"Bruce Sterling - Superglue (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

extremely strong under tension, superglue was not very good at
sudden lateral shocks or "shear forces," which could cause the glue-
bond to snap. Moisture weakened it, especially on metal-to-metal
bonds, and prolonged exposure to heat would cook all the strength
out of it.

The stuff also coagulated inside the tube with annoying speed,
turning into a useless and frustrating plastic lump that no amount of
squeezing of pinpoking could budge -- until the tube burst and and
the thin slippery gush cemented one's fingers, hair, and desk in a
mummified membrane that only acetone could cut.

Today, however, through a quiet process of incremental
improvement, superglue has become more potent and more useful
than ever. Modern superglues are packaged with stabilizers and
thickeners and catalysts and gels, improving heat capacity, reducing
brittleness, improving resistance to damp and acids and alkalis.
Today the wicked stuff is basically getting into everything.

Including people. In Europe, superglue is routinely used in
surgery, actually gluing human flesh and viscera to replace sutures
and hemostats. And Superglue is quite an old hand at attaching fake
fingernails -- a practice that has sometimes had grisly consequences
when the tiny clear superglue bottle is mistaken for a bottle of
eyedrops. (I haven't the heart to detail the consequences of this
mishap, but if you're not squeamish you might try consulting The
Journal of the American Medical Association, May 2, 1990 v263 n17
p2301).

Superglue is potent and almost magical stuff, the champion of
popular glues and, in its own quiet way, something of an historical
advent. There is something pleasantly marvelous, almost Arabian

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Nights-like, about a drop of liquid that can lift a ton; and yet one can
buy the stuff anywhere today, and it's cheap. There are many urban
legends about terrible things done with superglue; car-doors locked
forever, parking meters welded into useless lumps, and various tales
of sexual vengeance that are little better than elaborate dirty jokes.
There are also persistent rumors of real-life superglue muggings, in
which victims are attached spreadeagled to cars or plate-glass
windows, while their glue-wielding assailants rifle their pockets at
leisure and then stroll off, leaving the victim helplessly immobilized.

While superglue crime is hard to document, there is no
question about its real-life use for law enforcement. The detection
of fingerprints has been revolutionized with special kits of fuming
ethyl-gel cyanoacrylate. The fumes from a ripped-open foil packet of