Nobel prize-winning biochemist Albert
Szent-Györgyi said, “A discovery is said
to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.”
There are many items that we use today without
thinking about how they were created.
I’d like to share a few things with which we are all familiar that were
discovered or created by accident. I
acquired this information from a variety of websites. I hope you find this as interesting as I did.
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Silly Putty - In the early 1940s, General
Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war
effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn't come any
sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime.
Potato Chips - Chef George Crum concocted the
perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when a customer who complained his fries
were cut too thick, he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp.
Needless to say, the diner couldn't eat just one.
Penicillin - Forever enshrined in scientific legend, the discovery of
penicillin—a group of antibiotics used to combat a variety of bacterial
infections—is a case of dirty dishes. Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming took
a vacation from his lab where he was investigating staphylococci, known
commonly as staph. Upon his return, he noticed a strange fungus on a culture he
had left in his lab—a fungus that had killed off all surrounding bacteria in
the culture. Modern medicine was never the same.
Velcro - On a hiking trip in 1941, Swiss engineer Georges
de Mestral found burrs clinging to his pants and to his dog's fur. On closer
inspection, he found that the burr's hooks would cling to anything loop-shaped.
What if he could artificially re-create the loops? The result: Velcro. In the 1960’s, NASA was a notable client. The
agency used the material in flight suits and to help secure items in zero
gravity. It then became a space-age
fashion all its own.
Teflon - In 1938, Roy Plunkett, a scientist with DuPont,
was working on ways to make refrigerators more home-friendly by searching for
ways to replace the current refrigerant, which was primarily ammonia, sulfur
dioxide, and propane. Upon opening the container on one sample, Plunkett found
his experimental gas was gone. What remained was a strange, slippery resin that
was resistant to extreme heat and chemicals. In
the 1940s the material was used by the Manhattan project. A decade later it
found its way into the automotive industry. It wasn't until the '60s that
Teflon would be used for its most noted application: nonstick cookware.
Coca-Cola - The inventor of the Coca-Cola wasn't a shrewd
businessman, a seller of sweets, or a dreamer looking to strike it rich in the
beverage business. John Pemberton, a pharmacist, just wanted to cure headaches.
Pemberton used two main ingredients in his hopeful headache cure: coca leaves
and cola nuts. When his lab assistant accidentally mixed the two with
carbonated water, the world's first Coke was the result. Over the years, Coke
would tinker with the now-secret recipe. Pemberton died two years later and
never saw his simple mixture create a soft drink empire.
Kellogg’s Corn
Flakes - Who knew that one of America's first beloved
cereals was invented by accident? Will
Keith Kellogg assisted his brother, a doctor at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in
Michigan, with patients and their diets.
Responsible
for making bread dough one day, he accidentally left his main ingredient -
boiled wheat - sitting out for several hours. When he came back to roll the
ingredient into dough, the wheat became flaky.
Curious,
Kellogg baked the flaky dough anyway, creating a crunchy and flaky snack. The
flakes were a hit with patients, so Kellogg tinkered with his recipe and
finally settled on using corn as a main ingredient for the flakes. He launched “The
Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flakes Company,” in 1906, which eventually was
renamed the Kellogg's company.
Pacemakers - An assistant professor
at the University of Buffalo thought he had ruined his project. Instead of
picking a 10,000-ohm resistor out of a box to use on a heart-recording
prototype, Wilson Greatbatch took the 1-megaohm variety. The resulting circuit
produced a signal that sounded for 1.8 milliseconds, and then paused for a
second — a dead ringer for the human heart. Greatbatch realized the precise
current could regulate a pulse, overriding the imperfect heartbeat of the ill. Previously
pacemakers were television-sized, cumbersome things that were temporarily
attached to patients from the outside. But now the effect could be achieved
with a small circuit, perfect to tuck into someone's chest.
Anesthesia - Without this discovery, medical treatments would be a big pain -
literally. Although the true discoverer
of anesthesia is contested, the people who contributed to its development and
use were inspired by similar accidental observations. Crawford Long, William Morton, Charles
Jackson and Horace Wells all were associated with the creation of anesthesia.
They realized that in some cases, ether and nitrous oxide (laughing gas)
inhibited pain in people under their influence.
In the 1800s, anesthesia's founding fathers learned how this combination
affected people's perceptions of pain.
In 1844, Horace
Wells attended an exhibit and witnessed a participant injure his leg while
under the influence of laughing gas. The man, whose leg was bleeding, told
Wells that he didn't feel any pain. After
his accidental discovery, he used the compound while he removed his tooth. From
there, anesthesia's use during medical, dental and surgical procedures took
off.
The
Post-it-Note -
Its inventor, Art Fry, a now-retired 3M
scientist while trying to create a strong adhesive, instead ended up as an
adhesive that could be temporarily stuck to paper and other materials. Fry and others fiddled with the idea for
several years before the product went into full production in 1980.
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