The myth of super glue · 11:26pm Dec 14th, 2015
When I was a kid, I knew that our times were unlike any before, because we'd sent men to the moon, and we had a glue one drop of which could hold a ton.
The History of Sticking One Thing to Another Thing
It wasn't easy for primitive man to stick things together. If you were lucky, and had tough, stringy, yet flexible vines, you could tie things together with vines. Most places don't have very good vines.
The next-easiest approaches are pine tar or sinew glue. Pine tar is pretty simple: Heat up some pine sap until it runs, and stick the things together.
Dogbane cordage and pine pitch glue reinforces the foreshaft receiving end of the spear shaft
Also, it sucks and comes apart easily, which is why you only use it to keep rope from coming untied. ('Cordage' is rope that you made yourself.)
You make sinew glue by heating a bunch of sinew for about 12 hours until it melts, without ever bringing it to a boil, which would ruin it. This is easy on a modern range-top; a bit of a nuisance on a wood fire. It's good enough to stick feathers onto arrows.
If you want your civilization to grow up and join the big boys, you'll eventually want wood joints, concrete, and nails. But first you've got to have rope. I don't know if there are any cultures that never invented rope. And rope is genius. Have you ever thought about how rope works? Why doesn't it just unravel itself?
Rope technology is surprisingly tricky. I bet that even if you take apart a piece of rope or twine and study it, most of you still won't be able to figure out how it works. Try taking many long strands of unwaxed dental floss and making an unbraided rope that stays together when you cut it. (Hint: It isn't any kind of knot, braiding, or weaving. You can buy braided rope, but that's not a practical primitive technology.) I think inventing rope required more genius than, say, discovering the structure of DNA. All you had to do to discover the structure of DNA was keep shooting X-rays at it until you figured out its conformation. Rope was out of the blue--you had to invent it all in one step, and there was no reason to think such a thing was possible. I couldn't have invented it.
Also, it takes hella long to make rope by hand. If people still made rope by hand, it would cost $20 a foot. Rope used to be made in ropewalks, which at 20 feet wide and 1000 feet long were very distinctive buildings.
Guys would slowly push machines backwards down the ropewalk, spinning out rope as they went like steampunk spiders. I couldn't find any photos of a proper old planetary rope-making machine, which made rope the same way a human would (in one step, from one end), only the simpler two-step or two-person ones. But you might figure out what the trick is from this photo of a modern one:
Or, you can make leather cordage. To do this, first you need to invent flint-knapping, a technology so difficult that I've studied it under the supervision of experts, for a total of about 10 hours of practice, and still can't do it at all. Then you cut strips of leather from a tanned hide.
But first you have to invent hide tanning. Now hide tanning is just crazy. Who was the person who first said, "Let's piss into these clay pots until we've got about twenty gallons of piss, and leave it sitting in the back of the cave for a few weeks until it's nice and rancid. Then we can soak animal hides in it!" What were they thinking? Or, "Let's scrape the outer layers of hair and skin off of these hides, mash these animals' brains up, boil the skins in the brains, chew on them for an hour, stretch them out, then put some really smoky wood over the fire and smoke them overnight!" It's not very intuitive.
Sticking things to other things is hard. Mastery of it is proof of mastery over nature.
The Myth of Super Glue
Super glue was one of the central myths of my generation. It was a science indistinguishable from magic, entering into everyday life. The tiny bottle of super-glue was an object of awe. Unlike the Elmer's glue we kids were familiar with, which was so safe we could--and did--eat it, super glue could kill you. If you super-glued your lips shut, you wouldn't be able to eat anymore. They'd have to take you to the hospital and feed you through IVs or a tube into your neck for the rest of your life. If you accidentally super-glued yourself to a pole or a basement wall, you'd die of starvation before anyone found you. We all knew these stories. We couldn't try any of these things, because our parents wouldn't let us near the stuff. In some places you had to be an adult to buy super glue. That didn't matter, since kids didn't have money in my day anyway. But we had faith in super glue.
Yesterday, a little fiddly plastic bit on a toilet seat lid broke, one of those fiddly plastic bits we have so many of these days which are too small and numerous to bother selling individually, so you have to buy a whole new whatever-it-is to replace one penny's worth of plastic. I tried super-gluing it together.
Of course it didn't work. Super glue never works. I don't think anything I've ever super-glued together has stayed together for more than about a day. So I did what I always do, and glued it together with boring old dad's-generation epoxy.
