The lens was ruined.
It was 1942, deep inside a laboratory at Eastman Kodak. A young chemist named Harry Coover was looking at a disastrous result. He had been tasked with creating a clear plastic for military gun sights, a critical tool for the war effort.
Instead, the formula he created was too sticky. It clamped to everything it touched. It destroyed the molds. It refused to release the glass.
According to the strict standards of the laboratory, a material that cannot be molded is not a product. It is waste. The supervisor looked at the mess. The formula was cyanoacrylate.
Harry Coover was told to abandon it. The chemical was deemed a failure because it worked too well at the wrong thing. He washed the equipment, discarded the notes, and moved on. The war ended, and the sticky formula was forgotten in a filing cabinet.
Nine years later, in 1951, Coover was running a new project. This time, the goal was to create a heat-resistant coating for the cockpits of jet planes. He assigned a young colleague, Fred Joyner, to test a list of chemical compounds.
Joyner went down the list. He arrived at the old formula from 1942. He applied it between two prisms of a refractometer—an expensive, precision instrument used to measure light.
He took the measurement. Then, he tried to separate the prisms. They would not move.
The panic in the room was immediate. The instrument cost nearly $3,000. In 1951, that was a small fortune. Joyner had permanently bonded the glass together. He expected to be fired. He expected the chemical to be banned from the lab forever.
This is how institutions usually work. They are built to minimize error. When a chemical destroys expensive equipment, the system identifies it as a threat. The logical response is to eliminate the threat, write up the employee, and enforce stricter safety protocols. Under normal rules, the "accident" is cleaned up, and the offending substance is buried. This rule protects the budget. It works—until it meets a person who stops looking at the cost and starts looking at the bond.
Harry Coover did not fire Joyner. He walked over to the ruined instrument. He didn't look at the $3,000 loss. He looked at the seam where the glass met.
He tried to pull it apart. He realized no heat was required. No pressure was needed. The bond was instant.
Most people see a ruined machine. Coover saw a new power. He realized that for nine years, he had been judging the chemical by what it failed to do, rather than what it did perfectly.
But the real test of this discovery would not happen in a lab. It would happen in the jungle.
Years passed. The chemical was refined and sold as a commercial adhesive. But in the 1960s, the United States entered the Vietnam War. The conflict was brutal. Soldiers were suffering massive tissue damage from ballistics and shrapnel.
Field medics faced a terrible problem. When a soldier was hit in the chest or abdomen, the bleeding was often too fast for stitches. There wasn't enough time to clamp the arteries. Men were dying in the helicopters before they could reach a surgeon.
The military needed something faster than a needle and thread.
Word began to travel about Coover’s adhesive. It was known as "Eastman 910" or simply super glue. It was strong, and it was fast. However, it was not approved by the FDA for use inside the human body. There were concerns about toxicity and skin irritation.
The bureaucratic rule was clear: Do not use unapproved industrial chemicals on open wounds.
The medics on the ground ignored the rule.
Reports from the field describe a chaotic scene. Dust, noise, and the smell of propellant. A medic kneels over a young soldier with a chest wound. The bleeding is catastrophic. The medic reaches into his kit, not for a bandage, but for a spray bottle or a tube of the adhesive.
He sprays the chemical directly over the open flesh.
The reaction is immediate. The chemical polymerizes on contact with the moisture in the blood. It forms a hard, waterproof shell. The bleeding stops. The soldier is loaded onto the chopper. He survives the flight to the base hospital.
Harry Coover heard the stories. The substance he had once thrown away because it was "too sticky" was now holding men together.
The invention had technically failed its first two inspections. It failed as a gun sight. It failed as a cockpit cover. It destroyed lab equipment. It violated medical regulations.
But because one man refused to view a mistake as garbage, the failure became a miracle.
Coover eventually received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. He held over 460 patents. But late in his life, when asked about his greatest achievement, he did not speak of the commercial success or the household name the glue became.
He spoke of the soldiers.
He spoke of the letters he received from veterans who told him they were alive because a medic carried a tube of his "mistake" in their pocket.
Source: National Inventors Hall of Fame, MIT Lemelson Center, New York Times Archives. Details on Vietnam field usage summarized from military medical reports.