Accidents May Happen*

by Charlotte Jones

  One estimate says Americans strike more than 550 billion matches a year.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • The first advertisement to appear on a matchbook was in 1889. It was for New York’s Mendelson Opera Company. If you have one of those 1889 matchbooks, it’s worth about $25,000.

  • There’s a name for collecting matchbox labels or matchbook covers: phillumeny.

  MICROWAVE COOKING

  Microwave cooking is probably the best cooking discovery since fire. In fact, it might be better than fire, since microwaves, instead of a flame or an electric element, cook the food.

  Microwaves are short radio waves, similar to heat and light waves. They work by motion. They cause the molecules in food to move, which produces friction. (It’s similar to rubbing your hands together when they’re cold.) The friction produces heat in the food (not in the oven), and the heat cooks the food.

  There is a legend behind the use of microwaves for cooking.

  Percy Le Baron Spencer was employed by the Raytheon Company during World War II. One day in 1942 he was working with magnatrons, which produce microwaves. When he pulled a candy bar from his pocket, it was a melted mess. Although Spencer was working on scientific experiments, not trying to invent a new way of cooking, he realized that it was the microwaves that had melted the candy.

  Spencer knew that if microwaves melted candy, they would cook other foods as well. The Raytheon Company agreed, and by 1947 it introduced its Radarange to the public.

  The first ovens were suspected of causing health problems, but the new models are safe when the factory’s instructions are followed.

  The only disadvantage of microwave cooking is that some of our nursery rhymes will have to be rewritten—like this one:

  Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake, fast-food man.

  Zap me a cake as fast as you can.

  Roll it and pat it and put it in a microwave-safe dish.

  Nuke it in the microwave on High for a minute and fifteen seconds.

  RAYON

  If you’re not wearing clothes containing rayon, you might be sitting on upholstered furniture, standing on carpeting, or riding on tires made of rayon.

  Rayon was once called artificial silk and was invented by a young French chemist named Hilaire de Chardonnet. In the 1860s Chardonnet worked with Louis Pasteur to save the French silk industry from a sickness that threatened the silkworms.

  Because of such problems with silkworms, Chardonnet knew it would be useful to find a way to produce silk artificially.

  One day in 1878 he was developing photographic plates in his darkroom when he spilled a bottle of collodion. That’s a solution of nitrocellulose in a solvent of ether and alcohol. Because he was busy with the photographs, he didn’t clean up the mess right away.

  When he finally got around to it, part of the solvent had evaporated, leaving a thick, sticky material. As he wiped up the mess, long, thin strands of fiber formed. Chardonnet realized that the fiber was very much like the silk of the silkworms he had worked with while assisting Pasteur.

  Chardonnet worked on his discovery another six years before he got protection from the French Academy of Science. (Such protection is similar to an American patent.) He continued to develop his new fabric, and he showed it at the Paris Exposition in 1889.

  Another famous chemist, Edwin Slosson, said, “At last man has risen to the level of the worm and can spin threads to suit himself.”

  The new fabric was called Chardonnet silk. In 1924 it was renamed rayon because it was so shiny that it seemed to give off rays of light.

  STAINLESS STEEL

  Have you noticed that some metals rust and some don’t? Ordinary steel rusts. This is obvious in steel car bodies. If the paint is damaged, weather soon causes the steel beneath the paint to rust.

  Why does steel rust? Because it reacts easily with oxygen in the air to produce crumbly red iron oxides.

  Stainless steel, however, does not rust. And its invention … or discovery … was accidental.

  In 1913 Harry Brearley, a metallurgist, was trying to find a metal suitable for making gun barrels. He experimented with combinations of metals, which are called alloys. After his experiments, he threw the samples in a junk pile.

  Several months later Brearley noticed that while most of the rejected specimens had rusted, one had not. He analyzed it and realized that the specimen that wasn’t rusty contained 14 percent chromium. With this discovery, stainless steel was born.

  Today most kitchens are full of stainless steel. Pots and pans, mixing bowls, flatware, knives, and many kitchen sinks are made of stainless steel. So are many surgical tools and automotive tools and parts.

  6. Things to Write Home About

  “If you don’t learn from your mistakes, there’s no sense making them.”

  —Anonymous

  LIQUID PAPER

  Anyone who types and makes mistakes knows about Liquid Paper. It’s a kind of white paint sold in small bottles that covers typing errors.

  While Liquid Paper was no accident, it was messy typing erasures that led to its invention.

  Bette Nesmith of Dallas was an excellent typist. In 1951 she had a job as an executive secretary at a bank, but then someone brought new technology into the office: electric typewriters. With a lighter touch on the keyboard, it was easier to make errors.

  To make matters worse, the electric typewriters had a new kind of ribbon. Every time Nesmith erased a typing error, an ugly mess remained.

  Nesmith had once helped design holiday window displays, and she knew that when artists make an error, they don’t erase. They paint over the mistake. So she went home and mixed up some paint in a bottle and found a watercolor brush. She took them to the office.

