Mirror Magazine

Mirror Magazine

Amazing inventions
Accidental inventions have shaped our lives in incredible ways. They have brought safety, made things quicker and saved lives. Marisa de Silva looks at a few such inventions…
Ever wonder how many objects, foodstuffs and machines were initially discovered? Believe it or not, many of them were mere accidents turned great inventions. From the discovery of the Popsicle, to Velcro, to the microwave, they were all in fact accidental discoveries, stumbled upon whilst researching some other topic or were discovered completely by chance.

Someone once said that “luck favours the prepared mind,” which means that if someone didn’t figure out that the discovery (be it accidental or not) would be beneficial to the masses, then it would have been in vain.

Contrary to common belief, not all inventions and discoveries were made by renowned intellects or eccentric geniuses; many of these discoveries were made by ordinary, everyday folk, of all ages, whilst going about their routine chores.

The popsicle
Take for instance the story of 11-year-old, Frank Epperson, who way back in 1905, was sitting on his front porch stirring a soda, with a stirring stick. However, as something distracted him, he jumped up and ran off forgetting his soda. It was so cold that night that the drink froze with the stick in it. The next day, Frank had a Popsicle! But it wasn’t until 18 years later in 1923 that Frank started selling these frozen treats. He called them ‘Epsicles’ at first (after his last name).

Ice cream cones
Although Italo Marchiony is credited with the invention of the first ice cream cone, a similar creation was independently introduced at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

As the tale of ice cream vendor Charles Menches unfolds, we learn that his story is quite in keeping with the saying ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ For those who lived anywhere near St. Louis, Missouri, the biggest event in the summer of 1904 was the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. No one knew beforehand, but that exposition was the occasion where ice cream cones were first made and sold.

Menches sold his ice cream in dishes the way every other ice cream vendor did, at the time. That August though, the weather was a real scorcher, and there were so many hot and thirsty fairgoers wanting ice cream that he ran out of dishes. He had more than half-a-day of business ahead of him and not a single dish to serve his ice cream on. He had to think of something and fast.

Nearby was a stand where his friend, Ernest Hamwi, from Syria, was selling a Middle Eastern treat called ‘Zalabia.’ Zalabia was a crisp, wafer-like pastry sold with syrup. “Give me Zalabia!” cried Menches. He rolled up the Zalabia, scooped his ice cream on top, and presto! ice cream cones were born.

Cheese
Cheese was invented by an old Arabian traveling across the desert. He had a pouch with him, made of sheep’s stomach. He poured his milk into it and continued on his way. Later, he opened the pouch to find… cheese? What really happened though was hardly magic, it was in fact, chemicals from the sheep’s stomach combined with the heat of the sun which had clumped up the milk into cheese.

Sandwiches
Royalty too did their share of contributions to the world. And what a discovery it was. There he was, the high and mighty John Montague, Fourth Earl of Sandwich, sitting daintily at his gambling table when he realises it’s in fact lunchtime! The Earl is faced with a dilemma. Give up his gambling or starve? Suddenly, the Earl is inspired and orders his servants to simply pile all the food between two pieces of bread. Easy enough to eat while gambling, and a delightful snack, too, he thinks. He names his wondrous creation after himself, of course.

Coca-Cola
Would you believe that Coke was actually meant to be a remedy for headaches? Well, it’s true. A long time ago, a doctor was carefully working on a new headache medicine. He wanted it not only to taste good, but also to feel good. He finally perfected it and sent it for approval. When the approvers were inspecting it, they realised that the medicine tasted better than it worked. They then put in some carbonated water, changed it a little more, and introduced it worldwide as, Coca-Cola, a new soft drink!

Frisbees
How many people do you know who toss around a pie tin for fun? Well, it might have been a lot if you had lived before the Frisbee was invented. College kids used to play catch with pie tins for fun. There are two crusty schools concerning Frisbee’s origins: the Pie-Tin School and the Cookie-Tin School, each camp holding devoutly to its own argument. The Pie-Tin School claims that Yale students bought Frisbie Pie Company’s (a popular Bakery of ole, renown for its special baked goodies) pies and tossed the prototype all over Eli’s campus. These early throwers would exclaim ‘Frisbie’ to signal the catcher. And well they might, for a tin of Frisbee is something else again to catch. The Cookie-Tin School followers, although agreeing on these details, insist that the true, original prototype was the cookie-tin lid that held the goodness of Frisbie’s sugar cookies.

