by Phil Mason
A curious omission from Alfred Nobel’s choice of prizes may have been down to a simple affair of the heart.
When, in 1895, he wrote his instructions for creating annual prizes for achievement, Nobel specified precisely the five areas – physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace. Some have pondered ever since the strange absence of a prize for mathematics, the essential building block of the sciences.
One theory has it that a mathematician stole the heart of one of Nobel’s mistresses. A letter exists which implies that a notable Swedish mathematics professor, Gosta Mittag-Leffler, believed that the absence of a prize in his discipline was down to the personal estrangement between the two men.
A related theory points to the attempts by the professor, as Nobel was formulating his own plans for prizes, to persuade him to donate his wealth to the professor’s own institution which offered a mathematics award. Could overzealous lobbying have turned Nobel off too, especially if he harboured suspicions about Mittag-Leffler for other reasons?
Nobel’s lifelong antipathy towards lawyers nearly destroyed his entire scheme even before it got off the ground. He drew up his will entirely without legal advice, leaving many elements of his grand plan unclear and open to challenge in the courts. He had never established a legal place of residence, and with so much of his wealth spread around the world the executor of his will had to work overtime to establish legal ownership of the amassed fortune and return it to Sweden. Nor, before he died, had Nobel actually established the foundation to which the funds were to be left.
Members of Nobel’s family, who were embittered at the prospect of losing an inheritance, tried to have the plans overturned on the grounds that as the funds did not legally have an owner, they were the rightful heirs. They failed.
The idea also attracted opposition from the King of Sweden who objected, along with much of public opinion. He scathingly questioned the idea of Swedish wealth being dispersed to foreigners at a time when Sweden was a poor country. He eventually changed his mind years later when he decided that the annual prize giving might bring beneficial publicity for Sweden.
The machine that most reshaped domestic lives in the late 20th century, the microwave oven, emerged accidentally from a chocolate bar and wartime work in radar which used magnetrons to generate the microwaves used to detect objects.
A radar researcher at the Raytheon Corporation, Percy Spencer, who wandered across a magnetron beam in his lab in 1946 found the bar in his pocket had melted. Intrigued, he experimented by putting popcorn kernels near the magnetron tube and watched them pop. Next day he tried an egg, which exploded over a colleague.
By the end of 1946, Raytheon had patented the concept of a microwave oven, and in 1947 produced the first commercial device. There was some way to go before it was ready for every home to have one: the first version was nearly 6ft tall, weighed a third of a ton and cost $5,000.
The jacuzzi was born because a member of the seven-brother Jacuzzi family had developed rheumatoid arthritis. The clan, California immigrants from Italy, had established a profitable business making air pumps for aircraft. In 1948, Candido Jacuzzi’s six-year-old son needed therapy for his increasingly debilitating condition. He developed a portable pump to immerse in a hospital bath to soothe the child’s limbs. By 1955, the idea was launched commercially as a therapeutic device and within 15 years the first made-for-purpose whirlpool baths with fixed air jets came on to the market.
The boy, Kenneth Jacuzzi, went on to successfully run the company that had been born to ease his childhood affliction.
Sylvan Goldman, a store owner in Oklahoma City, came up with the idea of the shopping trolley in 1936 from the chance observation that his customers tended to stop shopping not because they had everything they had come for but because their hand-held baskets became too heavy.
The idea of a wheeled cart came to him in his office as he stared at a foldaway metal chair. He patented a double-decker, pram-like contraption the following year. He then encountered customer resistance. Men thought the device effeminate; women that they were unstylish (and too much like prams).
Goldman’s stroke of genius was to hire models of all ages to pretend to be customers and walk around the store using the trolleys. The deception worked and by peer persuasion, the trolley caught on and Goldman made a $400 million fortune.
Swiss inventor of Velcro, George de Mestral, was inspired from a walk in the Jura mountains in 1941 when his dog brushed against cockleburrs. As he tried to remove them he was intrigued by their tenacious grip. He took one of the burrs back to his amateur laboratory and under the microscope saw the tiny hooks that enable the burr to cling to any soft material.
He patented Velcro in 1955, taking the name from a combination of velour for loop and crochet for the hook.
The now ubiquitous ‘post-it’ note was a chance invention born of the combination of the needs of a church chorister and his work colleague’s experiment that had resulted in a product with no apparent practical use.
Art Fry, a chemist at the 3M company, in Minnesota in 1974 encountered a problem with finding the right place in his hymn book as he sang in two services on a Sunday. He would use a paper slip to mark the places of the hymns for both services. By the second service, the slips had often fallen out after turning the pages for the first.
Fry recalled a strange concoction a colleague at 3M had produced six years earlier and shelved because no one could think of a practical use. Spencer Silver had developed a glue that did not quite stick. Fry spent a year and a half working out how it could be applied to the paper slips to produce a bookmark that stayed affixed when it was needed but could be pulled off without damaging the page when its work was done.
