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Jan Kedves
Anyone who has ever seen how horses and cows stand close to hedges in bad weather on the pasture to seek protection has actually already understood the principle of Gore-Tex. The wind doesn’t howl through hedges, and when the rain falls at an angle, which it usually does, hedges absorb some of it too. In fact, the people at Gore-Tex in Feldkirchen-Westerham, in the European headquarters of the market leader for water- and wind-repellent fabrics, speak of the “hedge structure” of their membrane. It is made of PTFE, which stands for polytetrafluoroethylene, and, like a hedge, it contains many spaces: 1.4 billion micropores per square centimeter. If you look through an electron microscope at 100,000 times magnification, you can actually see them.