  For the next five years, whenever she made a mistake, she would sneak the paint out of the drawer and paint over the error. (She had to be sneaky because in those days it was considered cheating for a person to pass herself off as a perfect typist when she was really making errors.)

  Soon other typists found out about her paint and wanted their own bottles. So Nesmith made some to sell to coworkers. She called the product Mistake Out. By 1958 she had changed the name to Liquid Paper and was selling a hundred bottles a month.

  If Bette Nesmith had never made any typing mistakes, the world might never have been given Liquid Paper. Now typists everywhere are grateful for her errors.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • Bette Nesmith began her business in her kitchen—probably not more than 100 square feet of space. The company’s current plant has more than 170,000 square feet.

  • In 1979 the Gillette Company purchased the Liquid Paper Corporation. That year its sales totaled $38 million.

  • Liquid Paper (which is a trademarked brand name) is available in several colors as well as the original white.

  MODERN PAPER

  Make a list of the most influential people in the world’s history. You might include Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Confucius, Queen Victoria, Gandhi, Thomas Edison, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Ts’ai Lun.

  Wait! Who is Ts’ai Lun?

  Believe it or not, your life is influenced enormously by Ts’ai Lun!

  Ts’ai Lun was a Chinese court official almost two thousand years ago. In 105 A.D. he invented paper as we know it today. He mashed mulberry bark, hemp, rags, and water into a pulp, pressed out the liquid, and hung the thin mat in the sun to dry.

  People had writing materials as early as 3500 B.C., but paper allowed the Chinese to become the most advanced culture in the world. Surprisingly, Ts’ai Lun’s method of papermaking was not introduced in Europe for another thousand years. In 1151 the first paper mill was built in Spain.

  Over the centuries the demand for paper grew—especially with the invention of the printing press. While the need for paper grew, the supply of rags shrank. Besides, papermaking was very time-consuming.

  The world needed a solution.

  One day in the early 1700s (no one is sure of the dat
e), René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, a French scientist, was walking in the woods. As he walked he spotted a wasp’s nest and, since the wasps weren’t home, stopped to investigate.

  Suddenly Réaumur realized that the wasp’s nest was made of paper. How did the wasps make paper without using rags? How did they make paper without using chemicals, fire, and mixing tanks? What did the wasps know that humans couldn’t figure out?

  It was quite simple. The wasps made paper by chewing small twigs or tiny bits of rotting logs and mixing them with saliva and stomach juices. Réaumur studied the digestive system of the wasp and presented his findings to the French Royal Academy in 1719.

  It took more than 150 years before a machine was invented that could chew wood efficiently enough to make wood pulp paper commercially. But thanks to Réaumur and the wasps’ vacant house, paper is widely used in today’s society.

  QWERTY

  Look at the keyboard of any standard typewriter or computer. “Q,” “W,” “E,” “R,” “T,” and “Y” are the first six letters. Who decided on this arrangement of the letters? And why?

  People tried for centuries to invent the typewriter. In 1714 in England, Henry Mill filed a patent for a machine called An Artificial Machine or Method for the Impressing or Transcribing of Letters, Singly or Progressively one after another, as in Writing, whereby all Writing whatsoever may be Engrossed in Paper or Parchment so Neat and Exact as not to be distinguished from Print. That machine probably didn’t sell because no one could remember its name!

  The first practical typewriter was patented in the United States in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes. His machine was known as the type-writer. It had a movable carriage, a lever for turning paper from line to line, and a keyboard on which the letters were arranged in alphabetical order.

  But Sholes had a problem. On his first model, his “ABC” key arrangement caused the keys to jam when the typist worked quickly. Sholes didn’t know how to keep the keys from sticking, so his solution was to keep the typist from typing too fast.

  Sholes asked his brother-in-law to rearrange the keyboard so that the commonest letters were not so close together and the type bars would come from opposite directions. Thus they would not clash together and jam the machine.

  The new arrangement was the QWERTY arrangement typists use today. Of course, Sholes claimed that the new arrangement was scientific and would add speed and efficiency. The only efficiency it added was to slow the typist down, since almost any word in the English language required the typist’s fingers to cover more distance on the keyboard.

  The advantages of the typewriter outweighed the disadvantages of the keyboard. Typists memorized the crazy letter arrangement, and the typewriter became a huge success. By the time typists had memorized the new arrangement of letters and built their speed, typewriter technology had improved, and the keys didn’t stick as badly as they had at first.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • The QWERTY keyboard became well established, and people who tried to introduce other keyboard arrangements quickly withdrew their typewriters from the market.

  • Author Mark Twain was one of the 400 customers who purchased Remington typewriters in 1874.

  • In 1959 Mrs. Carole Forristall Waldschlager Bechen typed 176 words per minute on a typing test.

  7. Tricks of the Trade

  “Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”

  —Albert Szent-Gyorgy

  ARC WELDING

  Bikes are welded. So are space shuttles, steel bunk beds, and submarines. The pipes that bring the water to your bathtub are welded. So are streetlights and cans of spinach or soup.