Velcro
In the early 1940s, Swiss inventor George de Mestral was walking his dog. When he got home, he noticed his dog’s coat and his pants were covered with cockleburrs. When he took a closer look under the microscope he discovered their natural hook-like shape.

He recognised the potential for a new fastener, but it took him eight years to perfect the invention. Eventually he developed two strips of nylon fabric, one containing thousands of small hooks, just like the burrs, and the other with soft loops, just like the fabric of his pants. When the two strips were pressed together, they formed a strong bond, but one that’s easily separated, lightweight, durable, and washable. Voila Velcro!

The post-it note
No one got the idea to create post-it notes and then stayed up nights to invent it. A man named Spencer Silver was working in the 3M research laboratories in 1970 trying to find a strong adhesive. Silver developed a new adhesive, which stuck to objects, but could easily be lifted off. It was super weak instead of super strong. No one knew what to do with the stuff, but Silver didn’t discard it.

Then four years later, another 3M scientist named Arthur Fry was singing in the church’s choir. He used markers to keep his place in the hymnal, but they kept falling out of the book. Remembering Silver’s adhesive, Fry used some to coat his markers. Success! 3M began distributing Post-it Notes nationwide in 1980, ten years after Silver developed the super weak adhesive.

Bubble gum
What Mr. Diemer was supposed to be doing, back in 1928, was working as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia; what he wound up doing in his spare time was playing around with new gum recipes. But this latest brew of Walter Diemer’s was unexpectedly different. It was less sticky than regular chewing gum. It also stretched more easily. The 23-year-old, Walter Diemer, saw the bubbles. He saw the possibilities.

Before long, the folks at Fleer were marketing Diemer’s creation at a penny per, and Diemer himself was teaching salesmen to blow bubbles, to demonstrate exactly what made this gum different from all other gums. Dubble Bubble, they called it. It bestrode the bubble-gum landscape unchallenged for years.

He never received royalties for his invention, his wife told the newspapers, but he didn’t seem to mind; knowing what he’d created was reward enough. “He was terrifically proud of it,” his wife explained. “He would say to me: ‘I’ve done something with my life. I’ve made kids happy around the world.’ How many people can make that claim?”

Superglue
Superglue, or Krazy Glue, is actually a substance called ‘cyanoacrylate’. Dr. Harry Coover accidentally discovered it twice, the first time in 1942, when he was trying to develop an optically clear plastic for gun sights and the second time, nine years later, when he was trying to develop a heat-resistant polymer for jet canopies. On both occasions his new product proved to be too sticky for the job, in fact he got into trouble when he stuck together and ruined a very expensive pair of glass lenses. Finally he realised his super sticking glue might have a use and in 1958 it was marketed as Superglue.

Cellophane
Back in 1908 Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist working for a French textile firm, was trying to make his fortune with a stain-proof tablecloth. He got the stain-proof part right, but the fortune never came. Apparently people liked stains on their tablecloths. Fortunately Jacques had a ‘Eureka’ moment and realised the potential of his product to package food. After all it was airtight and waterproof. But it was another ten years before he perfected the machine to produce his cellophane.

The microwave
Like many of today’s great inventions, the microwave oven was a by-product of another technology. It was during a radar-related research project around 1946 that Dr. Percy Spencer, a self-taught engineer with the Raytheon Corporation, noticed something very unusual. He was testing a new vacuum tube called a magnetron, when he discovered that the candy bar in his pocket had melted.

This intrigued Dr. Spencer, so he tried another experiment. This time he placed some popcorn kernels near the tube and he watched as the popcorn sputtered, cracked and popped all over his lab.

