Serendipity - [ser-uhn-dip-i-tee] noun
1. an aptitude for making desirable discoveries by accident.
2. good fortune; luck: the serendipity of getting the first job she applied for.
At some time in our lives, we all have probably set out in search of one thing, ending up finding something else entirely. For me, this has been limited mostly to going to K-Mart looking for cheap socks, and finding a big-screen TV for half-price.
But for scientists and inventors, serendipity can often mean career-advancement, notoriety, and financial success.
Many of the things which we use in our daily lives, came about entirely by accident. Well, not entirely, perhaps. For as Louis Pasteur once said, "chance favors the prepared mind." Years and years of schooling and/or experience prepared these people for their eventual fame and/or fortune.
I say "fame and/or fortune" because even if their discoveries made them rich or well-awarded, we don't necessarily know their names.
Surprisingly, sometimes the very thing discovered had been something the discoverer had initially been trying to eradicate.
The following is a short-list of these discoveries. Follow each link for more........
Firstly and most importantly.............
CHAMPAGNE
While many know that Dom Pierre Pérignon is credited for the invention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictine monk’s intention to make a wine with bubbles in it – in fact, he had spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was considered a sure sign of poor winemaking.
Pérignon’s original wish was to cater for the French court’s preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to grow in the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white juice from them. But since Champagne’s climate was relatively cold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spending the second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Pérignon tried but failed to eradicate. Happily, the new wine was a big hit with the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.
Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H20 out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul - probably a sailor decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born.
THE MICROWAVE
In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer and inventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons, the devices used to produce the microwave radio signals that were integral to early radar use. Radar was an incredibly important innovation during the time of war, but microwave cooking was a purely accidental discovery.
While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His keen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves that had caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have told him from mischievous childhood ‘experiments’), exploded.
The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was about the size of a fridge
LSD
The unintentional discovery of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-LSD-25 led to a cultural revolution – nobody today can deny that the hallucinogen uncovered by Swiss scientist Albert Hoffman in 1938 helped shape the hippy movement of the 1960s and sparked worldwide interest, having a massive impact on neuroscience research and treatment.
The actual discovery of LSD as a hallucinogen occurred when Dr Hoffman was involved in pharmaceutical research in Basel, Switzerland, hoping to produce drugs that would help ease the pain of childbirth. Having synthesized what would later become known as LSD; Hoffman catalogued the untested substance and placed it in storage, after finding nothing particularly interesting about it during the initial analysis.
It wasn’t until a Friday afternoon in April 1943 when Hoffman discovered the true properties of the compound, inadvertently absorbing a healthy dose of it when handling the chemical at work without wearing gloves. On his bicycle ride back home he observed “an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors”.
SUPERGLUE
More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value, unlike Silver’s Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldn’t work, so research moved on.
Six years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (or “Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition”, to give it its full name) was born.
It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam – the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.
Louis Pasteur once said, "chance favors the prepared mind." That's the genius behind all these accidental inventions - the scientists were prepared. They did their science on the brink and were able to see the magic in a mistake, set-back, or coincidence.
Smart Dust
Most people would be pretty upset if their homework blew up in their faces and crumbled into a bunch of tiny pieces.
Not so student Jamie Link. When Link was doing her doctoral work in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, one of the silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward, however, that the tiny pieces still functioned as sensors.
The resulting "smart dust" won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003. These teensy sensors can also be used to monitor the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical or biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumor cells in the body.
The Pacemaker
This list wouldn't be complete without at least one absent-minded professor. But it's not flubber clocking in at No. 2, it's a life saving medical device. That pacemaker sewn into a loved one's chest actually came about because American engineer Wilson Greatbatch reached into a box and pulled out the wrong thing.
It's true. Greatbatch was working on making a circuit to help record fast heart sounds. He reached into a box for a resistor in order to finish the circuit and pulled out a 1-megaohm resistor instead of a 10,000-ohm one.
The circuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for one second. Then it repeated. The sound was as old as man: a perfect heartbeat.
Vulcanized Rubber
Charles Goodyear had been waiting years for a happy accident when it finally occurred.
Goodyear spent a decade finding ways to make rubber easier to work with while being resistant to heat and cold.
Nothing was having the effect he wanted.
