La Gotita

La Gotita is a small tube of instant adhesive, two millilitres of cyanoacrylate in a black squeeze tube printed with its name in fat yellow letters between reversed guillemets, »La gotita«. A clear pointed cap covers the nozzle, a red oval on the body reads 'Presione aquí', and the tube stands on a flat base. It comes in a black and orange carton marked 'Industria Argentina' and carrying a blue drop.

Its maker, Akapol, began in 1960 in the back of a family house at Villa Ballester, where Claus and Reiner Kühlcke and their father turned industrial adhesives into products for the home. The first was Poxipol, a two-part glue whose name became the guarantee printed on everything the firm made after it. By Akapol's account La Gotita followed in 1980, an instant glue for small repairs that sets in seconds on metal, rubber, porcelain, glass and wood, though not on polythene.

It became one of those brand names Argentines use for the whole category. Its jingle, 'Lo que La Gotita pega, nada, nada lo despega', was a fixture of 1980s television, and in July 1984 the satirical magazine Satiricón could draw a tube labelled La Gotita in a cartoon and rely on every reader knowing it. The phrase 'más pegado que con La Gotita' passed into ordinary speech.

The tube itself has been refined rather than replaced. The 1984 drawing shows a crimped squeeze tube with a pointed cap; an undated Akapol leaflet later announced a 'nuevo envase' that doses drop by drop and stands upright, and a gel and a larger bottle joined the two-millilitre original. Akapol still makes it, now at its plant in Buenos Aires province, and it is sold in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile: still a few drops for a broken cup, as it was.