Margen
In 1942, chemist Harry Coover was searching for a clear plastic for rifle sights at Eastman Kodak. He tested a family of compounds called cyanoacrylates and rejected them in frustration: they stuck to everything they touched. Useless.
Nine years later, in 1951, his team ran into them again while researching materials for jet canopies. An assistant, Fred Joyner, spread the compound between the two prisms of a very expensive measuring instrument... and bonded them together forever. This time Coover saw it clearly: this was not a defect, it was the product.
It went on sale in 1958. During the Vietnam War, medics used it in spray form to close wounds in emergencies and buy time on the way to surgery, a use Coover himself recounted with pride. The invention rejected twice ended up bonding everything — including, for some soldiers, life itself.