10 things I bet you never knew: Serendipity

Melaine Warren

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

MANY times, stuff happens the way we didn't want them to, but there are times when pleasant surprises occur. This week, we look at serendipitous inventions that happened out of luck or by accident.

1. Play-Doh was originally a cleaner for wallpaper. The company, which had been going bankrupt, removed the cleaner from the product and remarketed it as a toy after kids across the nation began using it to make arts and crafts.

2. Dr Harry Coover encountered the substance cyanoacrylate twice to his dismay before realising the good use that it had. It adheared strongly to anything it touched, and 16 years after its invention it earned the name Super Glue.

3. The Slinky came into existence when Richard James of the US Navy was working out a way to protect sensitive equipment on the high seas. One of his springs fell to the floor with the trademark Slinky motion and a new toy was born.

4. When Wilson Greatbatch was making a circuit, he grabbed a resistor that was bigger than what he wanted. He ended up making a circuit that perfectly replicated the pulse of a human heart, and small enough to be put inside a person, which created the pacemaker.

5. When working with a machine that emitted microwaves, Percy Spencer realised that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted because of the radiation. He used this accidental discovery to create the microwave oven.

6. Wilhelm Roentgen was working with cathode rays when he discovered that the rays were travelling through a screen and into a piece of cardboard. He then began experiments with the rays which resulted in the medical marvel of the X-ray machine.

7. Corn flakes were invented when Seventh-day Adventist and sanitarium superintendant Dr John Kellog, and his brother Will, were working to create bland, vegetarian foods for their patients. They let cooked wheat go stale by accident, and when they tried to use it anyway it resulted in small flakes, which they then toasted and served. Later, they began to use corn instead of wheat.

8. Ruth Wakefield, an inn-owner and cookie baker extraordinaire, was trying to make chocolate cookies when she found she was out of baker's chocolate. Thinking pieces of a chocolate bar would melt in the oven, she substituted them and invented chocolate chip cookies.

9. Velcro came about because of a hunting trip of George de Mestral. Burrs stuck to him and his dog, and he later saw they had little hook-shaped thorns, which made them stick to things. This became his inspiration for Velcro.

10. Frank Epperson, in 1905, left a cup with a mixture of powdered soda and water along with a stir stick outside in sub-zero temperatures, and returned to find the drink had frozen over, creating the world famous ice popsicle.

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10 things I bet you never knew: Serendipity