The only thing super glue is really good at sticking together is fingers. "One drop holds a ton"? Bullshit. A ton happens to be about what one square inch of epoxy will hold. One drop of super glue can cover one-fourth of a square inch, max. So super glue should be 4 times as strong as epoxy!
But epoxy is like stone. Even paper maché made from flour, sawdust, and water is stronger than super glue. (Come to think of it, the Native Americans should've used paper maché.)
I don't believe the Krazy Glue commercial. It never happened. Super glue is a myth. The future never arrived.
Probably those moon rocks are fake, too. 
Yep, it's a shame the Mythbusters never proved that the moon landing was real or not, would've made for a good episode.
3618528 My favorite is the Mythbusters episode on sarcasm.
Technology builds on itself, a tower of giants standing on one another's shoulders. It makes sense that the hardest part was getting the first one to stand up.
Dogbane Cordage is Ponyville's Captain of the Watch, and usually speaks in pretentious malapropisms:
3618540 Yep, mine too.
My grandpa knew how to make his own rope. He didn't, because the store-bought stuff was way better, but he could do it.
As for the glue, it's all the case of having the right glue for the job. Superglue is great for the right applications (CA, one of the popular instant glues, was originally designed to glue wounds together, which is why it's so good at sticking flesh to things, but not as good as sticking things that aren't flesh together). Two-part epoxy is where it's at for most gluing jobs. You can stick damn near anything together with two-part epoxy.
I do often think of the stuff our ancestors invented (or learned from aliens). Who did come up with that? Who looked at a cow and thought, "I bet I could drink out of those." Probably happened after the invention of alcohol. And if milking a cow for your breakfast cereal is too mainstream, read up on how you milk a mare. It's topical! Kind of.
3618540
Best Mythbusters episode ever.
Tapioca takes nine separate steps to make it non-poisonous, let alone edible. Who was the guy who tried just one more thing... after eight of his friends had died of incomplete tapioca preparation?
Actually, it's fairly easy to make two-strand cord by accident if you're messing around with a bit of fiber.
This was great and I read it to my mother.
I think if you connected the first section to the second with a bit of glue history, you could have some publishable funny nonfiction on your hands. But that's just me. :B
3618776
I, uh, hate to burst your bubble, but...
Cyanoacrylate was invented as a replacement for glass gun sights in WWII fighter airplanes. Turns out, when the ester was curing by absorbing water vapor from the air, it would stick. Mostly to fingers. Really well. It was about a decade before it was ever used in a medical setting, and that was in vet offices.
Also, as for cow's milk... every mammal feeds its own young with milk. Why not eat what they eat? However, it wasn't until about 5k-10kya that adults could drink milk. Until then, it was only for children. The ability to consume dairy into adulthood opened up such a huge new source of nutrition, the genes that shut off lactase production died off pretty quickly in most populations, once cattle had been domesticated.
I ruin all the fun.
3619003
Dammit, I hate it when my bubble's burst.
Out of curiousity, did CA ever actually work as a gunsight, or was it another one of those things which was invented for one purpose and then found to be more suitable for another?
Because if you ever went up to a mare and tried to suckle, you'd wish you hadn't. Which maybe says something about cows or humans, I'm not really sure.
Nah, Belle of the 7.62x51mm Ball was way more entertaining than any fun-ruining you did here. Besides, I like factual accuracy, even if it means I have to admit I was wrong, which it turns out I do a lot.
3618895
It's easy to twist strands together into a cord, but not easy to twist those cords together in the right way to get a rope that doesn't come apart. Some folks might want to try it before reading the spoiler.
Spoiler: Make 3 light cords, each by twisting 3 strands together in a clockwise spiral. While keeping each of those strands tightly wound up, twist them together in a counter-clockwise spiral. The friction between the individual strands trying to unwind from the clockwise spirals against the 3-strand cords trying to unwind from the counter-clockwise spiral locks them all in place and keeps everything from unwinding.
You know, I'm surprised I've never even once seen any video game about the progress of civilization comment on the importance of rope technology, even though it is used in a ton of our most important primitive tools. That's crazy. Then again, it is probably because it is a bit of prehistoric technology that is basically omnipresent.
Watching a video about how to make rope by hand, it is incredibly tedious. The spinning wheel was a marvelous invention.
The real fun of knapping that stuff is that you end up with a lot of very sharp objects. Obsidian is great for cutting - and as it turns out, it is great for cutting your hands as well. I'm not sure when gloves were invented, but I have to imagine dealing with those shards before that point in history was an exercise in having lots of cuts on your hands.
I superglued my brother to the floor once.
