Dr. Walther Grot Documentary
Sitting down with his father at Ion Power, Dr. Stephen Grot asks the question at the heart of the whole series: how did Nafion come to be? Dr. Walther Grot — widely credited as its inventor — answers with a characteristic bit of humility.
The original concept, Walther explains, didn’t come from him. It came from the manager of DuPont‘s exploratory research group, Frank Reschme. The idea was elegant: take a Teflon derivative and attach an ionic group to it, turning an inert fluoropolymer into an ionic conductor. A colleague, Donald Connolly, was assigned to actually make the material — and within a few months, he had synthesized the polymer.
When Connolly moved over to marketing, the next challenge landed on Walther’s desk: figuring out what this brand-new material was actually good for. Finding applications for Nafion became his job — and it’s the work that would define the decades that followed. By his account, that was 1963: the true starting point for Nafion.
It’s a fitting introduction to Walther’s style — precise about the facts, generous with credit, and quietly proud of a discovery that would go on to reshape entire industries. The applications, the patents, and the global impact all unfold across the episodes to come.
Press play above to hear Walther tell it in his own words.