Accidents May Happen*

by Charlotte Jones

  If you couldn’t stand the pain (and who could?), there were several options. You could be:

  frozen,

  beaten senseless,

  asphyxiated,

  pumped full of alcohol,

  or given a piece of wood to bite down on.

  But in the 1800s things changed.

  New gases had been discovered—ether and nitrous oxide, which was called laughing gas because it made people who inhaled it sing, laugh, act silly, or fight. At first these two gases were mainly used for entertainment at parties called ether frolics or laughing gas parties.

  Also, so-called professors traveled from town to town giving public lectures. They administered ether or nitrous oxide to a volunteer, and that person’s hilarious behavior made the audience laugh.

  At one of these demonstrations an accident occurred. In 1844 in Hartford, Connecticut, a “professor” named Colton asked for someone to inhale nitrous oxide. Samuel Cooley volunteered, but he soon became violent, tripped, and fell. When he went back to his seat, someone noticed that Cooley was bleeding from his fall.

  Horace Wells, a dentist, had come to the demonstration with Cooley. He realized that Cooley felt no pain from his fall, and he reasoned that the gas might deaden patients’ pain while he performed dental work.

  Wells began testing the gases. He breathed some nitrous oxide and had a fellow dentist pull one of his teeth. The procedure went so well that Wells decided to give a demonstration at a university. He was probably excited and eager to prove the success of the gas. After giving a patient some gas, Wells began to remove the patient’s tooth. The gas had not taken effect, and the patient screamed out in pain. The audience of students hissed and drove Wells away in disgrace.

  Wells, however, still felt confident that the gas would be effective, and he continued to use it in his practice.

  Another dentist, William T. G. Morton, learned of Wells’s use of nitrous oxide. He tried some on his patients. Then his partner, Charles T. Jackson, suggested using ether. So Morton extracted a tooth from a patient on September 30, 1846, using ether.

  Still another physician, Dr. Crawford W. Long of Jefferson, Georgia, said he had seen a slave lose consciousness—yet breathe normally—after inhaling ether. Long claimed that on March 30, 1842, he used ether as an anesthesia while removing a tumor from a patient’s neck. He continued using ether on patients but never publicized his discovery.

  So four doctors claimed to have first used ether or nitrous oxide to dull pain. The U.S. Congress offered $100,000 to the person who discovered anesthesia. But since it could not decide who should receive the award, Congress never paid the money.

  The American Dental Association and the American Medical Association finally decided that Horace Wells was the discoverer of anesthesia in the United States.

  INOCULATION

  Louis Pasteur was one of the most brilliant chemists of the nineteenth century. In 1880 he helped the French chicken industry battle chicken cholera. It was a terrible disease. Chickens that contracted it soon had drooping wings, feathers standing on end, and tottery legs. A chicken would stagger around until it collapsed, flutter its wings, and die.

  Pasteur grew the organism that caused the cholera and stored the germs in bottles. One day he fed some of the germs to a few chickens. He expected them to get sick and die. The chickens acted a little sickly for a while, but then they recovered.

  The germs had been growing for about six weeks, and Pasteur figured they must be stale. So he fed a fresh crop of the germs to the same birds.

  Nothing happened.

  Pasteur fed some of the same fresh crop of germs to a different set of chickens. All of those birds got sick and died, as he had expected.

  Pasteur had discovered by accident that the “old” crop of germs had somehow changed. They no longer caused serious disease, and they protected the chickens from getting the disease later, even when the chickens were exposed to fresh germs.

  Pasteur quickly realized that the same thing would happen with bacteria affecting humans, and in 1881 he developed the anticholera vaccine.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • Bacteriologists (people who study germs) call the process by which germs change so that they no longer cause serious disease attenuation.

  • In 1885 Louis Pasteur discovered the rabies vaccine.

  QUININE

  Quinine isn’t something most Americans keep in their medicine cabinets. But quinine has had a major influence on the world of medicine.

  Quinine is the drug used to treat patients with malaria, a disease spread by certain kinds of mosquitoes. Legend says quinine was discovered by accident in the early 1600s.

  A Spanish soldier in Peru had an extremely high fever and chills caused by malaria. His comrades left him behind to die. The high fever made him so thirsty that he crawled to a nearby shallow pond to drink. Although the pond water tasted bitter, he drank it anyway, then fell asleep.

  When he awoke, his fever had gone down. He rejoined his military company and told them of the miraculous pond water. They examined the water and discovered that its bitter taste came from the bark of a log lying in the pool. The soldier had accidentally discovered that the bark of the cinchona tree could cure malaria.

  For almost two hundred years, the bark of the cinchona tree was made into a powder and used to cure malaria. Today synthetic drugs are more often used to treat the disease.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • Malaria has killed more people than all of the wars throughout recorded history.

  • Our nation’s capital used to be a dangerous place to live in the summer because of the malaria-carrying mosquitoes that swarmed around the Potomac River. In 1881 Mrs. James Garfield (wife of the president) was bitten by the mosquitoes and came down with malaria.

