Invented by Accident

goes off. But in truth, innovation often follows in the footsteps of other discoveries, right because our subject typically stands upon the shoulders of giants, and they in turn stand on other giant shoulders and so on all the way back into history. It's very rare that we come across an invention that truly comes out of an However, sometimes innovation comes to us by way of a whipsie. That's

why this episode's all about accidental inventions. You know, maybe the inventor was trying to do something else, but due to a misunderstanding or a mistake or an oversight, they created something else. That's kind of how our first story unfolds. So doctor William great Batch was an engineer. He was born in nineteen nineteen, and, like many young boys back in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he became fascinated with radio technology. During World War Two, he joined the Navy. Afterward,

he attended Cornell University. He received a Bachelor of Science degree and then pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Buffalo, focusing on electrical engineering. Now, while studying at Buffalo, he also served as an assistant professor, and it was at the University of Buffalo in nineteen fifty six when doctor great Batch had his whipsie. He was attempting to build a device that would monitor a person's heartbeat. They would just listen for your heartbeat and keep track of how

fast or slow it was going. But doctor gray Batch had chosen the wrong kind of resistor to go into his device. So, a resistor is a component within electrical circuits, and its purpose is to regulate the flow of electrical current. So it's a limiter. It resists the flow of current. Now, the resistor will allow some current to go through as

long as it's greater than what it can resist. So the amount depends upon the resistor itself, and there are lots of different kinds of resistors for different levels of electrical current, and doctor great Batch accidentally used a resistor that allowed more current to go through than he had intended. Now, because of this, the device he created didn't just record heart beats. It would generate electric pulses. Because doctor great

Batch considered his goof he realized something. These pulses were similar to the rhythm of a healthy heart. So perhaps his device could actually deliver electric pulses on purpose and give mild shocks to a heart that would cause it to contract. He could create a device that would assist a heart to beat at a healthy rhythm, and thus

doctor great Batch invented the pacemaker. Now, clearly it took a little while to go from an accidental discovery to creating a true medical device that doctors could implant in a patient, but by nineteen sixty great Batch's invention was helping a patient's heart beat properly. Now, I'm sure someone at some point would have figured out a similar means to help regulate heartbeats using an electronic device, but we got the invention early, all because of a little mistake.

Here's another example of an inventor who was working to solve one problem only to accidentally solve a problem that he wasn't even thinking about. Back in the nineteen thirties, a Swiss engineer named Walter Jaeger wanted to create a gadget that could detect poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, for example, and he had personal reasons for doing this. One of his closest friends had died in a poison gas accident

inside a laboratory. Now, obviously being able to alert people to the presence of a dangerous gas that they otherwise might not be able to detect, like carbon monoxide has no odor, right, so you can't really detect it on your own. Well, obviously this would have a huge benefit if you could have a detector that could pick up on the presence of such a gas. But Jaeger was running into a bit of a problem. You see. His

approach was to create an ionization detector. So ionization is when an atom either loses or gains an electron, and that means your atom becomes a charged particle. So typically when we talk about atoms, we're talking about particles that have an equal number of negatively charged electrons and positively charged protons, so on the whole, the atom has a

neutral charge because these posite charges cancel each other out. However, if the atom were to shed an electron, then it would have fewer electrons than protons and it would have a net positive charge. If it were to gain an electron, well, then it has a net negative charge. And these are ions. Now, a flow of ions can carry an electric charge. You likely have heard about plasma, which is an ionized gas. Sometimes we talk about that as like the fourth state

of matter. Well, the ionization detector the Jaeger was working on had two charged plates inside of it. Then these charge plates would attract ions. And because we know opposites attract, a negatively charged plate attracts the positively charged ions toward it. The positively charged plate will attract negatively charged ions toward it.

And Jaeger's hypothesis was that this poison gas would interact with those ions and bind with them and thus impede their flow, which would alter their electric current running through the device. And this change in electric current would then activate an alarm and cause a light to light up. So if something were to interfere with that electric current, the detector would go off. So the problem was Jeger wasn't seeing any results. He had been testing and testing,

and it just wasn't working. The amount of gas that would actually make it into the detector didn't seem to be sufficient enough to make an appreciable change in the ionic flow, so nothing was happening. So he got discouraged and he decided he was gonna light up a cigarette and smoke away in frustration. And to his surprise, shortly after he started puffing away, the alarm went off. Yeger discovered that while the poison gas wasn't setting off his alarm,

the smoke from his cigarette could do it. So Jaeger accidentally invented the world's first smoke detector. Now, other engineers would improve upon Yeager's initial design to make it more effective, and many modern SPA detectors work by using radioactive material inside them. But don't worry, it's a very small amount of radioactive material. It's also very well shielded. But it's

this that generates the ions in the first place. Anyway, Boom, we get smoke detectors because a Swiss physicist had to have a cigarette when his invention wasn't working properly. Speaking of booms, let's talk dynamite. Now. I think I might be stretching the word technology a little bit here, But then considering that the guy who invented dynamite would go on to fund to prestigious award that recognizes achievements and

fields that include technology, I think it's forgivable. So this is the story of Alfred Nobel, a Swiss engineer who is trying to figure out if there might be a safe way to leverage the rather spectacularly explosive power of nitroglycerin for useful purposes such as, you know, mining and that kind of stuff. The problem was that nitroglycerin is awfully unstable. It's an oily liquid, it's doless. You wouldn't think it could cause an explosion, but you'd be dead

wrong there, perhaps literally now. No Bell had worked in the lab that actually discovered nitroglycerin, and his compatriot who was responsible for that discovery, was skeptical that it could ever do anything useful, but no Bell had higher hopes. But here's how nitroglycerin works. It contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,

and nitrogen, and these are bound together in molecules. But if those molecular bonds should break, then the molecules will shift to form new molecules and they'll create stuff like carbon monoxide and other types of gases. Now, these gases will bubble and start breaking other molecular bonds, so it speeds up this molecular change at a rate that's so fast you get a massive release of energy all at

the same time. Essentially you get an explosion. And the really bad news is that just knocking into the stuff could be enough to trigger the reaction. It might not, but it could. No Bell was attempting to make nitroglycerin a useful tool for industry again, particularly in stuff like mining or maybe clearing land for things like building tunnels, but the unstable nature of the chemical remained a huge concern, and tragically, there were accidents that led to fatalities, including

Nobel's own brother back in Stockholm in a lab. So no Bell needed a solution not just to save his own reputation, but to prevent future catastrophes, and he hoped that by mixing nitroglycerin with the dust of otherwise solid material like wood or brick, could decrease its volatility, so he tried lots of different stuff, but diatomaceous earth turned

out to do the trick. And while I can't say for certain that this discovery was completely incidental or accidental, it shows up in a lot of articles as an accidental invention. I'm not so sure about that, but I'm including it here anyway. Anyway, dinamacious earth is made up of skeletons, not human skeletons, but diatom skeletons. So diatoms are these single celled algae, and their skeletons are cellular walls composed of silica. So really it's kind of like

silica powder. No Bell had no reason to believe that silica powder would be a great match for nitroglycerin, but he was desperate to find something, so maybe this is the by chance that we're looking for. Anyway, he discovered that mixing nitroglycerin with silica created a kind of putty or paste, and you could shape the stuff into rods, and using a blasting cap that no Bell also had invented,

you could create dynamite. The playto like texture meant that nitroglycerin couldn't form bubbles when it got bumped into so it could no longer initiate that runaway chain reaction that would make you know, explosions happen with the liquid nitroglycerin stuff and the rod shape mean that you could do things like drill a hole in a rock face and sort of stick a dynamite into the hole, light the fuse and get the heck out of dodge, and boom,

you remove a whole lot of rock. No Bell had high hopes that his invention would create an enormous benefit for humans, but as he neared the end of his day, he worried about his legacy, partly because a French newspaper published his obituary a little bit prematurely. Turned out, Nobel's brother Ludwig had passed away, and the reporter assumed it was Alfred Nobel who had shuffled off the mortal coil.

And this is when Nobel decided to dedicate a large amount of his enormous fortune toward establishing a trust that would reward those who made significant contributions to humanity. And that's how we got the Nobel Prizes. What a blast. All right, We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, We've got some more accidental inventions. We're back. So this next one I'm sure I've talked about before,

but it's a fun one. The story follows Richard T. James, and he was enlisted in the Navy and served as an engineer working in shipyards in Philadelphia during World War Two. And James was trying to solve a tricky problem. See, warships create a lot of vibration. They have these powerful engines that are on the ocean, which has lots of you know, waves. Obviously, also they tend to have these really big guns that occasionally fire great big shells that

