WD-40: The Fortieth Try
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WD-40: The Fortieth Try
In 1953, a three-person lab in San Diego was trying to keep an Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile from rusting. They failed thirty-nine times. The fortieth attempt worked — and what they made was so useful that employees started sneaking it home in their lunch pails. This is the story of WD-40: a product named after the number of tries it took, used today in more than 176 countries.
15/6/2026 · 20:19
There's a small blue-and-yellow can that sits, reliably, under the sink or on the garage shelf of roughly four out of five American homes. Most people can't tell you when they bought it or where it came from. It's just always been there. This episode follows that can back to its origin: a three-person chemical lab in San Diego in 1953, a corrosion problem on a missile that couldn't be allowed to fail, and a chemist named Norm Larsen who kept reformulating a compound until, on the fortieth try, something finally worked.
What the Rocket Chemical Company made for the Atlas missile program turned out to be far more useful than anyone had anticipated — and the story of how it escaped the aerospace world and ended up in ordinary households starts with employees quietly slipping cans into their lunch pails. That accidental leak, and the word-of-mouth it generated, is what put WD-40 on hardware store shelves by 1958. The name itself — Water Displacement, 40th formula — is still one of the most honest product names in industrial history: a number that quietly commemorates every attempt that didn't make it.
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