One day he spilled a mixture of rubber, sulfur and lead onto a hot stove. The heat charred the mixture, but didn't ruin it. When Goodyear picked up the accident, he noticed that the mixture had hardened but was still quite usable.
At last! The breakthrough he had been waiting for! His vulcanized rubber is used in everything from tires, to shoes, to hockey pucks.
Science has coined the phrase, "the Principle of Limited Sloppiness" to describe fortuitous or accidental discoveries such as these. Maybe their time has passed. Certainly, there is no place in, say, the space program for "limited sloppiness."
In 1791 Luigi Galvani was an anatomist at the University of Bologna. Galvani was investigating the nerves in frog legs, and had threaded some legs on copper wire hanging from a balcony in such a way that a puff of wind caused the legs to touch the iron railing. A spark snapped and the legs jerked violently (even today, we speak of being "galvanized" into action). In one unintended step, Galvani had observed a closed electrical circuit, and related electricity to nerve impulses.
In 1879, Louis Pasteur inoculated some chickens with cholera bacteria. It was supposed to kill them, but Pasteur or one of his assistants had accidentally used a culture from an old jar and the chickens merely got sick and recovered. Later, Pasteur inoculated them again with a fresh culture that he knew to be virulent, and the chickens didn't even get sick. Chance had led him to discover the principle of vaccination for disease prevention.
Wilhelm Roentgen was experimenting with electrical discharges one evening at the University of Wurzburg in 1895. There was a screen coated with a barium compound lying to one side, and Roentgen noticed that it would fluoresce when an electrical discharge would occur in the tube he was watching. On reaching for the screen, Roentgen got his hand between the discharge tube and the screen and saw the bones of his own hand through the shadow of his skin. In 1901, Roentgen received the Nobel prize for his accidental discovery of X-rays.
Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist at St. Mary's Hospital in London in 1928. One day in his cluttered laboratory, he noticed that a culture dish of bacteria had been invaded by a mold whose spore must have drifted in through an open window. Under the microscope, he saw that, all around the mold, the individual bacteria that he had been growing had burst. He saved the mold, and from it produced the first penicillin.
And lastly, another Nobel Prize-worthy discovery, made completely unintentionally, turns out to be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century. This discovery provided the most profound evidence to date (1978), of the Big Bang Theory of the origin of our universe.
And you've probably never even heard of it.
Bell Labs built a giant antenna in Holmdel, New Jersey, in 1960. It was part of a very early satellite transmission system called Echo. By collecting and amplifying weak radio signals bounced off large metallic balloons high in the atmosphere, it could send signals across long distances. Within a few years, the Telstar satellite was launched. It had built-in transponders and made the Echo system obsolete.
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When they began to use it as a telescope they found there was a background "noise" (like static in a radio). This annoyance was a uniform signal in the microwave range, seeming to come from all directions. Everyone assumed it came from the telescope itself, which was not unusual. It hadn't interfered with the Echo system but Penzias and Wilson had to get rid of it to make the observations they planned. They checked everything to rule out the source of the excess radiation. They pointed the antenna right at New York City -- it wasn't urban interference. It wasn't radiation from our galaxy or extraterrestrial radio sources. It wasn't even the pigeons living in the big, horn-shaped antenna. Penzias and Wilson kicked them out and swept out all their droppings. The source remained the same through four seasons, so it couldn't have come from the solar system or even from a 1962 above-ground nuclear test, because in a year that fallout would have shown a decrease. They had to conclude it was not the machine and it was not random noise causing the radiation.
Penzias and Wilson began looking for theoretical explanations. Around the same time, Robert Dicke (1916Ð1997) at nearby Princeton University had been pursuing theories about the big bang. He had elaborated on existing theory to suggest that if there had been a big bang, the residue of the explosion should by now take the form of a low-level background radiation throughout the universe. Dicke was looking for evidence of this theory when Penzias and Wilson got in touch with his lab. He shared his theoretical work with them, even as he resignedly said to his fellow-researchers, "We've been scooped."
Ironically, Robert Wilson had been trained in steady state theory (which suggested the universe was without beginning or end, unlike big bang theory), and he felt uncomfortable with the big bang explanation of their radio noise. When he and Penzias jointly published their research with Dicke, the Bell Lab researchers stuck to "just the facts" -- simply reporting their recorded observations.
A 1978 interview of Penzias and Wilson: