It's Krazy! (glue)

April 30, 2004 6:20 AM

Serendipity saves lives and holds a lot of things together. Harry Coover, an Eastman chemist, was trying to develop a plastic for gunsights. Instead he discovered cyanoacrylates otherwise known as Superglue. It's been sticking things and people together since 1952. Harry is being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio.
posted by tommasz (3 comments total)

The military once attempted to use superglue as a wound closure mechanism but had trouble sterilizing it. The technology was then passed along to private industry where it came into its most familiar form. In recent years a company (the one I work for) called Ethicon (A division of Johnson&Johnson) found a way to sterilize it and now they are using it instead of sutures to leave minimal scarring and quick application, in some cases it performs much better than stitches.

http://www.dermabond.com/
posted by Glibaudio at 7:13 AM on April 30, 2004

Dermabond's great but really expensive; I use 3M Vetbond which comes in a resealable bottle good for about 20 little cuts for about $14. It's meant for animals, but hey, aren't people animals?

Here's a good article on using cyanoacrylates for wound closure.
posted by nicwolff at 10:41 AM on April 30, 2004

Serendipity part deux.

A foresenic technician let Superglue get too close to a heat source and discovered a way to lift latent prints from surfaces that before were considered too difficult with other methods.
posted by karmaville at 11:10 AM on April 30, 2004