George Montague Pratley, born in Johannesburg in 1917, was an optimist and a man of vision. Since he first founded the Pratley Group, he refused to let failure become part of his vocabulary and consequently came up with several ingenious inventions. During the early 1960s Pratley laboratory developed Pratley Plastic Putty, a glue designed to hold together components within an electrical box.

Moldable putty was later converted to a gluey paste and found many other applications, such as fixing cracks in the supports of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. Pratley Putty was also used in the first American space module to land on the moon, thus becoming the only SA product to visit that planet.