Serendipitous inventions and discoveries

[Fatima Martin]

Dear kids

Since we are on the topic of researching ground breaking experiments, why dont you look up on those inventions, which 'accidentally' made a big difference. The serendipitous discoveries...

Serendipity is when someone finds something that he wasn't expecting to find, or, happy discoveries.

To start with,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_Crowned_Night_Heron_-_Pilea...

Go to the above link, ........

Fatima Martin

[Taher Shabbir Kapadia]

Did you know that pacemaker was a serendipitous invention!!
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.
By these cases of serendipity millions of lives have been saved......! wow, That fascinates me!

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

Taher Bhai, did you know that Wilson Greatbatch held more than 350 patents and was a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He used Mallory mercuric oxide-zinc cells (mercury battery) for the energy source of the pacemaker(originally called Chardack-Greatbatch pacemaker). This patented innovation led to the Medtronic company of Minneapolis commencing manufacture and further development of cardiac pacemakers.

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

Come to think of it, one extremely famous discovery has completely slipped our minds. Gravity! Sir Isaac Newton discovered gravity completely by chance when an apple fell on his head. Now that is what I call being in the right place at the right time!

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

I would just like to add on to what I previously said- Newton utilized the findings of Galileo and other great scientists, of the time, to research and experiment to determine how the universe works. Using mathematics he calculated the force to keep the moon in orbit around the earth. He then compared that calculation to the force needed to cause the apple to fall downward. Allowing for the difference in distance and mass Newton was able to deduct that the forces were the same and the moon is held in its orbit by the gravitational pull of the earth.

[Amatullah Najmi]

Ummulkiram, Alexander Flemming shared the nobel prize with two other people, the Australian Nobel Laureate Howard Walter Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

I just came across another interesting discovery that was made by accident. Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist, was at the lab of the noted scientist Ira Remsen, trying to find new uses for coal tar, when he spilled a chemical derivative on his hands. That evening, at dinner with his wife, Fahlberg noticed that his rolls tasted sweet. He asked her if she had done something special. She had not, and he quickly realized that what he was tasting was the residue he'd spilled on himself at the lab earlier that day, and thus he came to discover what is known today as-Saccharin(artificial sweetener).

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

Percy LeBaron Spencer should be thanked profusely, for he introduced us to the ever-dependable kitchen help-the Microwave!

Amatullah Najmi said:

Even Percy LeBaron Spencer of the Raytheon Company was walking past a radar tube and he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket melted. Realizing that he might be on to a hot new product he placed a small bowl of popcorn in front of the tube and it quickly popped all over the room. Hundredes of millions of lazy cooks now have him to thank for their dull food!

[Amatullah Najmi]

In 1894, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. He and his brother Will Keith Kellogg were Seventh Day Adventists, and they were searching for wholesome foods to feed patients that also complied with the Adventists' strict vegetarian diet. When Will accidentally left some boiled wheat sitting out, it went stale by the time he returned. Rather than throw it away, the brothers sent it through rollers, hoping to make long sheets of dough, but they got flakes instead. They toasted the flakes, which were a big hit with patients, and patented them under the name Granose. The brothers experimented with other grains, including corn, and in 1906, Will created the Kellogg's company to sell the corn flakes
John Kellogg and Will Kellogg are truly thanked for making our breakfasts delicious yet so healthy!

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

Thank you Amatullah. I did not know about this one. Very interesting, but did you know that the Kellogg brothers did not invent the concept of the dry breakfast cereal. That honor belongs to Dr. James Caleb Jackson, who created the first dry breakfast cereal in 1863, which he called, "Granula".

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

This inspirational quote by the American physicist Joseph Henry is for everyone who dreams of succeeding in scientific fields, "The seeds of great discoveries are constantly floating around us, but they only take root in minds well prepared to receive them." My message to everyone reading this is," Follow your dreams with open arms and watchful eyes."

[zainab mustafa]

lolipop of ice lollies which every child enjoys was also an accidental discovery, and the story goes like this :The Popsicle was invented by an 11 year who kept it secret for 18 years. The inventor was Frank Epperson who, in 1905, left a mixture of powdered soda and water out on the porch, which contained a stir stick. That night, temperatures in San Francisco reached a record low. When he woke the next morning, he discovered that it had frozen to the stir stick, creating a fruit flavored ice treat that he humbly named the epsicle. 18 years later he patented it and called it the Popsicle.

[Alefiyah Kinana]

While researching serendipitous discoveries I came across the discovery of 'radioactivity', which was also found by accident.
In 1896 Henri Becquerel was using naturally fluorescent minerals to study the properties of x-rays, which had been discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Roentgen. He exposed potassium uranyl sulfate to sunlight and then placed it on photographic plates wrapped in black paper, believing that the uranium absorbed the sun’s energy and then emitted it as x-rays. This hypothesis was disproved on the 26th-27th of February, when his experiment "failed" because it was overcast in Paris. For some reason, Becquerel decided to develop his photographic plates anyway. To his surprise, the images were strong and clear, proving that the uranium emitted radiation without an external source of energy such as the sun. Becquerel had discovered radioactivity.