1.02 · Accidental Genius: Discoveries Nobody Planned

Accidental Genius: Discoveries Nobody Planned
Five famous accidents, and the people who were ready for them.

We like to imagine science as a straight road: a question, an experiment, an answer. The real road isn’t that simple. Many useful things exist because someone made a mistake, noticed something strange and didn’t ignore it. As the French scientist Louis Pasteur said, “chance favors only the prepared mind.”

In September 1928, the Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming came back from vacation to his London laboratory. A dish of bacteria had been left on his bench, and a mold was growing in it. Around the mold, the bacteria were dead: something in the mold had killed them. A tidier scientist would have washed the dish. Fleming didn’t: he studied it and called the substance penicillin. In the 1940s, it was turned into a medicine by a team at Oxford.

Seventeen years after Fleming’s discovery, a melted snack led to a new machine. In 1945, the American engineer Percy Spencer was testing a magnetron, a device that produces microwaves for radar. According to the famous story, he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Curious, he held some corn kernels near the magnetron, and they popped. As a result, his company built the first microwave oven.

Some failures turn into successes. In 1856, William Perkin, an eighteen-year-old student in London, was trying to make quinine, a medicine for malaria. The experiment didn’t work, and it left a dark, sticky mess in his flask. When he cleaned the flask with alcohol, the liquid turned bright purple. Because natural purple dyes were very expensive, his new color became a fashion hit, and a new industry grew from his mistake.

In November 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen was working with a glass tube covered in black cardboard. A few feet away, a screen coated with a special chemical began to glow. He didn’t know what was passing through the cardboard, so he called it “X-rays”: X for unknown. Within weeks, he had made an image of the bones in his wife’s hand. Soon X-rays were being used in hospitals.

Sometimes an accident has to wait for the right problem. In 1968, Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M, was trying to make a very strong glue. Instead, he made a weak one that peeled off and didn’t leave a mark. For years, 3M didn’t know what to do with it. Then his colleague Art Fry, who sang in a church choir, got tired of bookmarks falling out of his songbook. A weak glue was exactly what he needed. The result was the Post-it note, and billions have been sold since 1980.

These people weren’t simply lucky. If Fleming hadn’t been a careful observer, he would have thrown the dish away. If Percy Spencer hadn’t understood his machine, the melted chocolate would have been just a mess. Luck opened the door, but preparation walked through it.