By 1977, Fry had mastered the technical problems and developed the concept of the removable note. Although the notes bombed when they first went on sale that year and were about to be judged a commercial failure – people would not lay out cash for a product there was no obvious use for – when free samples were sent out to offices for an extended trial, office workers began to find a multitude of uses for them that they had never previously thought of. Once practical uses had been discovered, ‘post-it’ notes, relaunched commercially in 1980, suddenly became an indispensable part of the office furniture.
‘Blu-Tack’, the sticky reusable adhesive, was an entirely accidental creation in 1971 as a by-product of a process being used by Bostik to try to develop a sealant. The lumpy, tacky material was too thick and not adhesive enough to be a sealant, but as company officials toyed with it, they found it useful to fix announcements to walls in the office. It was then noticed that when the announcements came down, the tacky stuff was still sticky and could be used again. ‘Blu-Tack’ was born as a commercial product and soon became another modern office essential.
The original substance was white. It was coloured blue because of fears that children might mistake it for a chewy sweet. There were no blue sweets on the market at the time.
The rawlplug – the sheath that helps to hold screws firmly in a wall – is only around today because of the British Museum’s worries about its fragile decor. In 1919, engineer John Rawlings had been contracted to fix some electrical fittings to the walls of the museum, as unobtrusively as possible and without damaging the historic wall surfaces.
The traditional method of doing this was to gouge out a hole in the masonry and pack it with wood, which held the screw tightly in the wall. Rawlings was told he could not do this so he developed the plug (the first ones were thin brass, then a hemp and string blend). He named the device the Rawlplug, his company started manufacturing them in 1920 and it revolutionised the job of fixing things to walls.
The ‘Band-Aid’ plaster only came about because of the poor kitchen coordination techniques of a cotton buyer’s wife. The buyer, Earle Dickson, worked for the Johnson & Johnson company, manufacturers of surgical gauze and adhesive tape. His newly married life was affected in 1920 by his wife’s frequent accidents in p
reparing dinner. At the time, the accepted way of dressing a wound was to apply the gauze on the wound and use separate pieces of sticky tape to hold it in place. As Mrs Dickson needed so many, Earle prepared treatments in advance. He laid out a long strip of tape and at regular intervals laid a piece of gauze on it. Whenever Mrs Dickson needed a dressing, she simply cut off a strip of tape containing a piece of gauze.
Earle Dickson suddenly realised how easier dressing small wounds could be, and the plaster was born. The following year, Johnson & Johnson produced their first commercial version. Rivals Smith & Nephew produced their ‘Elastoplast’ three years later.
Earle eventually became a Vice President of Johnson & Johnson. As the company’s history relates, no one actually knows, however, whether Mrs Dickson, who started it all, ever mastered the art of accident-free cooking.
The flexible contact lens was invented through a chance conversation on a Czech train in 1952 between a chemist and a passenger who was reading a scientific paper on corrective eye surgery. The chemist was Otto Wichterle, an assistant professor at Prague University specialising in manmade fibres. The man he struck up a conversation with was a complete stranger to him, but as they talked about the problems of correcting vision, Wichterle offered his own thoughts about developing a plastic implant. The listener turned out to be an official with the Czech Health Ministry, and shortly afterwards Wichterle was commissioned to make good his idea.
It took another nine years before he had perfected a comfortable version. He initially ground his prototype lenses using a grinder adapted from the motor of a record player. He never acquired any wealth from the invention. The communist Czech government sold the rights to an American businessman for just $330,000.
One of the icons of modern security controls, the door lock system using a keypad and an entry code, was inspired by its inventor, Frenchman Bob Carrière, watching a Popeye cartoon with his children in the late 1960s.
The story showed a chef locking his fridge by using a telephone dial device and a code number. Carrière thought this could be a useful way of securing a house door, saving problems with carrying keys around. Instead of a dial, which looked likely to take too long to unlock, Carrière took inspiration from his typewriter and developed a 12-button box, which he patented in 1970, called the Digicode.
They became popular in multi-occupancy Parisian apartment blocks. Carrière’s big break came when the computer giant IBM ordered 150 sets to protect its sites. The same touchpad technology used in the door locks spread into a wide range of other modern automated devices, such as vending machines and the ubiquitous cashpoint. And all stemmed from a chance viewing of a children’s cartoon. Carrière died in 2007 having sold his Digicode company in 1995.
The cat’s eye reflective road stud was literally inspired by a driver nearly running over a cat on a dark country road in 1933. Yorkshireman Percy Shaw was driving through dense fog near his home in Boothtown, near Halifax, when he had to swerve to avoid a cat in the middle of the road. Only the reflection from its eyes alerted him. It also stopped him from driving over a cliff – the near-accident happened on a dangerous bend.
Shaw was so struck by his close escape that the idea of permanent light-reflecting warnings for roads became his mission in life. Within a year, he had perfected the design and started his company, Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd in 1935.
The Ministry of Transport held a competition for rival designs, and after two years Shaw’s were the only ones still in one piece. All his rivals had dropped out because their designs either could not stand the repeated shocks of being run over or they silted up, blocking the glass.
Shaw’s ingenious twist was another inspiration drawn directly from cats’ real eyes. He embedded his studs in a moveable holder so that when run over the glass depressed. When it rose again, it pushed against the rubber coating and wiped itself clean, just like a cat’s eyelid.
