The History of Super Glue

In his distinctively forthright manner, Lance Geiger of The History Guy bonded with his audience about the history of super glue, noting that simple recipes for joining two pieces have been used for a very long time. It wasn’t until the 20th century, however, that the wonders of cyanoacrylates were discovered by accident twice by Dr. Harry Coover. The first discovery was made in 1942 .

Harry Wesley Coover Jr was working at the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester New York on Research involving cyanoacrylates in order to find a material to make clear plastic gun sites but the cyanoacrylates were found to be incredibly sticky which made them difficult to work …

The second discovery was made in 1951 while working with Dr. Fred Joyner.

In 1951, Coover was working with a new team at the Tennessee Eastman company looking for a temperature resistant coating for jet cockpits with another researcher appropriately named Fred Joyner. Joyner spread the 910 compound between a pair of lenses on a reflectometer and afterwards found that he could not separate the lenses

In between those years, BF Goodrich had patented cyanoacrylates for a very specific use, however Eastman Kodak found a formulation to make the substance stick to more items and subsequently filed for a patent in 1954.

The first patent regarding cyanoacrylates was filed in 1947 by BF Goodrich Corporation for a process particularly concerned with promoting the adhesive action of such compositions….Kodak submitted a patent application in 1954 for alcohol catalyzed alpha cyanate adhesive compositions which was granted in 195. dubbed Eastman 910 and later to superglue. This new adhesive hit the market in 1958.