He was pretty annoyed, but couldn't reach me. :P Of course, he didn't stay stuck for that long - it was only superglue. But I think the skin came off before the glue broke.
Also, having been around people who twisted thread by hand I can confirm; it's tricky to get right. If you roll it on your thigh, it's possible to do a fairly long piece in sections, but it's a real pain.
3619121
Actually, primitive cord is 2-stranded, and it works exactly like rope; the twist of each strand opposes the twist of the cord as a whole. If you hold a piece of fiber by the center, roll the two end sections against your thigh, and then release the center, you get cord... that doesn't unwind. Rope is 3-stranded because that's how you get it to be closest to a circle in cross-section, and it makes it a lot easier to splice, two things that make the dramatic increase in difficulty/complexity of making it worthwhile.
rope can also be used for sexy bondage times.derpicdn.net/img/view/2014/5/3/616741__safe_animated_screencap_upvotes+galore_smiling_spike_edit_bedroom+eyes_princess+cadance_grin.gif
(glue could be too, i suppose, but comes with some complications.)
3619317 Yes, it's easier to make it out of 2 2-strands. But I still don't think it's something you'd do by accident. It's quite tricky to do with only 2 hands, and keep it from unraveling, until you get the hang of it.
I was never able to figure out why superglue is meant to be super. Nearly everything I've ever used glues better than superglue. I suspect it is because superglue is ridiculously hard to use properly. It has a shelf-life of buggerall so nearly all supergluing that gets done is done with stuff that's full of atmospheric moisture. Also, you have to spread it thinly, and it doesn't work on everything, and it won't act as filler, and it won't glue smooth surfaces properly, and it'll set fire to cotton and... I suspect it's actually perfectly serviceable glue, but it is so finicky that hardly anyone notices.
3619121
I do not want to appear to brag but... the moment you mentioned the Miracle of Rope I imagined a piece and went... "Ooooh! Opposing helices holding each other! That's why he mentioned DNA!" I'm not sure why but it seems so obvious and intuitive to me. Probably one of those things that seem obviously correct to me because I'm too stupid to fully understand them, like the Banach-Tarski paradox.
Seems like a lot of our inventions happened largely by accident. Brass, for instance, was probably the result of copper ore that had zinc deposits inside it being smelted without any realization of what would happen. The ancient people just thought they had some kind of super-copper.
3618776
Actually, I think it was who first looked at a goat, and thought that. And in fairness, considering water would like as not make you sick, it's not hard to imagine goat's milk would be a better alternative. And then came cheese...
3619389 If you solved the rope puzzle that quickly, you need to be congratulated. If the Banach-Tarski paradox is intuitively obvious to you, you need an exorcism.
3619389
Where Ghost immediately arrives at an intuitive psychological concept, I just think of that time we spent making rope in the Scouts. I think the sudden flash of intuition method was probably more fun.
3619416
I think you mentioning DNA helped.
It's probably because I'm thinking about it all wrong. I've gone through the proof and it makes sense, yes, but the way I always imagined it is to realize that there's continuum many points in any sphere and any slice of that sphere. You'd expect a topological sphere to have infinite other spheres in it and seeing a proof that that's indeed so isn't 'paradoxical' so much as 'soothing.' The fact that it's bound together with the axiom of choice is, also, obvious and... reassuring, I guess? But I don't think this intuitive understanding is of any practical use. I'm just confused over why everyone seems to be confused.
3619384
Compound rope by accident? No. But twisting a single strand of cord while just messing around is possible (even likely) and it would reveal the concept... and rope isn't too much of a leap from there.
3619180
In fact, the very first knapped stones are not useful tools. They appear to have been gifts given to prospective mates. Why? Perhaps because it proves that one has intellectual capability to learn, manual dexterity, and a strong immune system - all of which are excellent traits to pass on to offspring. It wasn't until thousands of years later that someone knapped stone tools instead of paleolithic jewelry.
3619651
The first known jewelry appeared 100,000 b.p. in the form of shell beads. The first knapped tools appeared nearly 2 million years ago.
3619663 I was suggesting that knapped tools served a similar societal function as jewelry - present to a mate to show that you're capable of supporting and providing for offspring. Except in this case, more directly. Instead of earning power, you're proving your physical, mental, and immun... uh... immunological? Immunative?
I think you have a basic idea where I was going with this.
A bit late to the party, but I feel I need to stand up for superglue here. As an engineer I've used superglue in industrial applications many times. And yes, that's 'some parts of this precision scientific instrument that will cost a customer a quarter of a million pounds are glued on, and they're not going to fail'.