  • Today it is estimated that between 300 million and 500 million people get malaria each year, and as many as 2 million people die from the disease annually. The situation is getting worse, since the new strains of the disease resist the known cures.

  ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS

  Saccharin

  Saccharin is a substitute for sugar. It’s more than just sweet. It’s three hundred times sweeter than sugar!

  Saccharin has no nutritional value, but it can be used to sweeten food for people who cannot have sugar, such as people with diabetes and people on weight-loss diets.

  Saccharin was discovered more than a hundred years ago … by accident!

  In 1879 Constantin Fahlberg was a student working under Professor Ira Remsen, a brilliant chemist. The lab was at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. One day Fahlberg was experimenting with antiseptics and food preservatives. He was working with several chemicals, including toluene.

  That evening at supper he noticed that his food tasted sweet. He soon realized that the sweetness was on his fingers.

  He returned to his laboratory and tested everything he had been working with. Finally he discovered the combination of chemicals that was the source of the sweetness. Later the mixture was named saccharin, and it was sold to the public in 1900.

  In 1970 saccharin was found to cause bladder cancer in laboratory mice and was declared unsafe for humans.

  Sucaryl

  Sucaryl is a trademark for an artificial sweetener that was discovered in a similar accident.

  Michael Sveda, a chemistry graduate student, was working in a laboratory at the University of Illinois in 1937. He was trying to develop a new drug that would kill bacteria.

  One day Sveda picked up a cigarette from the counter and noticed that it tasted extremely sweet. He checked the containers he had been working with until he found the one that had produced the sweetness. It was calcium cyclamate.

  Calcium cyclamate was later named Sucaryl and was made available to the public in 1950. Like saccharin, it is used by people who should not have sugar.

  NutraSweet

  Aspartame, or NutraSweet, was discovered by Dr. James Schlatter. Schlatter was
working for a drug company in 1965, trying to develop a new drug to treat ulcers, when he heated a batch of chemicals and accidentally spilled some.

  Later he licked his finger to pick up a piece of paper and noticed a strong sweet taste. He realized the taste must have come from the chemical he was working with.

  He had just invented—accidentally—NutraSweet.

  5. Handy Around the House

  “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”

  —Al Bernstein

  AVON COSMETICS

  Books. That’s what David H. McConnell was selling door-to-door in 1886. He had no intention of starting a cosmetics company.

  But one day McConnell had a great idea. He decided to offer a small sample of perfume to the women who answered the door, as a bonus for listening to his sales demonstration. (He made the perfume himself—with some advice from a local pharmacist.)

  McConnell was amazed at how quickly the perfume samples got the customers’ attention. Soon they were more popular than the books!

  McConnell abandoned the books and established the California Perfume Company—which was not located in California, but in New York City. The company introduced a line of “Avon” cosmetics in 1929 and officially changed its name to Avon Products, Inc., in 1939.

  BUTTONS ON JACKET SLEEVES

  Men’s and women’s jackets often have two, three, or four buttons on the sleeve near the wrist. But why?

  When handkerchiefs first came into use, they were expensive and mostly for show. Paper facial tissues had not yet been invented. So what did people use to blow their noses? Dainty ladies, sophisticated gentlemen, kings, and queens wiped their noses on their sleeves.

  Frederick the Great, King of Prussia, was disgusted by this custom. To break his soldiers of the habit, he ordered that buttons be sewn on the soldiers’ sleeves. Every time a soldier wiped his nose on his sleeve, the buttons gave him a good scratch.

  Today people are seldom tempted to wipe their noses on their sleeves, but those buttons are still there—just in case.

  Another story says that in the mid-1800s men’s and women’s sleeves were extremely long and wide. In cold weather the sleeves provided protection against the elements. But when the weather was warm, the cuffs were turned back. Buttons were added to the sleeves to keep the fabric folded back and out of the soup. The buttons became an accepted part of the garments, and they remained even after their original use was forgotten.

  CELLOPHANE

  You see a lot of cellophane at the grocery store. That clear stuff covering the raw hamburger is a type of cellophane. You also seal your friend’s birthday gift with cellophane tape.

  Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist, was not trying to make something to cover your pork chops in 1908. He worked in a French textile firm and was looking for a way to make a stainproof tablecloth. He tried coating the cloth with a thin sheet of viscose film. No one would buy the tablecloths, but Brandenberger realized that the sheet of film held possibilities.

  It took him ten years to develop a machine that would produce what he named cellophane. He patented the production process and called the company La Cellophane. The name came from combining “cello,” from cellulose, with “phane,” from the French word diaphane, which means transparent.

  Cellophane became available to the public in 1919. In 1927 a waterproof lacquer coating was developed that made it more useful. With the lacquer coating, cellophane could be used to package food, since it was airtight and waterproof.

  Today new products are being developed to replace cellophane plastics.

  DRY CLEANING

  If you drop ice cream on your T-shirt, you throw it in the washing machine. Spill milk on your jeans and they get washed.

  But if you splash prune juice on Aunt Bertha’s ostrich feathers or upset the bowl of beets on Grandmother’s antique linen tablecloth, a dry cleaner will have to clean up the mess.

