encapsulating the wires which proved successful and led to the company's first patent. The resulting product was called Multi-Tet cable, a multi-conductor ribbon cable used in computers, communications, and process control equipment.
The company operated from the basement of the Gores' home until 1960, when an order from the Denver Water Company for seven and a half miles of Multi-Tet cable made it necessary to expand manufacturing capacity. The Gores built a new facility in Delaware, not far from their home, which is still in operation. By 1970, Gore and its subsidiary companies had manufacturing plants for wire and cable in Arizona, Scotland, Germany, and Japan.
Bob Gore joined the company in 1963 upon completion of a Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Minnesota. In 1969, he was researching a process for stretching extruded PTFE into pipe thread tape when he discovered that the polymer could be “expanded.” The discovery followed a series of unsuccessful experiments in which he was attempting to stretch rods of PTFE by about 10%. As it turned out, the right conditions for stretching PTFE were counterintuitive. Instead of slowly stretching the heated material, he applied a sudden, accelerating yank that unexpectedly caused it to stretch about 800%. This resulted in the transformation of the solid PTFE into a microporous structure that was about 70% air. The company initially referred to this new material as “fibrillated PTFE”. One year later, it was given the name of “Gore-Tex expanded PTFE”. Today, expanded PTFE (ePTFE) accounts for the vast majority of the company's products.
In 1985, Bill Gore received the Prince Philip Award for Polymers in the Service of Mankind, which honored Gore’s Medical Products Division. The award is given in recognition of polymers that have provided a significant service for mankind. In 2005, the Society of Chemical Industry presented Bob Gore with the Perkin Medal, which recognizes the most significant achievements in applied chemistry. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for the invention of ePTFE.
Bill Gore served as president of the company until 1976, when Bob Gore assumed the position. Bill continued as chairman until he died in 1986 at the age of 74. Genevieve (Vieve) Gore continued in active service to the company until she died in 2005 at the age of 91.
Charles (Chuck) Carroll, a long-term business leader in the Electronics and Fabrics Divisions, replaced Bob Gore as president in 2000. Terri Kelly, who joined Gore in 1983 as a mechanical engineer in the Fabrics Division, became president in 2005. Bob Gore continues as Chairman of the Board. The company remains privately held. Gore is one of the 200 largest privately held companies in the United States. Gore and its subsidiaries employ approximately 8,500 associates at more than 50 facilities throughout the world in East Asia, Australia, Europe and the Americas.
Read more about this topic: W. L. Gore And Associates
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