Harry Coover's discovery of cyanoacrylates, a class of chemicals with powerful adhesive properties, opened the door to a wide range of industrial, consumer, and medical applications, most notably as superglue. While working as a research chemist at Eastman Kodak during World War II, Coover worked with cyanoacrylates in an effort to produce an optically clear plastic to use for precision gunsights. These chemicals proved to be unsuited to this particular task, but Coover recognized their potential applications as an adhesive.

During the Vietnam War, field surgeons made dramatic use of cyanoacrylate by spraying it on potentially fatal wounds to stop bleeding instantly, thus allowing them to treat the wounds later in a conventional manner. Cyanoacrylate adhesives are currently used for medical procedures such as performing sutureless surgery to rejoin veins and arteries, sealing punctures or lesions, and sealing bleeding ulcers.

Harry Coover was born in Newark, Delaware. He received his B.S. from Hobart College and his M.S. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Coover, who holds 460 patents, is also responsible for advances in the fields of graft polymerization, organophosphorus chemistry, and olefin polymerization.

Frederick Banting
Charles Best
Vannevar Bush
James Collip
Harry Wesley Coover
Wallace Coulter
Ray Dolby
Edith Flanigen
Robert Gallo
Ivan Getting
John Gibbon
Lloyd Augustus Hall
Elias Howe
Charles D. Kelman
Luc Montagnier
Bernard Oliver
Bradford Parkinson
Norbert Rillieux
John Roebling
Claude Shannon