The stirring story of the discovery of Blu-Tack®
IT all started in 1969, or possibly the year earlier, we weren’t keeping notes. It was a bright, sunny day (luckily in both years) and frankly, Britain was falling behind in the Space Race. Apollo 13 was being prepared for the following year as a shining beacon of American workmanship, the floppy disc with its vast new information capacity was in final development and news was circulating in the highest offices of government that the childproof safety cap was approaching launch status.
Something had to be done to put Britain back on top.
Then, as one of the research and development team was watching The Clangers one night, light dawned. He noted their principal diet of blue string pudding and…
“Hell-oooh” he said out loud, though since he was on his own at the time — well let’s face it: in his thirties, watching The Clangers, a hot date wasn’t exactly likely, was it? — no one heard him say it. But this was the breakthrough he needed. His mind, steel trap-like, swung shut, trapping an idea and pinching its skin a little.
“What if,” our man queried, “we could invent a genuine pudding made out of blue string?”
He was fired next day.
But that got another scientist on the team thinking. “Hmm”, he said quietly to himself. “Blue, eh? And what if...” he added, thinking quickly now, “instead of pudding, it was something similar — say a white adhesive putty?”
Next day he went to work. He laboured for... oh, ages; a very long time, adding polymers here and binders there; mixing, formulating, experimenting and then, well, experimenting some more. There were setbacks, of course; times when he thought he might never achieve that adhesive grail, that shining beacon of tackinesss.
There were endless steps forward followed by bigger steps back.
Anyway, by elevenses, he had it.
Two hours later: the boardroom
“Gentlemen,” he told the assembled gathering, for they were indeed mostly men not given to violent outbursts — well except Jim (though he preferred to be called James because it sounded classier), the director of packing, who had been known to kill ocasionally, but only those who deserved it.
Pausing only for the narrator to finish explaining about Jim, he breathlessly began again: “Gentlemen, I bring you today my latest achievement. Inspired by the work of Einstein, Newton and before them both, Eric the White, inventor of whitewash: I give you, White-Stick!”
The silence was, well, really rather quiet.
“And what do you expect us to do with it?” asked the chairman — not a little put out, for having inadvertently put his hand in some on the desk, was now stuck to it.
“How the heck should I know,” said the scientist. “I just dream it up and put my massive brain to work. The rest is up to marketing.
“Anyway if it helps, I had a bit of time before elevenses so I made it almost edible. Give me this afternoon and you can sell it as food you can stick on things so you’ll always know where you left it.”
Sadly, chewing gum had been invented just the day before, so that was that. Pity really.
But the rest, as they say, is history. Bostik dropped the edible idea, made it blue not white and called it something else. Apart from that, this is exactly how it happened. British science at its best.
