In 1942, as World War II bombs fell across half the planet, an intern spent his hours locked in a laboratory at the American giant Kodak. His name was Harry Wesley Coover. He was 25 years old and studying organic chemistry at Cornell University in upstate New York. By then, the photography company had adapted to the war economy, and the department to which Coover had been assigned had been given a mission: to research a polymer that would improve soldiers' vision through the sights of precision weapons, such as rifles. Through a process of trial and error, the student stumbled upon cyanoacrylate. It was a completely new chemical substance with great adhesive properties, but since it wasn't suitable for solving that specific problem, it was discarded.