Chance plays an important role in bringing many innovations to fruition, but it鈥檚 rarely chance alone that does the trick. What matters is 鈥渟erendipity鈥�, a term coined in 1754 by the writer and politician Horace Walpole. He described it as a product of 鈥渁ccidents and sagacity鈥�.
It鈥檚 a safe bet that without the sagacity, many scientific and technological breakthroughs would not have turned out half as well as they did. Here are a few shining examples of serendipity at work.
Purple reign
Teenagers can be troublesome, and that was certainly the case with William Perkin. The 18-year-old chemistry student had big plans. In 1856, he worked over the Easter break to turn an organic chemical called toluidine into the antimalarial drug quinine.
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In his home lab in East London, he added a variety of substances to toluidine and a related chemical, aniline. The result was a series of sludges and solids, in colours ranging from dark brown to black. Then, while washing his flasks after one such experiment he noticed the water turned purple.
It was a happy accident. The stuff Perkins had created dyed cloth a vivid purple, at a time when permanent purple dyes were very costly. So, abandoning quinine, the teenager patented his dye and, with money from his wealthy father, built a factory. Perkins鈥檚 kick-started the entire synthetic dye industry.
Shatterproof
Dropping a glass flask is generally not a good idea. But one such mishap proved fortuitous for the chemist Edouard Benedictus because, although the flask was smashed, the shards of glass did not fly apart.
The year was 1903. The flask had held a quantity of an early plastic called cellulose nitrate, which had evaporated to leave a thin coat on the inside. This kept the glass shards together.
Weeks later, Benedictus reportedly read a newspaper article about people injured by flying glass in car accidents. He had a eureka moment and worked feverishly until he had created the first piece of Triplex safety glass 鈥� a thin layer of plastic sandwiched between two glass sheets.
He patented the idea in 1909, but the car industry wasn鈥檛 ready for it. The first large-scale use of safety glass was in gas masks during the first world war. Only after the war ended did cars begin to sport safety glass as standard.
Slippery customer
On 6 April 1938, Roy Plunkett was trying to create a new refrigerant at the New Jersey lab of chemicals company DuPont. But he was struggling with a tank of tetrafluoroethylene which wouldn鈥檛 release its payload of gas.
He checked that the valve was clear. Still no gas. So he sawed the tank open. What he found was a waxy white powder. As a chemist, he realised that the gas molecules had reacted with one another to create a polymer.
Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) turned out to be . It held back corrosive chemicals in the making of the first atomic bomb, and protected the space suits of Apollo astronauts. More recently, it has been used to coat heart valves because the body doesn鈥檛 reject it.
Its slipperiness even helps you out in the kitchen: PTFE also goes by the name Teflon.
Bulging planet
Equipment failures are usually a pain. But for James Christy, an astronomer at the US Naval Observatory in Washington DC, a breakdown in 1978 turned into a godsend.
He had placed a photographic plate of the sky around Pluto on to a machine which let astronomers track the movement of celestial objects. Pluto appeared elongated and blurred, and he was about to discard the plate when the machine broke down.
While it was being fixed, he had nothing to do but ponder what the plate showed. Only Pluto seemed to be bulging. To be on the safe side, he checked past images and found that some also showed an elongated Pluto.
Christy realised he might have found a moon, which he called Charon. Confirmation of the discovery came from predictions of mutual eclipses of Pluto and its moon. Sure enough, at these times the planet lost its bulge.
Blue trumps yellow
Jaundice in newborn babies is common and potentially dangerous. Caused by a build-up of bilirubin, which their liver cannot break down, it turns babies yellow.
It used to be routine for children to have blood transfusions to overcome severe jaundice. But in 1956, at Rochford Hospital in the UK changed that.
During the summer, nurse Jean Ward moved delicate infants out of the baby unit into the courtyard. One particularly fine day, she showed paediatrician Richard Dobbs a child who had been in the sun naked, and whose skin bore a triangular dark yellow patch. The patch wasn鈥檛 suntan, she said. The corner of a sheet had cast a triangular shadow on the baby; it was the rest of the baby鈥檚 skin that had lost its jaundiced colour.
Shortly afterwards, a blood sample from one of the jaundiced babies was erroneously left on the windowsill of the pathology lab before being tested. The level of bilirubin was way below what it should have been.
These two accidents led Hobbs and his colleague Richard Cremer to suggest that light or heat was breaking down the bilirubin. Through a series of experiments they showed that blue light was the essential ingredient. Today, blue lights are standard fixtures in neonatal units.
Read more: 鈥�The science of serendipity: Can we all become genius inventors?鈥�
