Serendipity: 10 accidental inventions

Serendipity: 10 accidental inventions

As anyone with a knack for clichés knows, necessity is the mother of invention. However, it could also be said that while good inventions are often the product of necessity, great inventions are accidental. To demonstrate the importance of serendipity, we’ve put together a list of 10 examples of unintentional discoveries that too often we find ourselves taking for granted. In no particular order.

1. PenicillinEverybody knows the story – or at least, should – the brilliant yet notoriously absent-minded biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so threw it away. It wasn’t until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould.
Fleming didn’t even hold out much hope for his discovery: it wasn’t given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was slow-acting – it wasn’t until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.

2. The MicrowaveIn 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.

3. Ice Cream ConesThis story is a perfect example of serendipity, and a single chance encounter leading to worldwide repercussions. It’s also rather sweet.
Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasn’t until the World’s Fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together.
At this particularly sweltering 1904 World’s Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were quickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn’t doing so well, selling Zalabia – a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia – and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into cone shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born – and it doesn’t look like dying out any time soon.

4. ChampagneWhile 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.

5. Post-It NotesThe invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidental collaboration between second-rate science and a frustrated church-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the large American corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but nobody took any notice.
4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver, leading to an epiphany – the church being a good a place as any to have one, I suppose – and later applied some of Silver’s weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today you’d find it hard to imagine life without them.

6. Potato chips/crispsIn 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, a particularly fussy diner (railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had been served with his meal, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy. After he had sent back several plates of increasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decided to get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato in grease and sending them out.
Vanderbilt initially protested that the chef’s latest efforts were too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody in the restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipe appearing on the menu as “Saratoga Chips”, before later being sold all over the world.

7. The SlinkyWhat walks down stairs, alone or in pairs, and makes a slinkity sound? Well, originally it was just a spring falling off a desk. To be more precise, it was the desk belonging to marine engineer Richard James, who sometime in 1940 noticed that when the spring fell, it stumbled and tumbled across the floor for a while before laying to rest. After a few prototypes, the Slinky was ready to be introduced to toy stores in 1948, where it became one of the most popular and iconic toys of all time.
James’ wife Betty was the one who came up with the name “Slinky”, and has been CEO of the company since 1960. Over 250 million Slinkies have been sold worldwide, and they were even used as mobile radio antennae during the Vietnam war.

8. The PacemakerLike penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the world’s first implantable cardiac pacemaker.
Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patient’s body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.

9. SuperglueMore 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.
6 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.

10. LSDThe 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”.
Criminalized throughout the USA in 1966 (and most others following suit soon after), further research into LSD was (and still is) constantly hampered by its illegal status. Early researcher Dr Richard Alpert claimed to have administered LSD to 200 test subjects by 1961, and reported that 85% of his test subjects said that the experience was the “most educational” of their lives.

Here are a few other accidental innovations that deserve at least a mention: saccharin (artificial sweetener), Scotchguard (aka Sellotape), Teflon, the band-aid, the frisbee, the sandwich, the popsicle, Silly Putty, x-rays, vulcanized rubber, velcro, and safety glass.

The First Thanksgiving

In 1621, the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians shared an autumn harvest feast which is acknowledged today as one of the first Thanksgiving celebrations in the colonies. This harvest meal has become a symbol of cooperation and interaction between English colonists and Native Americans. Although this feast is considered by many to the very first Thanksgiving celebration, it was actually in keeping with a long tradition of celebrating the harvest and giving thanks for a successful bounty of crops. Native American groups throughout the Americas, including the Pueblo, Cherokee, Creek and many others organized harvest festivals, ceremonial dances, and other celebrations of thanks for centuries before the arrival of Europeans in North America.
Historians have also recorded other ceremonies of thanks among European settlers in North America, including British colonists in Berkeley Plantation, Virginia. At this site near the Charles River in December of 1619, a group of British settlers led by Captain John Woodlief knelt in prayer and pledged "Thanksgiving" to God for their healthy arrival after a long voyage across the Atlantic. This event has been acknowledged by some scholars and writers as the official first Thanksgiving among European settlers on record. Whether at Plymouth, Berkeley Plantation, or throughout the Americas, celebrations of thanks have held great meaning and importance over time. The legacy of thanks, and particularly of the feast, have survived the centuries as people throughout the United States gather family, friends, and enormous amounts of food for their yearly Thanksgiving meal.
What Was Actually on the Menu?
What foods topped the table at the first harvest feast? Historians aren't completely certain about the full bounty, but it's safe to say the pilgrims weren't gobbling up pumpkin pie or playing with their mashed potatoes. Following is a list of the foods that were available to the colonists at the time of the 1621 feast. However, the only two items that historians know for sure were on the menu are venison and wild fowl, which are mentioned in primary sources. The most detailed description of the "First Thanksgiving" comes from Edward Winslow from A Journal of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, in 1621:
"Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, among other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed upon our governor, and upon the captain, and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty."
Did you know that lobster, seal and swans were on the Pilgrims' menu? Learn more...
Seventeenth Century Table Manners:
The pilgrims didn't use forks; they ate with spoons, knives, and their fingers. They wiped their hands on large cloth napkins which they also used to pick up hot morsels of food. Salt would have been on the table at the harvest feast, and people would have sprinkled it on their food. Pepper, however, was something that they used for cooking but wasn't available on the table.
In the seventeenth century, a person's social standing determined what he or she ate. The best food was placed next to the most important people. People didn't tend to sample everything that was on the table (as we do today), they just ate what was closest to them.
Serving in the seventeenth century was very different from serving today. People weren't served their meals individually. Foods were served onto the table and then people took the food from the table and ate it. All the servers had to do was move the food from the place where it was cooked onto the table.
Pilgrims didn't eat in courses as we do today. All of the different types of foods were placed on the table at the same time and people ate in any order they chose. Sometimes there were two courses, but each of them would contain both meat dishes, puddings, and sweets.
More Meat, Less Vegetables
Our modern Thanksgiving repast is centered around the turkey, but that certainly wasn't the case at the pilgrims's feasts. Their meals included many different meats. Vegetable dishes, one of the main components of our modern celebration, didn't really play a large part in the feast mentality of the seventeenth century. Depending on the time of year, many vegetables weren't available to the colonists.
The pilgrims probably didn't have pies or anything sweet at the harvest feast. They had brought some sugar with them on the Mayflower but by the time of the feast, the supply had dwindled. Also, they didn't have an oven so pies and cakes and breads were not possible at all. The food that was eaten at the harvest feast would have seemed fatty by 1990's standards, but it was probably more healthy for the pilgrims than it would be for people today. The colonists were more active and needed more protein. Heart attack was the least of their worries. They were more concerned about the plague and pox.
Surprisingly Spicy Cooking
People tend to think of English food at bland, but, in fact, the pilgrims used many spices, including cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, and dried fruit, in sauces for meats. In the seventeenth century, cooks did not use proportions or talk about teaspoons and tablespoons. Instead, they just improvised. The best way to cook things in the seventeenth century was to roast them. Among the pilgrims, someone was assigned to sit for hours at a time and turn the spit to make sure the meat was evenly done.
Since the pilgrims and Wampanoag Indians had no refrigeration in the seventeenth century, they tended to dry a lot of their foods to preserve them. They dried Indian corn, hams, fish, and herbs.
Dinner for Breakfast: Pilgrim Meals:
The biggest meal of the day for the colonists was eaten at noon and it was called noonmeat or dinner. The housewives would spend part of their morning cooking that meal. Supper was a smaller meal that they had at the end of the day. Breakfast tended to be leftovers from the previous day's noonmeat.
In a pilgrim household, the adults sat down to eat and the children and servants waited on them. The foods that the colonists and Wampanoag Indians ate were very similar, but their eating patterns were different. While the colonists had set eating patterns—breakfast, dinner, and supper—the Wampanoags tended to eat when they were hungry and to have pots cooking throughout the day.
Source: Kathleen Curtin, Food Historian at Plimoth Plantation

Suzanna Gratia-Hupp: What the Second Amendment is REALLY For

jumping the gun

i used to have a next door neighbor that complained about everything.
right after i built my kennels a police officer showed up at my door one morning asking me if i was licensed for a buiseness and kennel. i informed him that yes i was and asked what this was about. he said that my neighbor had called to complain about barking dogs (my dogs were all de-barked due to her previous complaints so i couldn't figure out why she would be complaining). the officer upon hearing my de-barked dogs told me that i was going beyond what any kennel owner was required to do and was going next door to inform her of that.
i decided to go with the officer and talk to my neighbor.
when i asked my neighbor why she called the police she answered, "because i thought that if you boarded dogs that they would be barking."
wow!
she thought something would happen and freaked out.
what a shame that she had to live her life in fear of something that might happen (and being a responsible dog owner it never did happen so her fears were groundless).
she hadn't even given me a chance!
which brings me to my point.
i keep hearing and receiving emails of all the negative things people are afraid obama will do as president such as banning guns, abortion issues and so forth.
the man hasn't even been sworn into office yet!!!!
maybe we should give him a chance???

