In 1953, in a small lab in San Diego, three people set out to solve an unglamorous problem. The company was called the Rocket Chemical Company, and it had exactly three employees. The problem belonged to the aerospace industry: metal parts rust, and rust on an airframe or a missile skin is not a cosmetic issue. What was needed was a solvent and rust preventative that would displace water from a metal surface and leave a protective film behind.
The chemist working the problem, Norm Larsen, and his colleagues did what chemists do. They mixed a formula, tested it, and wrote down what happened. Then they adjusted and mixed another. Then another. Nothing about this was cinematic. It was a small team in a small shop, iterating on a spray can while the bills came due.
The thirty-ninth formula did not do the job well enough to keep. The fortieth did. And that is the whole meaning of the name printed on every can sold since: WD-40 stands for Water Displacement, 40th formula. It is not a marketing invention. It is a lab notebook entry that never got cleaned up.
The first customer was Convair, which used it to protect the outer skin of the Atlas missile from rust and corrosion. That was the product's intended market and, for a few years, its only one.
What happened next was not planned. Employees at the company began taking cans home, because the stuff turned out to be useful on hinges, tools, bicycle chains, fishing reels, and anything else that squeaked or seized. That word-of-mouth demand — people wanting a rust preventative for their garage rather than a missile — was the actual business. In 1958 the company put WD-40 in an aerosol can for consumers, and it began selling in San Diego stores. In 1961, when Hurricane Carla struck the Gulf Coast, cases of it were shipped to help recondition vehicles and equipment that had been submerged by flooding.
Sales grew year over year on almost no advertising. In 1969 the company renamed itself after the only product it made: the WD-40 Company. It went public in 1973. Today the can is in the majority of American households and it is sold in well over a hundred countries. It has been used to unstick everything from door hinges to, in documented cases, freeing animals and people from tight spots, and there are long-running lists of thousands of uses submitted by customers.
There is a detail in this story that is easy to skip past, and it is the reason the story is worth telling at all. Most organizations bury their failed attempts. They present the finished thing as though it arrived whole. This company did the opposite — it took the number of the attempt that finally worked, which is also a permanent public reminder of the thirty-nine that did not, and made it the brand. The failures are printed on the label, in the shop, in millions of garages, for seventy years and counting.
It also matters that the fortieth formula was not a lucky guess. Each of the thirty-nine before it eliminated something — a solvent that evaporated too fast, a film that did not hold, a mix that attacked the metal it was meant to protect. That is not thirty-nine wasted efforts. That is a search, conducted honestly, that narrowed until only the answer was left.
And the product's real success came from a market nobody in that lab had aimed at. They were solving an aerospace problem; they ended up in every household in the country. The work was done faithfully for one purpose and turned out to serve a much larger one — which is worth remembering when the thing you are laboring over feels small and specific.
If you are keeping count of your own failed formulas, keep counting. Write them down. Adjust one variable. Mix again.