Gregorio Imedio
(Calzada de Calatrava, 1915-Madrid, 2002) Spanish businessman, creator of the popular glue that bears his name.Gregorio Imedio was born in 1915, in Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real province, where a few decades later another universal character would see the light, the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.
His father, in addition to a drugstore, ran a summer cinema, and Gregorio, a fifteen-year-old boy, was in charge of the camera and drawing the poster for the films.Accustomed to experimenting with chemicals in his father's store and making splices with film tapes, one day he observed that acetone was able to bind the cellulose to the celluloid and generate a sticky gelatin.
That discovery led him to find the optimal formula, but not before breaking a large part of the dishes at home to do bond tests and check their resistance.He was then sixteen years old.His only training was school and he never, if not for his own hobby, had access to chemistry books.
Versatile and multifaceted, he was always busy in something: in the development of an idea or in the creation and final design of a new advertisement for his flagship product and, in recent years, in others that He would market the company, created in 1944.Gregorio created, in fact, the brand's logo, and his first investment was five hundred pesetas.Glass carafes, kettles, metal syringes and tubes and pliers to close them were his primitive instruments.
Productos Imedio, SA
Imedio used his ability, his intuition, his common sense and the brilliance that characterized him as an entrepreneur to find a Transparent glue that held everything together and whose formula was his best kept secret for decades.
After the original discovery came other complementary formulas that ended up giving him a whole range of adhesive products.Gregorio dedicated himself to manufacturing glues in quantity, bottling them with syringes and giving them to his father's clients to try.He even made use of his father's travelers, to whom he gave cans of glue to give them to try and spread it to other places.
When he decided to set up a full-fledged industry, he asked for the collaboration of the potentates of the town and no one believed in him.Only his brother-in-law Pedro Ciudad Torres became his partner for life nine years after Gregorio came up with the formula for his great invention.
They rented a place, and began the adventure.The Civil War paralyzed its activities and, in 1944, after overcoming all the inconveniences to obtain raw materials, Productos Imedio was reborn in the company of his brother-in-law.By then the factory was already producing about two hundred tubes a day.
Success and sale of the company
In 1972 they built a modern industry with sports and leisure facilities for their employees, most of whom were women.The peculiar way of understanding the business management of these Calzadeños included an annual trip for the entire workforce, employees and managers, outside of the normal vacation period.The first trip they made was by car and the last by plane.
The factory and the business worked perfectly.Still, in 1988, when Gregorio was already retired, a Dutch multinational, Perfecta Chemie, bought Imedio.The company continued in Calzada, where the product brought from the Netherlands was packaged.
Don Gregorio, as he was already called everywhere, decided then to spend long periods together with his wife, Dolores Trujillo, in Madrid, accompanied by their six children.He died on January 9, 2002 at his home in the capital, after being admitted to La Paz for thirteen days, as a result of a cardiac arrest caused by pneumonia.
It is probable that the current generations of the new technologies do not know, like their postwar "ancestors", "the solution for everything", as that catchy slogan created by Gregorio Imedio sang: "The remedy, Imedium glue ».Many of its old users were unaware, however, that the brand name corresponded to the last name of its inventor, who created the formula for the glue without barely chemical knowledge and then successfully marketed it.Few had considered, until the obituaries unearthed it from oblivion, what the qualifier Imedio responded to.
The inventor was a character with an innovative spirit, a lover of miniature trains, mechanics and drawing.A melomaniac of the classics and Spanish popular song, he was a hard-working man, with a cheerful, simple and very human character who kept an open mind and the ability to be surprised by the simplest things until the last moment of his life.He was, in fact, ahead of his time and earned a place in Spanish business history.
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