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

[Amatullah Najmi]

“I had dissected and prepared a frog in the usual way and while I was attending to something else I laid it on a table on which stood an electrical machine at some distance from its conductor and separated from it by a considerable space. Now when one of the persons present touched accidentally and lightly the inner crural nerves of the frog with the point of a scalpel, all the muscles of the legs seemed to contract again and again as if they were affected by powerful cramps.”

This is Galvani's own description of his first and absolutely accidental observation of what he called "animal electricity". Instead of forgetting the incident he didn't stop until he could repeat it. Galvani's experiments set the basis for modern neurophysiology. Nerves were not the fluid-filled channels that the mind of Descartes had earlier imagined but electrical conductors.

[Tasneem Moyyadi]

In 1907 shellac was used as insulation in electronics. It was costing the industry a pretty penny to import shellac, which was made from Southeast Asian beetles, and at home chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland thought he might turn a profit if he could produce a shellac alternative.

Instead his experiments yielded a moldable material that could take high temperatures without distorting.

Baekeland thought his "Bakelite" might be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear that the product had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived from Bakelite, is used for everything from telephones to iconic movie punch lines.

[Tasneem Moyyadi]

when student Jamie Link was doing her doctoral work in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, one of the silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward, however, that the tiny pieces still functioned as sensors.

The resulting "smart dust" won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003. These teensy sensors can also be used to monitor the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical or biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumor cells in the body.

[Yusuf Juzer]

Teflon was invented accidentally by Roy Plunkett of Kinetic Chemicals in 1938. Plunkett was attempting to make a new CFC refrigerant, the perfluorethylene polymerized (say that 3 times fast!) in a pressurized storage container. In this original chemical reaction, iron from the inside of the container acted as a catalyst. In 1954, French engineer Marc Grégoire created the first pan coated with Teflon non-stick resin under the brand name of Tefal after his wife urged him to try the material, that he’d been using on fishing tackle, on her cooking pans. Teflon is inert to virtually all chemicals and is considered the most slippery material in existence – second only to the political wrangling of President George Bush.

[Tasneem Moyyadi]

yusuf, i have recently read, when heating pans treated with PTFE to very high temperatures. When heated to over 300 degrees Celsius / 572 degrees Fahrenheit (a temperature you won't likely reach intentionally on your stove or in your oven), PTFE releases fumes. These fumes can cause an illness resembling the flu, with symptoms including tightening of the chest, mild coughing, nausea, and sweats. It's called polymer fume fever, and it's rare.

[Tasneem Moyyadi]

Harry Brearley was working to prevent corrosion in rifle barrels when he accidentally invented something interesting. Brearley had a background in steel. His father was a steel melter and young Harry had followed his father into the industry. Through years of private study and night school he became an expert in the analysis of steel and in 1908, at the age of 37, was given the opportunity to set up the Brown Firth Laboratories for research purposes where he was given the job of looking at improving rifle barrels. The problem: when the gun was fired, the heat and gases generated would quickly erode away the inner barrel. Brearley was given the task of finding a steel that would not erode away. Brearley made history on 13 August 1913 when his mix 0.24% carbon and 12.8% chromium with steel created the first ever stainless steel. And although Brearley didn’t immediately realise what he had created, the resistance of the metal to acids such as vinegar and lemon juice soon pointed him in the right direction. At that time cutlery was made from silver or carbon steel, or plated with nickel. None of which were resistant to rust, so Brearley launched his ‘rustless steel’, later renamed as the more catchy

stainless steel.

[Amatullah Najmi]

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!
Percy LeBaron invented the dependable kitchen appliance- the microwave!

[Ummulkiram Khambati]

 

I just came across this weird discovery that I would like to share. Coronado(leader of an expedition) set out to find the golden city of Cibola (in search of wealth), but instead discovered Kansas.