Scrapbook: Serendipity

There is a wonderful word: serendipity. It refers to the accidental consequences of meetings or actions. Most often, these consequences are of the happy variety – though that, of course, depends on whether you are the sort of person who sees a glass as half full or half empty. As someone who frequently suffers the unfortunate unintended consequences of meetings or actions, I find myself unable to use that word very often.

Serendipitous inventions

Fortunately for many inventors, the serendipitous ‘half full’ scenario seems to prevail, giving us many excellent things produced entirely by mistake. Here are some examples. You might like to share some of these with your students, before setting them the activity on the photocopiable worksheet at the end. You can download a copy at the bottom of this page.

Crisps were accidentally invented in 1953, when a particularly demanding customer at the Moon Lake Lodge Resort in Saratoga Lake, New York, kept complaining that the restaurant’s chips were too thick and mushy. George Crum, the chef, sliced some potatoes wafer thin and then fried them until they were crisp and brown. He intended it as a joke, but the fault-finding customer loved them, and the crisp was born.

Microwave ovens were also an accidental invention. Percy LeBaron Spencer was an engineer at Raytheon, a company that manufactured products for the aerospace and defence industries. In 1946, he was working on a microwave-emitting magnetron – for use in radar – when he felt a strange sensation of heat in his trousers. Spencer paused in his work, and discovered that a peanut cluster bar in his pocket had melted. He quickly realised that it was the magnetrons that had caused this phenomenon, and within a year, he had filed a patent for his metal cooking box powered by microwaves.

John and Will Kellogg, the inventors of cornflakes apparently discovered the staple breakfast cereal when they accidentally left a pot of boiled grain on the stove for a number of days.

Champagne was first discovered by monks in the Champagne region of France. Living at high altitudes in this wine-producing area, they had plentiful access to all the best grapes. They found, however, that a problem arose when temperatures plummeted in winter: the fermentation process of the wine would stop temporarily – and when it began again in the spring, there would be an excess of carbon dioxide inside the wine bottles. This made it fizzy, which was considered undesirable and made the wine likely to break the bottles. In 1668, the Catholic Church decided that it was time to sort out the situation, and so they sent a monk who was an expert in wine production to fix the problem. His name was Dom Pierre Pérignon. However, by the end of the 17th century, people had decided that they actually enjoyed the fizziness, so Pérignon’s task changed into making the wine even fizzier, so creating the sparkling drink we know and love today.

Moving from the sublime to the rather less than sublime: there was once a pharmacist called Dr John Pemberton, who was trying to create a drink laden with cocaine and caffeine to help those addicted to drugs to wean themselves off them. The result was a certain well-known soft drink. The cocaine element remained in the drink for some decades before being removed, and gave rise to its name: Coca-Cola.

What do you do when you sell one of the most popular soft drinks on the planet? Change the formula, of course. That’s what the Coca-Cola company did in 1985. After being flooded with letters from angry customers who preferred the original taste, the company finally gave in and announced the return of Coca-Cola ‘classic’.

In the 16th century, a Dutch shipmaster wanted to make wine easier to transport. He decided to try heating it, to get rid of some of the liquid and concentrate the alcohol, with the intention of adding water to it once it arrived at its destination. However, what he discovered was that the concentrated wine tasted much better before it was watered down, and so he kept the full-strength brew, calling it brandewijn, meaning ‘burnt wine’ in Dutch. Brandy has now become an extremely sophisticated drink the world over.

A scientist called Spencer Silver, who worked for the American manufacturing company 3M, was researching strong adhesives when he came across quite the opposite: an adhesive that stuck lightly to surfaces but didn’t bond tightly to them. Silver initially had no idea what to do with his discovery, but years later another 3M scientist, Art Fry, came to him with the idea of using the adhesive to create a bookmark that could stick to paper without damaging it. Eventually, that bookmark became the Post-it note.

In 1943, an American navy engineer called Richard Jones was developing springs that could be used on ships to support and stabilise sensitive instruments in rough seas. He accidentally knocked one of his prototypes over. Instead of crashing to the floor, it gracefully sprang downward, and then righted itself after flopping around for some time. This gave him the idea of making a toy out of it. His wife called it a Slinky. Jones subsequently made a lot of money – and made stairs a lot more fun!

Quinine, the anti-malarial drug composed primarily of cinchona tree bark, was allegedly discovered accidentally by a member of one of the native tribes of South America. While suffering from malaria, a disease which makes sufferers extremely thirsty, the man accidentally consumed some cinchona bark – thought at the time to be poisonous – via a pool of water, and miraculously started to feel better almost immediately.

Though two women first filed a patent in 1901 for a ‘Tea-leaf holder’ made out of mesh, the invention of the modern tea bag is credited to tea merchant Thomas Sullivan. In 1908, Sullivan began shipping samples of his tea in small silk pouches. Although it wasn’t his intention for people to use these as tea bags, his customers did so, because they loved the convenience of not having to clean loose wet leaves from a teapot.