The bane of the modern motorist, the single- and double-yellow line system for restricting parking, was developed by the Ministry of Transport in the mid-1950s only through a loophole in the law which allowed the marking of roads but prohibited that of pavements. Wilfred Hadfield, an MoT engineer charged with looking at ways to reduce congestion, came up with the idea of the gutter-side markings to draw attention to restrictions which up until then could only be placed rather inconspicuously as small signs on lampposts.
They were first tested in Putney High Street and brought into permanent use in Slough in 1956. The ministry announced the introduction of a comprehensive national scheme the following year.
Bob Switzer, the Ohio-born inventor of high-visibility fluorescent clothing, did so as the result of an accident when he was a teenager. Sometime in the early 1930s, he tripped and fell off a loading bay while lifting crates for the Safeway supermarket. This put him into a coma for several months and permanently damaged his sight. To aid his recuperation, he was confined for several more months in a darkened room. The only stimulant for him was his collection of fluorescent minerals. After his recovery, he continued experimenting with fluorescent colours and working out how to create paints and dyes which glowed in the dark and reflected brightly in normal light.
By 1946, he had founded the company in Cleveland that later became the DayGlo Color Corporation. All high-visibility products around today, from security guard jackets and cyclists’ safety strips to traffic cones, derive from the innovations developed by Bob Switzer.
He had dreamed of being a doctor, but his accident put paid to that. His invention though has perhaps gone on to save more lives than he could ever have managed as a solitary physician.
The inventor of the cashpoint machine never made a penny profit from his idea. He refused to patent the invention because he feared thieves would learn from it how to cheat the machine.
John Shepherd-Barron, head of security company De La Rue’s armoured cash delivery operations which supplied cash to banks, was inspired by his own frustration of not being able to get his money out of the bank other than during working hours and a chocolate bar dispenser. The cash machine he devised was not the card-operated system familiar today. Bizarrely, in view of the problem it was trying to solve of not having to go into the bank while it was open, it relied on pre-purchasing a voucher from the bank that was then inserted into the machine to release the cash.
The system was bought by Barclays, and the first cash dispenser opened at its branch in Enfield, North London, in 1967. The other invention it required – the Personal Identification Number or PIN – was also created by Shepherd-Barron. He asked his wife, Caroline, what was the most number of digits she could readily remember as a security code. It turned out to be four.
6
Chance Beginnings
We would be driving Horchs today had it not been for the inability of the German car manufacturer, August Horch, to patch up a quarrel with his company backers. He was an irascible character, and preferred to leave his company to start another rather than make up, but could not use his own name any more because the original company retained the rights to it.
So Horch used the Latin translation of his name (which in German means ‘hear’) and produced in 1909 the first Audi.
The most famous aircraft of World War Two, the Spitfire, also got its name because of an argument. The plane’s designer by chance overheard the head of the company building the aircraft having a furious row with his daughter.
Sir Robert McLean, chairman of Vickers, was heard to remark, ‘There goes my little spitfire,’ after his daughter, Annie, had stormed out of the room. Reginald Mitchell, the plane’s designer, was present, liked the sound of it and the name stuck.
The design team were struggling to come up with a name for the craft. Had they not, it might have been the Shrike or the Shrew, names suggested by the Air Ministry.
According to some accounts, perhaps apocryphal, the Cunard liner Queen Mary would have been called the Queen Victoria but for a misplaced remark from which there was no way out.
Shortly before its launch in 1934, Sir Thomas Royden, one of the company directors, told King George V of the plan to name the ship ‘after the greatest queen this country has ever known.’ The King is said to have replied, ‘Oh, my wife will be pleased.’ So Queen Mary it had to be.
The bikini was so-named by its French designer, Louis Reard, since it was unveiled to the world in July 1946 four days after the first post-war American nuclear test had taken place on Bikini atoll in the Pacific. A rival designer, Jacques Heim, had beaten him to the mark bringing out a two-piece swimsuit, calling it in a blaze of publicity the atome. This had nothing to do with the tests, but from the atom being the smallest known article of matter.
Needing something different, three weeks later when he launched his, Reard plumped for bikini, as the ‘ultimate’ creation because of the current headlines, and it was that name that curiously stuck. Had they been launched another year, or even another month, bathers might be sunbathing in atomes instead.
The scriptwriter for the television series Dr Who, Terry Nation, forcefully turned down the BBC’s original request to him to write for the children’s series. He thought the idea beneath him. Later, without a job, he found that his agent had decided not to pass on his ill-tempered refusal to the corporation. He was hired without demur.
Asked to develop an arch-enemy for the Doctor, he was responsible for one of television’s most famous creations, the Daleks. He got the name from glancing at his bookshelf while trying to conjure a sufficiently threatening moniker. He is said to have noticed his set of encyclopaedias, and took inspiration from one of the volumes that covered topics from DAL-EK. The BBC, however, officially discounts the tale. It maintains that he simply made up the explanation to put an end to the persisistent questioning about the origin of the name.