Who Invented Super Glue?

Before we get started today, we’d just like to send a quick shoutout to one of our most prolific and best authors here, Gilles Messier, who if you liked his few hundred videos here the last few years, please do check out the link in the description below to his channel Our Own Devices, where you’ll find him covering in fascinating detail everything from radios to reactors to rocket launchers, breaking down the history and workings of the cleverest technology of yesteryear that humans have created. Now let’s get in to today’s video.

Ah, super glue. Along with duct tape and WD-40, it is an essential component of any toolkit, perfect for repairing everything from a chipped coffee mug to a cracked fingernail to that beloved toy the kids played a little too roughly with. Just dab on a little bit of the sticky stuff, wait a few seconds, and voila: the two parts are instantly bonded together…and to your hand…

Love it or hate it, super glue is one of the most successful adhesives in the world, accounting for more than $400 million in sales worldwide. And in addition to helping with minor home repairs, the substance has found applications in a wide variety of fields, including medicine and criminal forensic. But how did this powerful and versatile adhesive first come to be? Well, as with many inventions, superglue owes its existence to one person being in the right place at the right time. And that person was Dr. Harry Coover.

Harry Wesley Coover Jr. was born on March 6, 1919 in Newark, Delaware. His illustrious career as an inventor almost never happened, for at the age of 16 he was struck by a train while driving and fell into a coma for over a month. When he finally awoke, he remembered nothing of his life before the accident. However, Coover would go on to make a full recovery and study Chemistry at Hobart College and Cornell University, graduating with a Masters degree in 1942 and a PhD in 1944. His thesis was on a commercial synthesis process for Vitamin B6, which was adopted by the U.S. Army on the outbreak of the Second World War.

Shortly after graduation, Coover landed a job as a chemist at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York. At the time, Kodak was looking for a synthetic replacement for the optical glass used to make aircraft gunsights. Among the many materials being studied was a family of polymers known as cyanoacrylates. Normally a thick, transparent gel, when exposed to moisture cyanoacrylates spontaneously polymerize, the small molecular subunits or monomers assembling themselves into long, stronger and more flexible chains. However, as Coover later recalled, these compounds quickly proved less than up to the task:

“I was working with some acrylate monomers that showed promise. But everything they touched stuck to everything else. It was a severe pain.”

So the team moved on to more promising materials, and cyanoacrylates were quickly forgotten – for the time being, at least.

In 1951, Coover relocated to the Kodak facility in Kingsport, Tennessee, where he was assigned to a team of chemists researching heat-resistant polymers for jet aircraft canopies. While looking for an adhesive capable of bonding the various layers of a canopy together, Coover suddenly remembered the cyanoacrylates he’d experimented with seven years earlier. Unlike most adhesives, cyanoacrylates needed no additional heat or pressure to cure, greatly simplifying the manufacturing process. The team thus began experimenting with the compounds, synthesizing nearly 1000 different formulations. One day, Coover’s colleague Fred Joyner attempted to measure the optical properties of formulation 910 by spreading the compound between the prisms of a machine called a refractometer. To his horror, however, the compound immediately cured, permanently bonding the prisms together. As one of his colleagues later recalled:

“He ruined the machine. Back in the ’50s, they cost like $3,000, which was huge.”

For reference here, that would be about $40,000 today.

But thankfully, Joyner was not reprimanded for this mishap. Instead, he and Coover, immediately realizing the enormous potential of cyanoacrylate adhesives, filed for and were awarded U.S. Patent #2,768,109 for Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Compositions/Superglue and began refining the product for commercialization. The product first appeared on store shelves in 1958 under the name “Eastman 910,” though the company later coined the enduring name “super glue.” The formula was also licensed to the Loctite Corporation of Rocky Hill, Connecticut, who sold it under the name “Loctite Quick Set 404” and later “Super Bonder.” On January 15, 1959, Harry Coover appeared on the popular television show I’ve Got a Secret to promote his new invention. On live television, Coover used a single drop of super glue to bond a metal bar to a cable. Then, he and host Garry Moore grabbed hold of the bar and were hoisted off the stage, supported only by a thin layer of adhesive. Coover would later appear in several television advertisements endorsing various formulations of super glue.

From these humble beginnings, superglue spread quickly around the world, reaching all 7 continents by the 1970s. In addition to assisting ordinary people make minor household repairs and modelmakers stick their projects together, superglue has also found applications in other, sometimes unexpected fields. Rock climbers and guitar players use it to toughen their fingers or fix minor cuts and scrapes, veterinarians use it to mend broken turtle shells, while in forensic science cyanoacrylate vapour is used to reveal latent fingerprints, the oils, water, and other residues in the fingerprint causing the vapour to polymerize into an easily-photographed white crust. Superglue can even be used to light a fire in a survival situation. When dripped onto a cotton ball or other kind of fine natural fibre, super glue undergoes an exothermic reaction powerful enough to ignite the cotton.

But the application which Harry Coover was most proud of was in the field of medicine. One day in the early 1960s, Coover watched as his son tried to cut open a tube of superglue while building a model airplane. The knife slipped, cutting his son’s finger, only for a drop of glue to spill from the tube and immediately seal the wound. Immediately recognizing the tissue-bonding potential of superglue, Coover set about developing a formula that could be used to quickly staunch major bleeding in an emergency. This research soon caught the attention of the U.S. Army, then embroiled in the Vietnam War:

“During the Vietnam War, one of the generals came to us and said, ‘I want this for us out on the battlefield. When the medics go out on the battlefield, a guy’s got a big hole in his belly or someplace, bleeding. And he takes this and just sprays it, and that instantaneously stops the bleeding’…the biggest problem they had was stopping the bleeding so they could get the patient back to the hospital. And the consequence was—many of them bled to death. So the medics used the spray, stopped the bleeding, and were able to get the wounded back to the base hospital…This was very powerful. That’s something I’m very proud of – the number of lives that were saved.”

Despite this success, however, superglue as originally formulated was not ideally suited for medical use. Not only does the curing process produce large amounts of heat that can inflict serious burns, but it also releases formaldehyde, which can irritate the skin, eyes, and respiratory tract. For this reason, in 1988 a much less irritating derivative called 2-octyl-cyanoacrylate was developed and approved by the FDA, and is now sold under various brand names including Dermabond and Traumaseal. Indeed, in many clinics around the world, medical-grade superglue is now widely used in place of stitches for more minor wounds.

Given the astounding versatility and utility of his invention, it is safe to assume that Harry Coover became a very wealthy man…right? Alas, this is not the case, for while Kodak might have originated the product, they did not manage to capitalize on its success, and in 1980 the rights to super glue were sold to the National Starch Company. As a result, Harry Coover never received any royalties from his creation. But this did not prevent Coover from having a remarkable career. By the time of his death from congestive heart failure on March 26, 2011, Coover held 460 patents, including for graft polymerization, olefin polymerization, and organophosphorus chemistry. Over his nearly 60-year career authored over 60 papers and served as Vice President of Eastman Kodak, Director of Research and Development at Eastman Chemical Division, President of New Business Development at the Loctite Corporation, and board member at Reilly Industries. The many awards he received for his lifetime of work include the Industrial Research Institute Medal Achievement Award, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and an induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

And despite having invented many other products and processes, Coover was nonetheless proud of his most famous invention, his widow Muriel stating shortly after his death:

“I think he got a kick out of being Mr. Super Glue. Who doesn’t love Super Glue?”

Nonetheless, Coover acknowledged the key role of luck in his discovery, stating in an interview:

“The cyanoacrylate adhesive invention and discovery really involved one day of serendipity and about 10 years of hard work.”

But whatever the case, one thing is clear: superglue, like all good ideas, just sort of stuck.

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