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Exercises
Happy Accidents
Leo
Baekeland increased the amounts of and in the
and turned the flame higher than usual.
During the months of experimentation he had noted that by varying the quantity
of each chemical, by changing the intensity of the heat, and by stirring or
not stirring, he could obtain mixtures with different properties. Although
he could not determine beforehand what kind of mixture he would get, one thing
was certain: he was on the right
track. Eventually
this process would result in a better varnish.
Suddenly the mixture began boiling violently, and hot particles were spewed
all over the room. Baekeland
and his assistant dived for cover. As they peered from their shelter, the mixture began to overflow
the beaker, gradually stopped boiling, and started to harden.
Cautiously Baekeland approached the beaker and turned off the gas. Then he
examined the hard mass that had formed on its sides. Whatever this mysterious
substance was, it was not varnish!
It was a stubborn gray mass. Its very stubbornness, Baekeland realized, was
what would make it valuable. Now a way to shape it had to be found.
Day after day Baekeland and his assistant tried to soften the irregular gray
mass. But
regardless of what the used, nothing had any effect on it － neither chemicals, intense heat, pressure,
nor electrical current.
Months of unsuccessful experiments followed. Finally a method of molding the
substance was discovered in 1909. The name given this new discovery was ","
and with it began what is one of today's biggest industries: plastics.
Leo
Baekeland is only one of countless scientists who have set out
in search of one thing and through an accident or unforeseen
event have discovered something else - often more valuable than
what they were seeking.
In
1754 an English writer by the name of Horace Walpole, coined a word for such
"happy accidents": serendipity. It means "the ability to find unexpected things that are often more valuable
or agreeable than the things sought after." The word comes from Serendip, the
name of a country in the fifth-century fairy tale "The Three Princes of Serendip."
In this tale, the three princes were always discovering by chance things they
were not seeking.
The history of scientific inquiry is filled with examples of serendipity and
the frontiers of science have been advanced greatly because of it.
Charles Goodyear had spent years trying to find a means of processing rubber
so that it would not turn into in the summer heat or become stiff and
in the winter cold. By 1839 he knew he was closer to solving the problem
than he had ever been. He was getting fairly good results by adding
to melted crude rubber. But something was still missing.
Then one evening when Charles was showing a bit of rubber to a friend, he accidentally
dropped it onto a hot stove. Disgustedly, Charles dipped a second spoonful of
rubber from the kettle. Then he scraped the "ruined" bit of rubber from the
stove with an iron poker.
Suddenly Charles began to dance around the room like a man gone crazy. He dashed
out of the house and thrust the piece of rubber into a snowbank to test it.
At last he had found the answer! This
rubber, mixed with sulphur and then exposed to intense heat, was flexible in
cold yet firm in heat.
The accidental dropping of that bit of rubber led to the development of the
process － of rubber － which makes thousands of useful rubber
products possible.
One day in the year 1895 an absent-minded professor, Wilhelm von Roentgen,
was working in a laboratory in Germany. When he left the lab, he forgot to disconnect
the electric current to the vacuum tube he had been using in his study of .
The professor, whose hobby was photography, had also left an unexposed photographic
plate under a stack of books on a table in the same room. Later he used the
plate to take a picture of some scenery. When he developed the picture, he was
puzzled by a shadow that appeared right in the middle of it. The shadow had
the distinct shape of a key.
But how did it get in the middle of the picture? The professor traced his steps
back to the laboratory where he had kept the plate. Oh yes, it had been underneath
that stack of books.
He studied the outline of the key. It was shaped exactly like his office key
which he had misplaced again. Now, where was it this time? Oh, yes. He had used
it as a bookmark.
The professor picked up a book from the table and shook it. Out dropped the
office key.
Then he remembered that the plate had been in the room when the cathode ray
tube had been accidentally left burning.
So, through a series of seemingly unrelated accidents -- and
thanks to a very absent-minded professor -- medical science obtained one of its
most useful tools: X-ray.
In the late 1800's a husband-and-wife team of researchers, Marie and Pierre
Curie, made scientific history with the discovery of radium. This discovery
changed many theories about the atom and the composition of matter. This alone
would have been enough to impress the scientific world and to make the names
of the Curies immortal. Even so, the Curies were not satisfied. True, they had
made a great discovery. But they realized that there was much more to be learned
about this mysterious substance.
One day a friend and fellow scientist came into the Curies’ laboratory and
showed Pierre a burn on his . Radium, he told Pierre, had caused it.
About a week before, he had put a piece of radium in his coat pocket and had
forgotten about it for several hours. The burn had appeared a few days later,
and although it looked as though it should be painful, it did not hurt at all.
Why did radium burn the skin? What would happen to skin which had been burned?
Question piled upon question and the Curies had to find the answers. They started
further research which led to the discovery that radium, which could painlessly
burn human flesh, could be used in treating diseases of the skin and body tissue,
especially cancer.
Not only is the history of scientific inquiry filled with stories of such
"happy accidents" as these, so is the history of the world.
Ponce de Leon was looking for and discovered Florida.
Columbus set out in search of a new route to the Indies and discovered North
America.
Even your own life is filled with examples of serendipity. A trip to the beach
－ a pleasant thing in itself － could become even more pleasant if while there
you met the person who would eventually become your best friend.
Serendipity: that Walpole coined a word with such an interesting history is
in itself a very "happy accident."
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