apricots and billy goats

which smells worse apricots or billy goats? i think its a toss up having traveled 500 miles thru the desert in the heat of the summer with both.if you haven't noticed i get alot of bright ideas. some are definatly better than others. apricots and billy goats are not one of my better ideas i must admit!i had just bought my new van when my mom became ill so i went to see her. it had been a great year for apricots and her tree was loaded with them. mom was so worried about those apricots going to waste that, to keep her from going out and picking them, i told her i would pick them and take them back to utah to preserve them. the day before i was to depart for home my friend ,tim, and i picked all the apricots (about 50 lugs) and stacked the boxes in my van to take back to utah.APRICOTS STINK! AND THEY RIPEN BY THE SECOND! but i got them home and giving 1/2 the load to my son and myself taking 1/2 we canned apricots, we dried apricots, we juiced them, we made jelly out of them for the next week (while working 14 hour days, 6 days a week) while my van sat out in the driveway with all the windows down to air that horrid smell out.i never want to see another apricot as long as i live!about the time the van and the apricots were finished i got the call from the lady i had been buying the pedigree goats from in calif. she had decided to cut down more of her herd and offered me her billy goat, and the rest of her does at a great price (i love a blue light special) but on the terms i had to go get them right away. i called every dog person i know and borrowed all the extra large crates i could find. with crates packed to the ceiling in the van i headed for california to pick up the goats.the trip out there was fine. the trip back was another story!even tho i put "merle" into a crate at the far back of the van, traveling in september while a billy is in rut, with a vanful of 9 does in heat is not the most pleasant experience i have ever partaken in.driving thru baker the smell became so bad i decided the heck with the 100 plus weather i had to roll down the windows. it didn't work. the heat just seemed to make them all sweat and produce even more odor! i must say that was the longest trip of my life (other than the trip with chandra and niki as a baby) but there was no turning back now so i just trudged on. the thought did cross my mind that maybe i should double think some of my decisions in the future. finally i made it home, unloaded the animals, rolled down all the windows in the van for another airing.....this one took over 2 weeks before i could set in that van again!

bail outs

okay, i may be a bit dense, but i just don't get spending billions of government dollars to bail out failing companies.
i can understand the "theory" that by bailing them out it should keep big companies open and therefore keep jobs going, but in my mind it's just a band-aide that will fall off in a short time.
band-aides don't heal the sore, they just keep the dirt off until the sore heals (and no band-aide provides the air and sun and actually promote healing faster). so it seems to me that these bail outs are just going to inhibit healing of our economy.
examples;
1. we bail out mortgage companies, but that isn't stopping people from losing their homes. it's only keeping the mortgage company in buiseness. what about the people?
2. now the car companies are going under due to lack of sales so we need to bail them out. hmmmm, so we give money to the car companies to stay in buiseness, but no one is buying cars, so isn't this just going to lead to them going out of buiseness later anyway?
3. buisenesses go out of buiseness every day, my son's wife has started her own buiseness, if she goes under will the government give her money to keep going?
somehow, it just seems to me that bailing out buisenesses to enable them to keep running isn't going to solve the problem that the people still aren't going to be any better off to buy their goods. hence, the buiseness will still go under sooner or later.
it seems to me that we are being run on fear of another depression.
the depression was scary.
the depression was hard times.
but it seems to me that our country and people survived it, and even learned and grew stronger during it. anyway, the people i know who survived the depression seem to appreciate what they have, take care of their belongings, are more frugal and don't waste money on unnecessary things.
and it isn't just the buisenesses that are responsible. people took out mortgages. people want things. people want to live in the style that they think is necessary to be happy.
maybe we can learn something from the depression; for instance:
1. live within ones means instead of debt of credit cards, new cars, huge houses, electronic equipment, unnecessary nic knacks and all the other things that "we just have to have to survive now days."
2. our children will not die and may even learn to use their imagination and go out and play if they don't have seperate rooms with a t.v., computer, electronic games and closets full of clothes that they don't wear half of.
(remember when children had one special toy and took care of it, played outside with friends, and even helped around the house= OH MY! maybe they wouldn't have time for hanging out on a street corners and doing drugs!!!!)
3. gardens in the back yard where the food was not grown with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides---gosh, that may even be healthy for us!!!!
(of course that would mean we'd have to cut our own lettuce, grate our own cheese, cook our own food----HEAVEN HELP US!!!!)
maybe i just don't understand due to the fact that i have lived so poor so many times in my life that people are so scared. i drove $500.00 cars rather than go into debt. i washed out trash cans because i couldn't afford bags to go in them (every day i appreciate that luxury i can now afford). my children had 5 sets a clothes to get them thru the school week and after school and weekends they wore what was back then called "play clothes" (which were old clothes or hand me downs). we grew gardens and canned to get thru the winter. i cooked!!! there were 3 meals a day and no snacks (snack food is EXPENSIVE!). my kids worked at home for free, and learned to work for neighbors and such to earn money (and amazing! all my kids work and support themselves to this day!!!) i bought a house i could afford and 5 people lived in a 2 bedroom house (OH MY!!!) we turned the heat down low, lights were turned off in rooms not in use, I WASHED DIAPERS!
and we survived!
when i see the medications being handed out in this country for anxiety, stess, depression; both parents to provide what we now call "the basics" (when did 3 t.v's and electronic games become "basic?"),people over their head in debt, huge homes for a family that can't fill them, new cars, boats, motorcycles etc. in the driveway it makes me wonder if we have come to a time that is so fast paced and stressful that maybe it's time we slow down, appreciate what we have and get back to the basics of life: air, food, shelter (and perhaps even a beleif in a higher power that all will be okay).
don't get me wrong. i don't want another depression. however, bailing out big companies with government money just doesn't seem like a logical answer to me.
maybe it's time we looked at our lives, what we really need and as the saying goes "tighten our belt buckles and get through this," not bail me out so i can keep living in the way i want to.
whew---got that off my chest LOL --- and it's nice to be back online again..for me anyway =;-}