FACTORALY - E21 GLUE

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Glue has been used for so long for so much that it's become integral to our lives from top (hair products) to toe (shoe soles) and beyond. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello. Hello. I was going to say good morning, but it could be afternoon or evening, couldn't it, when people listen to this? Could be any time of day at all. How do you do? I'm Bruce Fielding. How do you do? I'm Simon Wells. And welcome to Factorally. Indeed. So what are we talking about this week, Simon? This week, Bruce, we're talking about glue. Glue. Which is going to be a bit of a sticky subject. We can hold it together. I'm sure we can. We'll adhere to our principles. Oh, dear. So this is... It's another one of those subjects, isn't it?

We think it's about something fairly dull and nothing. There's nothing much to say. And then we have like five pages of notes. Completely, yeah. How many interesting facts can you derive about glue? Turns out, quite a lot. Exactly. From its early beginnings. Well, from from its from its early beginnings well it's very i

mean it's very early beginnings was actually as insects and plants and stuff yeah absolutely there are all sorts of creatures there are barnacles that um secrete something a little bit cement like to enable them to cling on to to rocks polyphenols they are. Is that right? Yeah, they're actually, they're looking into barnacles because it's antibacterial, the glue. And they're looking at making it into dental and medical uses like dental cement.

As if they would actually harvest what the barnacles produce or that they're going to try and recreate. Recreate it. They're going to see if they can use the technology that barnacles use in technology. Fantastic. Isn't that great? I mean, for all of our wonderful scientific advances, it all comes back to the fact, well, the animals do it. So let's copy them.

Birds do it. Bees, actually, birds and bees do do it as well. Do they? Well, birds glue their nests together with saliva. Oh, of course they do, yeah. So a bird's nest is actually made of twigs and glue, effectively. Bees definitely do it. Yeah, bees is wax, you know, making a comb to put your stuff into. How about the educated fleas?

I haven't come up with... Do they do it? Termites, yes, but not fleas. So close. We'll take that. Termites use glue to build those termite mounds. And also, they kind of eject glue as a defence mechanism. Do they?

It sticks predators to the floor. And of course, the biggest user of glue in the animal world, spiders. A spider's web is gluey. Yes, of course it is. You know, the silk protein, they're called glycoproteins. And again, scientists are looking at spider glue. I discovered a small sea crustacean called Crassicorophium bonelli. Do that again.

Crassicorophium bonelli. There you go. See? Second time's the charm. So these little crustaceans produce an incredibly sticky, very strong silk and they actually use this material to build

their homes out of. And because they're underwater they are clearly resistant to salt and therefore the medical profession are thinking about using something like this to heal up wounds. Ah, I suspect we'll be coming along to glue to heal up wounds a bit later on in the podcast. You never know. That's animals. Animals have been doing this since forever. Yes. Humans, I think, first started getting glue from birch trees birch trees

apparently were like that if you if you take the bark of a birch tree and boil it down exactly right you get tar out of it and tar is obviously a very very good um glue so a lot of uh original glues were made from birch tree bark. How interesting. Yes, you can get sticky stuff from plants, from trees. You can get sticky stuff by boiling down bits of animal because animal skin and bone and horns, the natural elements of an animal contain collagen. Collagen is sticky, ergo glue. So it's been around since forever. I the one of the oldest examples of glue that has been found is is a a 5 000 year old cave painting um which had a sticky substance in it to help the paint stick to the wall so so we've got um uh animal glue yep we've got tree glue um i don't know

whether you've ever tried to get egg off a pan yes often eggs are really sticky and eggs were used a lot as a glue not just in general household use but also in painting where you combine it with paint and it makes a very interesting material to paint with okay i found examples of medieval monks using egg whites to stick gold leaf onto onto manuscripts of course yes yes i mean the other huge um thing that people make glue out of is the starch that comes out of things like wheat oh i mean starch based glue is is massive oh and we still use a lot of starch based glue do we um for example uh wallpaper paste is starch based is starch is that right so effectively it and it's generally extracted from wheat so you're probably too young but there

used to be a commercial for uh solvite or something okay and it was basically they glued um a suit to a to a panel oh no i remember that and they put a suit to a panel. Oh, no, I remember that. And they put a guy in it, and then they lifted it up in a helicopter and flew him over a city. I remember that, yes. And they did that for real. And that suit was held onto that board with, effectively, starch. How fantastic. But the thing about starch-based glues, obviously, is that they're non-toxic and there's a really important

use of a non-toxic glue that your history will probably know all about oh that sounds like a quiz question so what was your previous job my previous job was as a postman i'm thinking stamps stamps the lickability of of a postage stamp the kind of glue you can eat invented by roland hill who invented the stamp very good i've been to the postal museum in london i should have known that so licking glue made from starch and of course you know you've got to put it on an envelope yes envelopes have a line of glue, yeah. And then you've got to lick the stamp. So you've got to make sure that the glues that you're using are non-toxic. Then why do they taste so bad?