  Welding joins two pieces of metal together by heating the metal pieces until they melt, then applying pressure. Welding of various types has been around since about 3500 B.C.

  But the biggest welding discovery came in 1886.

  Professor Elihu Thomson was lecturing on electricity at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. While he lectured, he performed experiments. He had given the lecture and done the experiments so many times, he could almost do it in his sleep.

  But this time was different. While Thomson demonstrated high-tension electricity, he accidentally touched two wires together. The wires stuck.

  They weren’t supposed to stick together, so Thomson yanked on the wires to try to separate them. But they were joined together for good.

  Then Thomson realized what had happened. He had touched the wires together and they had become fused … stuck together … welded together.

  How? The electrical current in the wires had short-circuited and generated heat. The heat had caused the wires to weld together.

  Professor Thomson had stumbled onto a new method of welding.

  Today we call this process arc welding or resistance welding.

  BAKELITE

  Some days it seems almost everything we touch is plastic—from toys to toothbrushes, from spoons to car bumpers, from shoes to hammer handles.

  But 150 years ago, plastic had not even been thought of.

  Then Bakelite was born. Some people call it the mother of all plastics. But it was not what Leo H. Baekeland intended to invent.

  In 1907 Baekeland was forty-four years old. He had recently become a millionaire by selling his invention of photographic paper to Eastman Kodak. The million dollars allowed him to work on another invention: a synthetic substitute for shellac. The dictionary says shellac is a “purified resin” that is used in varnishes. You see it as a coating for wooden floors, wooden furniture, wooden boats, and musical instruments such as violins and guitars.

  For years natural shellac had been made from tiny insects found in Asia. Billions of these insects were used to make shellac for the United States alone. Baekeland knew that if he could invent a substitute for shellac, it would be easy to sell.

  He worked with phenol and formaldehyde, changing formulas and adding solvents, acids, and alkalies. But he could not come up with the shellac he wanted.

  Then Baekeland thought, Why not turn the idea around? If the mixtures were so tough, why not build on that?

  With this new thinking, he stopped working on shellac and started looking for a resin that could be molded. Instead of trying to hold down the toughening of his mixture, he worked in the other direction and tried to make it even tougher. He heated it instead of cooling it. He applied pressure.

  He soon had a hard, clear solid that could be dyed bright colors and wasn’t affected by acids, electricity, or heat. It could not be dissolved by solvents. It could be molded into any shape. It did not conduct electricity (so it could be used to make insulators). And probably best of all, it was inexpensive.

  Baekeland named his new product Bakelite. Manufacturers immediately had thousands of uses for it:

  electrical insulators knife handles heat shields

  electrical connectors radio dials telephones

  automobile parts adding machines gears

  railway signals billiard balls pipe stems

  bearings hairbrushes combs

  electrical fittings adhesives engine parts

  airplane propellers phonograph records paints

  FINGERPRINTING

  What do criminals bring with them when they commit a crime? Their fingers.

  Fortunately for police, many criminals leave behind their fingerprints.

  Fingerprints found at the scene of a crime are either latent or visible. What’s the difference?

  • Visible prints are formed by dirt or blood or other material that makes them easy to find and easy to see.

  • Latent fingerprints usually cannot be seen, but they can be brought out using chemical techniques. Police sometimes use a dusting powder, or chemicals such as iodine, silver nitrate, or ninhydrin solution.

  In 1982 a new method of lifting fingerprints was discovered by accident. There are several stories about this new discovery, but the most accepted is this one:

  A glas
s aquarium tank in a Japanese crime lab had a crack. Before going home one evening, the detectives in the lab emptied the tank and tried to repair the crack using Super Glue. When they returned to the lab the following day, they were surprised to find white fingerprints all over the glass aquarium.

  After doing some research, they found that a chemical in Super Glue called cyanoacrylate condensed (turned into a liquid). The liquid stuck to the body oils along the ridges of the fingerprints left on a surface. As it dried, a “plastic mold” formed over the ridges of the fingerprint, making the pattern visible.

  This new method of detecting fingerprints is called cyanoacrylate fuming. It is especially effective in developing latent prints that might be on aluminum foil, cellophane, rubber bands, Styrofoam, and other plastic products.

  GRAVITY

  How much would you weigh if you lived on the moon?

  How much would your best friend weigh on the planet Jupiter?

  Weight is determined by how much gravity there is.

  Gravity, the dictionary says, is a force that draws objects together—for example, the attraction of things toward the earth. When you drop a quarter, it goes down, pulled toward the center of the earth. When a paratrooper jumps from an airplane, he or she falls, pulled toward the center of the earth by gravity.

  In 1666 Sir Isaac Newton was sitting in the family garden watching the crescent moon when an apple fell from a nearby tree.

  “Why?” Newton asked himself. He theorized that the force that pulls apples to the earth is the same force that keeps the moon in its orbit by constantly pulling it toward the earth. This was a new theory. Scholars had always believed that earthly things and heavenly things obeyed different sets of laws—especially where motion was concerned.