Engineers Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes did invent bubble wrap on purpose. However, they intended it to be used as wallpaper, not packing material. When their bubbly wallpaper failed to take off, the two entrepreneurs marketed it instead as greenhouse insulation and later, in 1960, as protective packaging.

Ironically, before being found trodden into the carpets of child-rearing homes everywhere, Play-Doh was first marketed as a cleaning product. The paste was originally developed as a way of cleaning stains from wallpaper, until it was discovered that it wasn’t really any good for that. The product was rescued by the children of many customers, who used it as a modelling clay for ornaments and other projects. By removing the compound’s cleansing agent and adding colours and a fresh scent, the manufacturers transformed their wallpaper saver into one of the most iconic toys of all time – and brought huge success to a company which had been heading for bankruptcy.

A French doctor named René-Théophile-Hyacinthe Laënnec working at a hospital in Paris invented the first stethoscope in 1816. Before its discovery, physicians used to tap their fingers on a patient’s chest in order to get clues about their condition. This proved to be a problem for this gentleman doctor when he needed to inspect a young female patient. Reluctant to embarrass the girl, he rolled up a sheet of paper to create a tube, which he then placed on her chest. He was surprised when this method actually facilitated an accurate diagnosis. This breakthrough led to the invention of the first stethoscope, albeit one made out of a wooden tube.

A dog invented Velcro. Well, maybe that’s not strictly true, but a dog did play an instrumental role. Swiss engineer George de Mestral was out on a hunting trip with his pet in 1948, when he noticed the annoying tendency of burrs (the prickly seed pods of certain plants) to stick to the dog’s fur – and his socks. Later, looking under a microscope, de Mestral observed the tiny ‘hooks’ that stick burrs to the looped fibres of fur and fabrics. De Mestral experimented for years with a variety of textiles to host the system of hooks and loops that makes Velcro work. He finally chose nylon, which had just been invented. However, it wasn’t until two decades later that NASA’s fondness for using Velcro for the fastenings of space suits popularised the technology.

Space race spin-offs

NASA has been responsible for many of the things we benefit from in our daily lives, but which are actually by-products of the space race. These include: cochlear implants for the deaf, infra-red ear thermometers, scratch-resistant lenses, 3D food printing, anti-icing systems for aircraft, improved radial tyres, shock absorbers for buildings, memory foam, enriched baby food, portable cordless vacuum cleaners, freeze drying and solar cells.

Unexpected consequences

1 We use the word serendipity to describe the unintended consequences of actions. There are many instances of times when the consequences have been good. For example, a number of inventions came about when the inventor was actually trying to invent something completely different. Look at the items in the box. How many of them do you know? Are there any that you use? What do you think the inventor was actually trying to invent?

2 Not all the consequences of our actions are good, however. Work in pairs. Student A: read Text A. Student B: read Text B. Do not read each other’s texts. When you have finished reading, tell your partner about your text, explaining what the original event/action was and what the consequences were.

Text A

That sinking feeling

In 1912, the ocean liner Titanic hit an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on her way to New York, and sank with the loss of over 1,500 lives; there were only 705 survivors. The high death toll was largely due to the fact that there were not enough lifeboats on board to take all the passengers. In 1915, as a direct result of the sinking of the Titanic, a new law said that any American ship of over 100 tons had to carry enough lifeboats to accommodate every passenger in the event of an emergency. Unfortunately, this did not have the intended effect of making every ship safer.

The SS Eastland was a badly-designed, ungainly vessel at the best of times. The extra weight of several additional lifeboats crammed onto her top deck turned her into an unstable death trap. On July 24, 1915, just yards from her moorings on the Chicago River, she tilted alarmingly, took on water, and rolled over in just 20 feet of water. More than 800 people lost their lives in this disaster. While the poor design of the ship and the owners’ failure to carry out tests were also to blame, it was the extra weight of the lifeboats that actually caused the Eastland to sink.

Save the sparrow!

In 1958, Mao Zedong launched China into what he called ‘the Great Leap Forward’. Over the course of five years, he intended to transform China from an agrarian society into an industrial powerhouse. As part of this plan, Mao set out to eradicate those species he considered to be unwanted pests. Flies, mosquitoes and rats all came into that category – but so did sparrows, because they ate seeds that could otherwise have been used to grow crops for human consumption.

China’s entire population was mobilised in Mao’s war against the sparrows and, within a few short years, the birds had been all but wiped out, with catastrophic results.

While it is true that sparrows did eat a small amount of seeds, their diet was mainly made up of insects. With the sparrows gone, the country was overrun by a plague of locusts. Entire crops were lost. Mao belatedly realised his mistake and reintroduced sparrows obtained from the Soviet Union, but by then, much of the damage was done. More than 20 million people starved to death in one of history’s most terrible famines, and although it is impossible to say how much of the disaster was caused by killing all the sparrows, the story does have an important environmental message for us all.

3 Think about a time when something you did had unexpected consequences (either good or bad). Tell your partner what happened.

Scrapbook compiled by Ian Waring Green