I'm not sure, but I do know that if you lick an envelope and a stamp, you can get up to five calories out of it. Are you kidding? No. Wow. I know. I don't know how much you have to actually lick the stamp in the envelope. Probably quite a lot, but you can get five calories out of it. Fantastic. So if you're on a low-fat diet.

There are other glues which are made of starch. Such as? Well, there's one which I'm sure that every child has in their arsenal, which is a tube of prit. Oh, yes. So you might not know this, but prit is actually 97% natural. It's mostly potato starch and sugar. Is it really? Yeah. I would never have guessed that. It inherently smells very, very chemically to me.

Yeah, it really isn't. I went down a bit of a cement-based avenue. Oh, of course. That passed me by. I didn't think of cement. It's not glue per se, is it? But it's an adhesive. Yeah, no, absolutely right. Yeah, it sticks things together. Exactly, yeah. So cement in one form or another has been around for a very, very long time. The Romans were using it. The Phoenicians were using it. Essentially, if you grind up and cook limestone, ground up limestone to create lime,

if you then mix that with clay or various other aggregates and mix it with water, it becomes very, very sticky and it hardens very well and it lasts quite a long time despite the current thing we've got going with certain types of concrete falling down around our ears and all the educational establishments. But yeah, 12,000 years ago in Turkey, they were mixing limestone and clay and making cement out of it. 12,000 years ago.

And then there was that guy in Portland who put some ash in it or something and then made Portland cement. Yeah, so he came along a bit later. So 800 BC, the Phoenicians were using limestone mixed with volcanic ash to produce the same thing. The Romans came along and created opus cementium, which um pretty much the same thing but slightly different they used a bit of sand and crushed up rock but then there was one particular roman architect and engineer called marcus vitruvius polio who um made a really detailed description as the construction of concrete and and that's kind of formed the rough basis of how concrete has worked ever since. The Romans obviously used it to great extent.

You know, the Colosseum is held together with concrete and it's still standing. We mentioned latex glue that comes out of trees. Yes. And latex is hugely used as a glue. I mean, it's one of the big things because there are two ways of making latex is hugely used as a glue i mean it's it's it's one of the big things because there are two ways of making latex glue you can make it water-based or you can make it solvent-based okay as you can basically dilute the the latex in water or alcohol ethanol methanol that sort of thing um and i once worked in a glue factory.

You knew this was coming. You knew that I was going to tell you that something had to happen at some point. You'd either worked in a glue factory or you knew the man who invented super glue or something. Something like that. So one summer holidays, I worked in a glue factory in Brent Cross. Okay. On an industrial estate and they made latex based

glues and so the pure latex is wonderful, you put your hands in it and you sort of like, waft them about in the air and then you put your hands back into the latex and you waft them out in the air until they dry and then you do it again and again and again and you eventually get a pair of rubber gloves that are exactly the

right shape for your hand and it's just built up layer by layer this is layer of layer of latex on the first week that i was there apparently it's a thing they do to initiate new people who work in the glue factory so it's divided up into two there's there's the water-based latex bit which is where i was supposed to be working and there's the solvent-based latex glue bit right where everybody wore protective materials and and um masks and stuff just you know because inhaling the fumes was you know quite tricky everybody except some young bright spark called bruce fielding i'm guessing who was who was told to work there for like an hour okay and apparently i i went i was absolutely off my head inhaling this stuff and i went running through the um where all the secretaries were like

giggling and cuddling them all and then and and then i can like run around for a bit and then i just collapsed in one of the offices and fell asleep for like four hours. I mean, you'd still do that now. Yeah, I don't need the glue for that. But yeah, it was an initiation ceremony basically making me stir ethanol, methanol. Crikey.

Base glue. Wow. But I mean, now you get, I mean, the most common things that you find um water-based glue for again for children's things like copy decks and the sort of wood glues that go clear yeah and that you can peel off you know although there is nothing nicer than peeling that that bit of excess glue off after it's dry yes okay yeah isn't that nice i remember as a child we had pVA glue.

Oh, yeah. And you had the little plastic spatula to paste the glue on with and peeling a little layer of white PVA glue, dried glue, off of those little spatulas. Beautiful feeling. Well, actually, they still use that sort of like rubber-based glue in industrial usage. Do they? It's called snot glue. OK. I mean, the nice thing about snot glue is it's exactly what it sounds like.

Do you know when you get a credit card in the post? Yes. And the credit card is glued to the letter? Oh, yes. It's the little sort of dots, the little sticky dots. That's the snot glue that's gluing the credit card to the letter. Now that stuff intrigues me because it's clearly sticky enough to hold the credit card to the paper, but not so sticky that it rips the paper as you take it off.

Yes. That's quite clever. Yeah, so you can change the adhesion of glues just by the way that you make them. Okay. So you can have some which are very, which hold on really tight, which we'll get to in a minute. Yeah. Because there's one glue that we need to talk about anyway. Yes, there is.

But there's another glue which was invented by a guy called Spencer Silver. Okay. In 1968, who was trying to invent a really strong glue. He was trying to invent a glue that would basically stick once and that would be it forever. He was working for 3M at the time. Okay. And what he ended up with was completely the opposite of a strong glue.

He ended up with a really, really weak glue. And he thought, this is interesting because it's not only weak, but if you press it, it sticks better and you can use it over and over and over again.

Okay. If I put it on the back of a strip of a back of a piece of paper, maybe it'd be quite useful. And the first piece of paper that he found was yellow-coloured. Oh, I see. I just twerked.

And now you know where this is going. I've been trying to rack my brains of all the different uses that this might make. We're talking about post-it notes, aren't we? I am talking about post-it notes. Spencer Silver, 1968. Well done, Mr. Silver. Very, very... Well, you know, unfortunately, he didn't end up making what he was intending to make,

but he did make 3M an awful lot of money until the patent ran out. So there are lots of different myths about how superglue came into being. According to the Superglue Corporation website, they themselves have dispelled quite a few different urban legends as to how it came about. What they claim is that in 1942, scientists were trying to make

sort of a clear plastic substance in order to make gun sights for the war effort and to make them clear so that they didn't obscure the shooter's view. And they made this stuff and it was quite effective, but it was incredibly sticky and it was just getting everywhere and it was a mess and it was an annoyance. So they stopped using it. And then after the war, these couple of chaps who worked for Eastman Kodak went back to the stuff and said, actually, that might just make a good glue. And that was in 1951. They went back to the idea and it hit the market in 1958. But it was also used in the Vietnam War.

Was it? You talked about possibly using these organic glues in a medical way. When you're in a field hospital in the Vietnam War and you've got soldiers coming in with holes in them, what you really need to do is to seal those holes and to stop the blood coming out of those holes as fast as possible. So they made an aerosol of superglue. And they would basically aerosol superglue these wounds and they would stop almost immediately and it's like so let's not worry about the damage it's doing yeah because it's saving the guy's life we can sort that out later yeah and um then they realized that it came off

quite easily with acetone okay and um they were brilliant for acting like a liquid stitch right okay you put a bit on skin you hold the skin together for a few seconds, and it's fixed. I had no idea it was that old. You know, I've heard of people using medical glue now instead of stitches, and I thought, well, that's a very clever, modern, new idea. But it went back to the Vietnam War. Now, on the bottle of superglue, part of their logo, their branding,

is a picture of a car being held on a crane. Yeah. And this was because of a public show of the strength of superglue that they actually managed to stick a car to a crane. I don't know how long it lasted there. I don't know if it eventually fell down. But they were so proud of this thing that that sort of became their branding. I found a Guinness World Record.

You know what I'm like with Guinness World Records. I know you like your Guinness. There's a Guinness World Record for a company in Germany called DELO. And they won the Guinness World Record for the heaviest weight lifted with glue. And they managed to stick a 17.2 ton truck onto the arm of a crane in 2019. And it managed to stay there for 24 hours. Goodness. I mean, superglue is amazing stuff. I mean, if you think about the uses for it, everything

from like, you know, mending a teapot to mending a nuclear submarine. I beg your pardon. So when the bolts didn't quite work in a British nuclear submarine, the sailors decided it would be just as easy to glue the bolts around the nuclear reactor. They did get into a little bit of trouble for it, but it did work. That's just, I mean, I suppose I'm slightly comforted that you said they used it around the nuclear reactor rather than around the door. I think that would have worried me slightly more. But still if it works it works well exactly it's good stuff great

so one of the one of the glues that 3m made is is called spray mount i don't know if you ever come across spray mount because it's one of the things you find in advertising yeah so basically when you're doing a layout what you do is you get get a piece of paper and you um mount it onto a piece of poly board which is a little bit of board um with polystyrene in it so it's very light okay and you you can use spray mount to to make all sorts of collages and stuff like that but in advertising generally you use it to just spray down stuff and it's quite it's quite toxic right well fairly toxic so you have like spray booths which have a fan in them and a filter so you put the piece of paper into this booth and then you turn the fan on and then you spray the piece of paper and any excess glue is like

absorbed into the booth so it doesn't get inhaled by the person who's using the spray mount. And there's an apocryphal story of a guy who was up all night for a presentation the next day and couldn't be asked to use the spray booth. And was spraying and spraying and was fine until he went outside and breathed in some actual air. And then the spray mount set in his lungs. No. And he had spray mount set in his lungs. No. And he had to be rushed to hospital. He was all right, but he had a serious problem with gummed up lungs. Oh, yucky.

A lot of cars these days are glued together. Right. So they use glue instead of welding. Do they? One of the first cars to do it was in the late 90s, was a Lotus Elise. And basically, it's because it's a plastic car. The trouble with welding is a lot of cars these days have like aluminium and steel and plastic and rubber. And how do you get all that to stick together?

You can't weld plastic to metal. But you can stick it to it so what they do now is they deliver these car bodies with like peel off glue bits in them okay so when you rather than welding them together you use like peel off the bit of paper and very very carefully put the car if you're a robot you do it especially carefully together. And you glue chassis together and you glue panels to things. And it's amazing. I had no idea. So another area of glue I went down, I kind of think this counts as a glue, sort of.

Hair gel. Yeah, I guess it is. So again, this is something we sort of think of as being a relatively new invention. You think of, when I say hair gel, I'm opening that up to all kinds of hairstyling products. There are gels, there's hairspray, there's cream, there's wax, there's putty, there's clay, there's mousse. There's all sorts of hairstyling products out there, which all roughly do the same thing. They apply a certain stickiness to your hair to make it stay in in shape whichever shape you you prefer um and i always associate this as being quite a new thing you know i think of the sort of

the 1950s hairspray um or i think back to the 20s and 30s of the origin of Brylcreem and things like that. Ancient Egypt. Of course. Yeah, of course it was. Egyptian mummies have been found with animal fat in their hair. Oh, wow. Which has been assumed to be a styling product. Yeah.

There was the remains of a fantastically named gentleman called the Clonny Cavan Bog Body. Okay. A body found in an Irish bog, carbon dated to be from around 300, 400 BC. And he was found to have some kind of product in his hair made with pine tree resin imported from Spain. So we've been using hair products for absolutely ages. At the beginning, you mentioned about the Egyptians boiling down animals and things to make glue.

One of the uses of those glues that those Egyptians made was to build furniture. Oh, really? Yes. Yeah, so a lot of Egyptian furniture wasn't actually nailed together or anything. It was glued. I would totally see gluing furniture as a modern-day cheat. Yeah. I mean, they also used it for papyrus and stuff.

They would mix it with leaves and stuff to make a stronger papyrus. But yeah, Egyptian furniture and modern furniture, both made using glue. See, now I'm a child of the early 80s. I was brought up on a diet of BBC shows being repeated on VHS. I grew up watching The Good Life and Some Mothers Do Have Them and things like that. And there's an episode of Some Mothers Do Have Them

where Frank joins a furniture-making class. Okay. And he cheats slightly and brings in a tube of superglue. He gets stuck to lots of bits of wood. Hilarity ensues. He gets rushed to hospital because he's all stuck up. And the doctor in the hospital says, there's been an event involving that new superglue.

And it just never really occurred to me that super glue had ever been seen as as a newfangled thing yes yes but yes to find that the egyptians were gluing their furniture together all those years back it wasn't just frank spencer brilliant well i've run out of stuff to talk about, Lou. I've come unstuck. Oh, you beat me to it. I was going to say that. Yes, I've left my lid off for too long and I've become all rusted over.

Is that a euphemism for not having any more facts? I don't know. Well, there we go. That's the end of another episode of Fact or Really. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you. We do appreciate it. We do. And please share, comment,

like, subscribe, everything. Do all the things. Do all of the podcast-y things that you're meant to do. Exactly. Thank you. See you next time.

Cheerio. Bye-bye.