What is the relation between Kodak the photo company and a product which fixes things (not your broken heart though! That cannot be fixed!)?
The link is a person called Harry Wesley Coover Jr
His dissertation was on commercial synthesis of vitamin B6! But that process was taken over by army so this blog is not about that link!
Harry then joined as a chemist in the company Eastman Kodak! One of his research and his team’s major focus was to make clear plastic gun sights! This was of course for use by allied forces and his repeated experiments created one candidate with a minor flaw! It was clear but it was sticky!
He stopped the research during the war for almost nine years and came back to further the research.
The original material he discovered was cyanoacrylate! and so Coover and his team at Eastman Kodak examined cyanoacrylates again!
Coover was overseeing Kodak chemists investigating heat-resistant polymers for jet canopies when cyanoacrylates were once again tested and proved too sticky.
Then tragedy struck when a chemist in the group informed Coover that he had permanently damaged an expensive refractometer by gluing it together!
The material when dried not only glued the substances together but also used to do it with so much strength that is was permanent!
Coover with his inventor mindset did not think much about the expensive refractometer which could be adjusted in the coming budget! But he thought out of the box and refined the process to make this material liquid which later on solidified as a glue!
Now Cyanoacrylate is used as a forensic tool to capture latent fingerprints on non-porous surfaces like glass, plastic, etc!
While much attention was given to the glue’s capacity to bond solid materials, Coover was also the first to recognize and patent cyanoacrylates as a tissue adhesive after his eldest son cut open his finger while making a model and glued the cut closed with the glue!
It was also first used in the Vietnam War in a spray form as a hemostatic agent to temporarily patch the internal organs of injured soldiers until conventional surgery could be performed. Tissue adhesives are now used worldwide for a variety of sutureless surgical applications in humans and animals with the same material!
Coover said many times that he was most proud of the medical applications of cyanoacrylates, that they had saved many lives and would continue to do so
Every home of course knows its final form which is used every other day! The first version of this adhesive was released in 1958!
Since it marketed by Kodak, it was known as Eastman 910.
You and me know it as, The Superglue!
Like the super glue fixes or joins two broken things, actors such as birthday celebrity Venkatesh Prabhu Kasthuri Raja known professionally as Dhanush, join many industries with their performances which transcends the boundary of language!
Now close the cap of the super glue (It is often marketed as one which can be used more than once but I have never been able to use it more than once! It normally gets solid or wasted! So I stick to the smallest pack for single use!) and sleep!
Good Night!
ramadocblog 