Mistakes that paid dividends

Title

Creator

Opsahl, Josephine M.

Language

English

Year

1965

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Fulltext

MISTAKES THAT PAID DIVIDENDS Some of the world’s great est discoveries that permit, you to get more pleasure and value out of modern life — were really mistakes or acci dents. They were made by men who realized that while they had failed to attain a sought-for goal, they had nevertheless produced some thing worthwhile. Scientists give the name “serendipity” to such mis takes. The word dates back to fairy-tale days when the Three Wise Princes of Serendip “always made discoveries, by accident or sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” In an eighteen-year-old boy in 1856 had not failed in his ambitious task of making synthetic quinine and had not analyzed the black crys tals which formed in his test tube, the coal-tar dye indus try would not have been born. But William Henry Perkin was curious. He found that the crystals, dissolved in boiling water, produced a beautiful purple liquid. He dipped strips of silk into his purple liquid and they sop ped it up. When the color did not wash out and did not bleach when exposed to sun, Perkin knew he had produced the world’s first aniline dye, forerunner of the colors that make our clothes beautiful today. While printing and photo graphy owe much to the re search of a French painter and physicist, Louis Daguer re, they owe considerably more to his carelessness. In the 19th century, there was no photography as we know it today: plates had to be exposed for hours in order to secure a picture. One day Daguerre stored an under exposed plate in a closet where he had absent-minded ly left an uncovered saucer of mercury. The mercury vaporized becoming a re agent. It brought out the image on the discarded plate. 28 Panorama Daguerre’s accidental disco very resulted in the first com mercially successful form of photography. Today it is known as the Daguerreotype. Similarly we owe the color ed advertising plates in our magazines to the accidental observance one day by a Swe dish apothecary Karl Scheele, of the action of light on sil ver chloride. Charles Goodyear conduct ed rubber experiments for years, yet not until he acci dentally spilled a rubber and sulphur mixture onto a hot stove did he get the result he was seeking. While the inside of this patch of rub ber was seared by too much heat, the outer edges were firm, soft and pliable. Further tests showed that Goddyear’s process, which he called “vulcanizing” in honor of Vulcan, Roman god of fire, produced sheet rubber which had lost its stickiness. As a result, the sap of the hevia rubber tree today yields overshoes, raincoats, h o twater bottles, tires, insula tion materials and thousands of other useful articles which do not crack in winter or melt in summer. The Discovery — or rather the rediscovery — of blotting paper was also an accident. While blotting paper was known as early as 1460, it was virtually unused until the early 19th century when an Englishman in a Berkshire mill forgot to add sizing ma terials to a vat of paper. The entire run was unsalable. The frugal mill proprietor tried to salvage some of the soft paper for his own use, but the ink from his pen spread so rapidly through the fibers that he gave up trying to write. As he surveyed the messy sheets, it flashed through his mind that this paper would absorb ink, thus replacing the dry sand then in use. He advertised his discovery as “blotting paper,” and not only sold the entire lot but continued to receive orders for more. Although the beautiful colors of marble seen in mo dern buildings are natural, more than six hundred dif ferent hues are permanently imparted to the stone by dyes. The idea of coloring marble was accidentally dis covered in an experiment to October 1965 29 make barrel staves imper vious to petroleum. The ex perimenter used a piece of marble to hold in place the barrel he was working on. When through, he pulled out the marble wedge and, al though he noticed it was stained a beautiful color, he threw it in scrap heap. A month later he picked up the wedge again. Upon breaking it into pieces he found that the color had pe netrated. That accident was the beginning of experiments which have given us the beautifully tinted stones we know today. In our own time there is the wonder of shatterproof glass, discovered accidentally when a French scientist, Edouard Benedictus, dropped a bottle on the floor. The glass broke into fragments, but did not scatter. M. Be nedictus wondered why. He found that the bottle had contained collodion, which when evaporating had left on the inside a thin skin strong enough to hold the broken pieces together. From this accident he conceived the idea of making a “sand wich” of two pieces of glass with a sheet of nitro-cellu lose between. Our American planes owe much of their superiority to another accident. George W. Lee of Binghamton, New York, a collar-button manu facturer, decided to make aluminum snap buttons. In adjusting his machinery to the new device Lee made the punch longer than he had intended. To his sur prise his machine produced a long aluminum tube in stead of a flat button, for the soft! metal -was forced by pressure through the narrow opening between the punch and the die. By accident, Lee thus invented the pro cess of fashioning seamless tubes from thin metal, one of the greatest discoveries in metal working. When Lee could find no immediate practical applica tion for his invention, he sold it to a bicycle manufacturer, Leslie Hooker, who used it to make such things as guards for women’s hat pins, cases for physicians’ thermometers, and automatic pencils. Then one day he was asked to make a radiator with a maxi mum of cooling surface and 30 Panorama a minimum of air resistance for a racing car. Hooker borrowed an idea from the bees. He laid hun dreds of small seamless cop per tubes horizontally into brass shell. The tubes had six sided ends so that they fitted together closely and could be soldered into a sin gle unit. The open ends of the tubes faced the onrush ing air. In contrast to the ordinary radiator, the water did not flow through the tubes but around them, and Hooker’s invention made automobile history. Penicillin was discovered by accident. So were many of our new lightweight metals and our plastics. Hundreds of similar mistakes are con tributing to greater safety and comfort in our lives. Industry, realizing the va lue of such accidental disco veries, is spending 200 mil lion dollars annually to un earth more of them. Che mists and research workers are not given a definite pro blem: instead they are told to find out everything they can about a particular ma terial. Usually when they have finished they have found new uses for the basic product. That is why American in dustry is "serendipity"-minded today, searching constant ly for the secret of making bigger and better things at a price low enough to put them within reach of mil lions. — by Josephine M. Opsahl, from Coronet. KNIVES AND FORKS An American missionary who had spent some time in Borneo and vicinity was asked whether he had been able to get the natives to give up canniba lism. “No,” he admitted, “I did not quite succeed in that, but I did persuade them to start using knives and forks.” — Carol Long. October 1965 31

Media