Author: Brandon A. Weber / Source: Big Think
- All were “discovered” by accident
- The term “Eureka!” actually became the state motto of California during the gold rush
There are times when a researcher, scientist, or just a common, everyday tinkerer makes something that wasn’t quite what he or she had in mind … and it turns a mistake into a useful, real invention, sometimes ubiquitous across the world. Here are seven:
1. The Pacemaker
An artificial pacemaker (serial number 1723182) from St. Jude Medical, with electrode.
“I’m beginning to think I may not change the world, but I’m still trying,” Wilson Greatbatch, Inventor, 2007.
In fact, Mr. Greatbatch had indeed changed the world, after having invented a device by mistake that would save the lives of millions of people.
He’d been working on a device to record the rhythm of a human heartbeat. In 1956, as he was trying to finish the circuit where he worked at the University of Buffalo as an assistant professor, he accidentally grabbed the wrong sized resistor and used it instead. This was one of those fortuitous accidents, as it turned out; the intermittent electrical impulses that the device created because of that final resistor were very much like the sounds of a human heartbeat.
Seeing the value of such a device, he immediately set to work trying to make it small enough to fit inside a human. There were other research labs doing the same, so he worked urgently to get it done — documented in the book he wrote about the experience, “The Making of the Pacemaker.” His 2-inch device was debuted in testing on dogs in 1958 at the Buffalo Veterans Administration, and eventually, his device was licensed by Medtronic, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Greatbatch, seeing the biggest limitation of his pacemaker device hinge on the 2-year battery life, later acquired the rights to a lithium iodide battery, which would make his design last 10 years or more, and he redesigned it — the original version was potentially “explosive” — and later, his redesigned battery was adapted in countless medical devices, and still is.
2. Corn Flakes
Close-up, Corn Flakes cereal
The Kellogg brothers — John and Will — both worked in a Battle Creek, Michigan sanitarium (what they used to call long-term care). In fact, John was physician-in-chief.
Their religion, Seventh-Day Adventist, preached vegetarianism and avoidance of alcohol as central concepts; as such, the Kellogg brothers sought to find ways to help patients through nutrition.
That’s why they had some dough on hand one day, made up of whole wheat, and accidentally let it dry too much. When that dried mixture was in the process of being flattened, it separated into pieces, or flakes. Like they always did with their doughs and bread mixtures, they heated that in an oven to see what would happen.
Voila!
A few years later, the base was changed to corn from wheat, and Corn Flakes were born.
3. Microwave Ovens
Man in wheelchair preparing to use microwave
Since they were accidentally invented in about 1945 these devices have changed the way we live.
(Flashback to my college days … after chugging down too many beers at the local bar where bodies were squeezed into tiny spaces and conversations were always shouted into ears, we’d always hit the 7-Eleven and get cheaply-made microwaved burritos. They didn’t suck. Good times.)
But I digress.
Percy L. Spencer, widely known as an electronics genius after his stint in the Navy in WWI, was working for Raytheon in 1939, and his ideas and knowledge about radar helped the company win a government contract to develop the new technology and deploy it as “combat radar.” Especially as WWII was on the horizon, this was actually the second highest priority project for the military only after the Manhattan Project.
Radar arrays use magnetrons — invisible, super-energetic, short-wavelength radio waves that travel at the speed of light —…
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