You just need to pick the right glue for the job, lightly abrade both surfaces, make sure that they are both meticulously clean, use a minimum of glue, and a maximum of surface area. And make sure that they don't ever have to come apart again.
Epoxys work great too, provided that you mix them properly, and don't try and use epoxys that you mixed an hour ago.
Fun tip - if you do glue your fingers together, just use hot soapy water and a little patience and you'll be fine. Superglue is resistant to most things, but hot soapy water isn't one of them.
3619663 Yes, though I'd call Oldowan tools "fractured" or "very badly knapped". I can made tools like those.
3620559 I probably need to experiment more with how much abrasion is needed. Ironically, I went to the dentist today, and he superglued in two fillings.
3621145 Very little indeed. You just need a rough enough surface for the glue to som thing to hold on to. Too much and the profiles of the two mating surfaces won't match, and that would be bad. To be honest, it's the cleanliness point where most people trip up. Loose particles, fingerprint grease, oil from somewhere or other... It doesn't take much to really weaken the bond.
3619445
I have not read the actual proof of the Banach-Tarski theorem, so I don't know how intuitive it is, but I believe the reason the theorem itself seems so paradoxical is because it's so often stated in misleading layman's terms, involving balls being disassembled into "pieces". This invokes the mental image of a 3D jigsaw puzzle, where each "piece" has a definite, continuous shape and represents a clear, finite, measurable fraction of the surface area.
Once I saw the theorem stated properly in terms of mathematical subsets of surface points, I immediately went "Oh, of course. This way it makes sense." I wouldn't know how to prove or disprove the proposition, but at least it looks perfectly plausible and understandable, when it's stated correctly.
3634584 3619445 It doesn't seem possible at all to me, due to saying a finite number of pieces / subsets. It seems to me you'd require an infinite number of subsets just to produce the proper curvature at the surface without having a discontinuity somewhere internally.
Superglue has been existing for centuries.
It is simply called “a tag-along”.
3660860 You mean barnacles?
That's like saying antibiotics have existed for billions of years because they were in bacteria.
3661276
Mind you, I’m strongly allergic to seafood, so I barely know what a barnacle is. Oysters, clams, lobsters and other delis are forever barred from my staple diet.
I suppose you mean fungi here. But, yeah, this is 100% true. By the way, most of the antibiotics we use now are either 100% natural or semi-synthesised from mould. We aren’t even close to synthesise molecules that complex.
As Titanium Dragon™ mentioned a few weeks ago, aluminium was a luxury until someone invented the electrolytic process of refinement. Now it’s fairly common, but I don’t think you’d ever dare pretend aluminium didn’t exist in the 18th century because we were unable to extract it from bauxite!
3661353 Many antibiotics come from fungi, but some simple ones are entirely synthesized (like arsphenamine and metronidazole), and the -micins and -mycins come from bacteria.
3661647
Geez, you're right! I never thought bacteria could produce antibiotics. Thanks for that BH! I will go to bed less stupid tonight, thanks to you!
We are living in the Golden Age of Glue.
3662515 Cool!
Super Glue actually works very well... it's just a bit picky about what it'll bond to properly.
(eg. In my experience, it works beautifully for fixing cracks in Polycarbonate (eg. CD jewel cases) but I've never been able to get it to stick Polypropylene (eg. DVD keep cases) worth a damn)
3667248
I would have expected the topic of glue to be a sore point with horses, but apparently not.
So i found a video on how to make rope and remembered this blog post.
It actually seems very easy to accidentally discover.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DG26XDPpB8
4801748 That's a clever way of making it! I've always used the "3 bundles of 3 strands each" method, which is a lot harder. The key to either approach is that when you twist the bundles together, you twist them in the opposite direction that you twisted the strands. Using just 2 bundles lets him use 1 long bundle, bend it in the middle, and let the bend hold the other end together.
To be fair, that thing was probably made from polypropylene or polyethylene both of which stick to any commonly accessible glue only marginally better than PTFE/teflon.
Common problems specific to cyanacrylates are
And I'm probably forgetting something. That can be mitigated to some degree: pack it mechanically with particles of different sizes, add plasticizers, stabilizers and something that prevents cracks from growing... and get some ridiculously expensive Loctite formula (plain ethyl cyanoacrylate is dirt-cheap).
So, unless you need cyanacrylate for some specific reason, basically yes, epoxy is better
5730210
Ooh, that's really good to know. So gluing should be done only in low humidity.