  “Dry cleaning” sounds as if a huge fan blows the dirt out of the cloth, or maybe as if a vacuum cleaner sucks the dirt out. Not true. Dry cleaning is actually done with a liquid—a solvent. It’s called dry cleaning because it contains no water.

  Dry cleaning was discovered in 1825 when Jean-Baptiste Jolly upset an oil lamp in his Paris home, spilling the camphene (distilled turpentine). Afraid he had ruined his wife’s tablecloth, Jolly tried to wipe up the mess. But the more he rubbed, the brighter and cleaner the tablecloth became. A cloth dyer by trade, Jolly realized that he had discovered an amazing new cleaning process.

  In 1849 he offered the process at his factory. Soap-and-water cleaning would shrink, fade, or otherwise damage many fabrics, so Jolly called his new method dry cleaning.

  Since Jolly was using the oil from lamps, his cleaning method was dangerous. The oil could easily catch fire. It also left an unpleasant odor. People began experimenting with other solvents and improved Jolly’s first “dry cleaning” methods.

  Today there are more than forty thousand professional and coin-operated dry cleaning plants in the United States. People spend $2 billion each year on dry cleaning for their clothes, ostrich feathers, and other fabrics that need special care.

  DYES FOR FABRICS

  For more than five thousand years people colored their clothing, their baskets, their hair, their blankets. They used natural dyes to do it—dyes from plants, animals, and the earth.

  Then in 1856 a teenage chemistry student in England accidentally discovered synthetic dyes.

  Eighteen-year-old William Henry Perkin was conducting experiments in his home laboratory over Easter vacation. His professor had suggested he try to make a synthetic quinine by experimenting with coal tar.

  Perkin tried one combination but got a reddish brown sludge. When he tried again, the result was a black, sticky mess. But before he threw it out, he noticed that water or alcohol used to wash it out of the flask turned purple.

  This was a surprise. Fascinated by the color, he tested the purple solution and discovered that it would dye cloth. Perkin worked until he found a way to extract the purple dye from the black mixture. Over the following months, he patented his dye, built a factory, and established the world’s dye industry.

  And it all began with a chemistry experiment that didn’t produce quinine.

  MASONITE

  You probably push, shove, lean against, sit on, throw stuff on, or look at Masonite many times every day. And you probably don’t even realize what it is.

  Masonite is hardboard—a pressed wood. You might be sitting on some right now. It’s used for drawer bottoms, shelves, door facings, baby furniture, and outdoor signs. A form of it is used to make siding and roofing for houses.

  Masonite became Masonite strictly by accident.

  William H. Mason, who had been an associate of Thomas Edison, was probably about fifty years ahead of his time. In 1924 the waste at lumber mills disturbed him. The mills had huge incinerators that burned waste chips, slabs, and edgings.

  Paper mills didn’t want the waste wood. It contained too much bark. Factories that made insulation board didn’t want it. They could get other raw materials and didn’t want to bother with “waste” wood. So lumber mills saw no alternative but to burn the wood they couldn’t use.

  Mason believed that if he somehow “exploded” the waste wood into tiny fibers, the fibers could be useful. He devised a system: He loaded wood chips into a closed vessel, heated and pressurized the vessel, then jerked open an orifice. The chips exploded into fibers. Mason worked for months to perfect the system.

  But there was one problem: What was the stuff good for? Insulation board seemed the only practical use for the “exploded” wood chips.

  Then an accident happened.

  One day when Mason went to lunch, he left a fiber mat of the exploded wood chips in a press. It might not have mattered much except that the press had a leaky steam valve, which exposed the fiber mat to both heat and pressure for a long time.

  When Mason returned, he
found a thin board in place of a thick, soft piece of insulation. The thin board was dense and tough. Mason pounded the new board. He soaked it, cut it, and tested it. The board stood up to every punishment, and Mason realized he had invented something of tremendous value.

  But most important to him, he had found a way to use a “waste” product that others thought was useless.

  MATCHES

  Since Boy and Girl Scout training had not yet been invented, prehistoric people must have accidentally discovered that rubbing two sticks together would create a fire.

  Unfortunately, no one improved on fire much for the next half million years.

  Then in 1669 a German chemist named Hennig Brand produced phosphorus, and in 1680 a British physicist named Robert Boyle used small pieces of phosphorus to light splinters of wood dipped in sulfur. These matches were used for about 150 years, but phosphorus was scarce and expensive and gave workers in match factories a dangerous disease called phossy jaw.

  One day in 1826 an English chemist named John Walker was working in his laboratory in Stockton-on-Tees. He was trying to produce a new explosive, but as he stirred his mixture of potash and antimony, a glob formed on the end of his stirring stick. Walker tried to remove the glob by scraping the end of the stick against the stone floor. But the glob didn’t come off; instead, the stick burst into flame.

  Walker had unintentionally invented the friction match.

  Walker called his matches congreves and demonstrated them in London, but he never patented the invention.

  In 1836 in the United States, Alonzo D. Philips of Springfield, Massachusetts, obtained a patent for “manufacturing of friction matches” and called them locofocos.