cause vibrations. But they also have lots of sensitive instruments on board, and sensitive instruments don't mix really well with violent vibrations. And so mister James was trying to figure out a way to stabilize these instruments and kind of isolate them from all the vibrations. His solution was to create a tension spring, but he needed to find just the right amount of tension. If it was too stiff, then it would almost be like there was no stabilization

at all. And if it wasn't stiff enough, the darn instruments would be flopping around all over the place. So the story goes, he was working at his desk and he had all these different kinds of springs stacked all over the desk. When one of them, which had just the right amount of tension, tipped over. Now, instead of just bouncing all over the place or whatever, it walked, the top end of the spring moved in an arc, and gravity would pull that top down as well as

the rest of the spring along. And as the bottom of the spring got pulled up, it became the new top and likewise would move in an arc, and the process would continue for as long as the spring could stroll downward until it hit the floor, and then just would end up writing itself and stopping. And James, in his effort to stabilize naval instruments, had accidentally invented the slinky.

His wife Betty came up with the name. She was responsible for a lot of very smart business decisions, and James would work to find just the right type of wire intention to replicate his happy accident, and he settled on eighty feet of wire that was coiled into almost one hundred loops. In nineteen forty five, he began to sell the slinky through a new company that he had founded, and they sold like hotcakes. All it took was a simple demonstration and they would fly, or at the very

least walk off the shelves. The invention story gets pretty weird after that. James would later become involved in a religious group as the popularity of the slinky was starting to fly lag, and he would leave his family behind to go off to Bolivia and spent most of his money with this religious group. His wife, Betty, actually rescued the slinky business and actually successfully brought slinky back to popularity. So it's good to see that with the wise leadership

of Betty, the toy could you know spring back? Now? Finally, I would like to talk about chocolate bars, not the invention of chocolate bars. It's just that chocolate bars play an important part in this story, all right. So again, the year is nineteen forty five, big year for accidental inventions, and a feller by the name of Percy Spencer was

working with radar systems. Now. One of the components that Spencer worked around was a magnetron, which I know sounds kind of like a transformer, but while there is more than meets the eye, it's actually a device that emits short electromagnetic waves, specifically in the microwave range. So in many ways it's similar to a cathode ray tube, which is the light bulb like device that's inside old television sets.

So cathode ray tubes generate a stream of electrons which then collide with phosphor on the backside of a TV screen and cause that phosphor to illuminate. But a magnetron generates something else again, it generates microwaves. And Spencer was working near magnetrons and noticed something his pocket had become sticky. That's because he had a chocolate bar in his pocket and he was meaning to snack on it later, but

something had caused the chocolate to melt. Now, the lab's temperature wasn't really warm enough to do that, so Spencer theorized that the microwaves generated by magnetrons had heated up the chocolate bar someway that got the wheels turning. So Spencer's accidental discovery would lead to the invention of microwave ovens. The microwaves emitted by the magnetron will bounce around inside ovens.

Because these ovens are coated with metal, they reflect the microwaves, and so eventually the microwaves will hit the food inside the microwave, and at that point the microwaves will get absorbed by water molecules in the food, and those water molecules will begin to vibrate from absorbing this energy. That vibration causes friction, and friction, as we all know, creates heat.

And so by vibrating these water molecules inside food and making them vibrate super fast and create a lot of friction, you reheat the food or heat up the food, and it does it very quickly. And this is all because of a melted chocolate bar in a radar laboratory. Now, it's possible that every single one of the inventions I've mentioned today would have come about on their own time through some other means, that someone would have discovered it

at some point. But I think the lesson that we should take from this is that the next time you have a goofam up, you should really pay attention, because you might just be on to something anyway. I always think that it's fascinating to learn about inventions. As I said, a lot of inventions, as you read about them, you realize, oh, this is an iteration a refinement of a previous invention,

and you have to go back a bit. And then when you go back a bit, you realize, oh, well, this in turn was built on top of some other principles, so you got to go back further. So whenever you talk about the history of any invention, you are running the risk of actually diving super deep into history until you just have to make an executive decision of where you cut it off. So I hope you enjoyed this short episode about some of the accidental inventions that we

have been lucky enough to experience over the years. I'm sure I'll do more episodes along these lines in the future. There are things I didn't cover. I didn't cover things like velcrow or silly putty, which is another famous accidental invention, so maybe we'll chat about those in a future case. I maybe we'll talk about some purposeful ones in the future as well. In the meantime, I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again. Really, So,

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