The next morning, scientist Spencer decided to put the tube near an egg. Spencer was joined by a curious colleague, and they both watched as the egg began to tremor and quake. The curious colleague moved in for a closer look just as the egg exploded and splattered hot yolk all over his amazed face. Spencer’s face lit up with a logical scientific conclusion: the melted candy bar, the popcorn, and now the exploding egg, were all attributable to exposure to low-density microwave energy. Thus, if an egg can be cooked that quickly, why not other food? Experimentation began...

Dr. Spencer fashioned a metal box with an opening into which he fed microwave power. Dr. Spencer had invented what was to revolutionise cooking, and form the basis of a multimillion-dollar industry - the microwave oven.

Windshields
Safety glass, the kind that doesn’t splinter on impact, is everywhere these days, but when Edouard Benedictus, a French scientist, was working in his lab at the turn of the last century there was no such thing. One day in 1903, he accidentally knocked a glass flask to the floor, heard it break, but was amazed to see that all the broken pieces still hung together. The flask had been full of a liquid plastic. It had evaporated, but a thin coat of the stuff got left behind and this is what was holding the flask together.

Around that time there was a series of car accidents in Paris as the French got to grips with traveling faster than horses, and the most common form of injury were cuts from shattered windshields. Edouard saw an immediate use for his discovery, but the car industry rejected this life-saving safety feature on the grounds of expense. It wasn’t until World War I, when his invention proved a great success for lenses in gas masks, that the automobile industry reversed it’s position, and safety glass’s major application became car windshields.

Penicillin
Now on the field of Medicine and science Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Of course, he wasn’t actually looking for it at the time. He was researching the flu. He noticed that one of his petri dishes had become contaminated with mould. He chose to investigate.

Whatever this intruder was, it was killing off the Staphylococcus bug – a bug causing everything from boils to toxic shock syndrome. Eventually he identified it as the fungus Penicillium notatum. Being a scientist, he thought long and hard about what to call this new chemical, a chemical released from the fungus Penicillium notatum.

Yes, he called it penicillin. Unfortunately, naturally occurring penicillin isn’t very stable and thus not very useful. Fleming had found a wonder drug, but couldn’t do much with it. Luckily just three years later two Oxford researchers created a stable form.

The pacemaker
In the late 1950s, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Buffalo named Wilson Greatbatch was working with cardiologists on a way to record heart sounds. One day, Greatbatch pulled the wrong resistor out of a box.

That simple device was ideal to become a pacemaker, which has been a lifesaver for everyone from Mother Teresa to Dick Cheney.

X-rays
X-Rays were discovered in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. He was actually studying cathode rays, used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs.

Willie wanted to know if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. He couldn’t, but by chance he noticed a glow appearing in his darkened laboratory several feet away. He soon realised rays of light were passing right through the cardboard.

He named these penetrated rays, X-rays and found that as well as penetrating solids they were useful at recording images of human skeletons on photographic negatives. Doctors soon adopted X-rays as a standard medical tool and in 1901 Röntgen took home one of the first Nobel prizes.

Insulin
Frederick G. Banting, a young Canadian doctor, and Professor John J.R. MacLeod of the University of Toronto shared a Nobel Prize in 1923 for their isolation and clinical use of insulin against diabetes. Their work with insulin followed from the chance discovery of the link between the pancreas and blood sugar levels by two other doctors on the other side of the Atlantic decades earlier.

In 1889, German physicians Joseph von Mering and Oscar Minkowski removed the pancreas from a healthy dog in order to study the role of the pancreas in digestion. Several days after the dog’s pancreas was removed, the doctors happened to notice a swarm of flies feeding on a puddle of the dog’s urine. On testing the urine, the doctors realised that the dog was secreting sugar in its urine, a sign of diabetes. Because the dog had been healthy prior to the surgery, the doctors knew that they had created its diabetic condition and thus understood the relationship between the pancreas and diabetes.

With more tests, von Mering and Minkowski concluded that a healthy pancreas must secrete a substance that controls the metabolism of sugar in the body. It was Banting and MacLeod who established that the mysterious substance was insulin and began to put it to use as the first truly valuable means of controlling diabetes.

Just imagine a world without these inventions…can’t even begin to conceive it, ha? Well, never underestimate the power of chance happenings and keep your mind constantly open and alert. Who knows you might even be the next Albert Einstein!!!

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