10 Serependitous Inventions

 

Louis Pasteur once said, "chance favors the prepared mind." 

That's the genius behind all these accidental inventions - the scientists were prepared.

 They did their science on the brink and were able to see the magic in a mistake, 

set-back, or coincidence.

No. 10 - Saccharin

Saccharin, the sweetener in the pink packet, was discovered because chemist Constantin Fahlberg 

didn't wash his hands after a day at the office. Prepare to get icked. The year was 1879 and Fahlberg was 

trying to come up with new and interesting uses for coal tar. After a productive day at the office, he went home 

and something strange happened. He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularly sweet. 

He asked his wife if she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but she hadn't. They tasted normal to her. 

Fahlberg realized the taste must have been coming from his hands -- which he hadn't washed. 

The next day he went back to the lab and started tasting his work until he found the sweet spot.

No. 9 - Smart Dust 

Most people would be pretty upset if their homework blew up in their faces and crumbled into a bunch of tiny pieces. 

Not so student Jamie Link. When Link was doing her doctoral work in chemistry at the University of California, 

San Diego, one of the silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward, however, that the tiny pieces 

still functioned as sensors. The resulting "smart dust" won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003. 

These teensy sensors can also be used to monitor the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical 

or biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumor cells in the body.
No. 8 - Coke

There are many stories of accidentally invented food: the potato chip was born when cook George Crum 

(yes, really his name!) tried to silence a persnickety customer who kept sending french fries back to the kitchen 

for being soggy; Popsicles were invented when Frank Epperson left a drink outside in the cold overnight; and ice cream 

cones were invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. But no food-vention has had as much success as Coke. 

Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton was trying to make a cure for headaches. He mixed together a bunch of ingredients -

and don't ask, because we don't know; The recipe is still a closely guarded secret. It only took eight years of being sold

 in a drug store  before the drink was popular enough to be sold in bottles. 

No. 7- Teflon

After all the damage they've done to the ozone layer, chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are persona non grata. 

Back in the 1930s, however, they were (pardon the pun) the hot new thing in the science of refrigeration. 

Young DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was working to make a new a new kind of CFC. 

He had a theory that if he could get a compound called TFE to react with hydrochloric acid, 

he could produce the refrigerant he wanted. So, to start his experiment Plunkett got a whole bunch of TFE gas,

 cooled it and pressured it in canisters so it could be stored until he was ready to use it. 

When the time came to open the container and put the TFE and hydrochloric acid together so they could react,

 nothing came out of the canister. The gas had disappeared. Only it hadn't. Frustrated and angry, 

Plunkett took off the top of the canister and shook it. Out came some fine white flakes. 

Luckily for everyone who's ever made an omelet, he was intrigued by the flakes 

and handed them off to other scientists at DuPont.
No. 6 - Vulcanized Rubber

Charles Goodyear had been waiting years for a happy accident when it finally occurred. 

Goodyear spent a decade finding ways to make rubber easier to work with while being resistant to heat and cold. 

Nothing was having the effect he wanted. One day he spilled a mixture of rubber, sulfur and lead onto a hot stove. 

The heat charred the mixture, but didn't ruin it. When Goodyear picked up the accident, 

he noticed that the mixture had hardened but was still quite usable. At last! 

The breakthrough he had been waiting for! His vulcanized rubber is used in everything from tires, 

to shoes, to hockey pucks. 

No. 5 - Plastic

In 1907 shellac was used as insulation in electronics. It was costing the industry a pretty penny to import shellac,

 which was made from Southeast Asian beetles, and at home chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland thought he might turn a profit 

if he could produce a shellac alternative. Instead his experiments yielded a moldable material that could take high temperatures 

without distorting. Baekeland thought his "Bakelite" might be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear that 

the product had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived from Bakelite, is used for everything from telephones

 to iconic movie punch lines. 
No. 4 - Radioactivity

Two words that you don't ever want to hear said in the same sentence are "Whoops!" and "radioactive." 

But in the case of physicist Henri Becquerel's surprise discovery, it was an accident that brought radioactivity to light. 

Back in 1896 Becquerel was fascinated by two things: natural fluorescence and the newfangled X-ray. 

He ran a series of experiments to see if naturally fluorescent minerals produced X-rays 

after they had been left out in the sun. 

One problem - he was doing these experiments in the winter, and there was one week with a long stretch of overcast skies. 

He left his equipment wrapped up together in a drawer and waited for a sunny day. 

When he got back to work, Becquerel realized that the uranium rock he had left in the drawer had imprinted itself 

on a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight first. 

There was something very special about that rock. Working with Marie and Pierre Curie, 

he discovered that that something was radioactivity. 

No. 3 - Mauve

Talk about strange connections - 18-year-old chemist William Perkin wanted to cure malaria;

 instead his scientific endeavors changed the face of fashion forever and, oh yeah, helped fight cancer. 

Confused? Don't be. 

Here's how it happened. In 1856 Perkin was trying to come up with an artificial quinine. 

Instead of a malaria treatment, his experiments produced a thick murky mess. 

But the more he looked at it, the more Perkin saw a beautiful color in his mess. 

Turns out he had made the first-ever synthetic dye. 

His dye was far better than any dyes that came from nature; the color was brighter,

 more vibrant, and didn't fade or wash out. 

His discovery also turned chemistry into a money-generating science - making it attractive

 for a whole generation of curious-minded people. But the story is not over yet. 

One of the people inspired by Perkin's work was German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich, 

who used Perkin's dyes to pioneer immunology and chemotherapy. 

No. 2 - Pacemaker

 

This list wouldn't be complete without at least one absent-minded professor. 

But it's not flubber clocking in at No. 2, it's a life saving medical device. 

That pacemaker sewn into a loved one's chest actually came about because American engineer 

Wilson Greatbatch reached into a box and pulled out the wrong thing.  It's true. 

Greatbatch was working on making a circuit to help record fast heart sounds. 

He reached into a box for a resistor in order to finish the circuit and pulled out a 1-megaohm resistor 

instead of a 10,000-ohm one. The circuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for one second. 

Then it repeated. The sound was as old as man: a perfect heartbeat. 

No. 1 - Penicillin

You read this far into the list looking for penicillin, didn't you? 

That's OK. As one of the most famous and fortunate accidents of the 20th century, penicillin belongs at No. 

1 on this list. If you've been living under a rock for the past 80 years or so, here's how the popular story goes:

 Alexander Fleming didn't clean up his workstation before going on vacation one day in 1928. 

When he came back, Fleming noticed that there was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. 

Even stranger was that bacteria didn't seem to thrive near those cultures. 

Penicillin became the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics. 

Nikola Tesla .the forgotten genius.

The 10 Inventions of Nikola Tesla That Changed The World

'Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe. Throughout space there is energy.  -- Nikola Tesla, 1892 

Source

Nicholas West
Activist Post

Nikola Tesla is finally beginning to attract real attention and encourage serious debate nearly 70 years after his death.  Was he for real? A crackpot? Part of an early experiment in corporate-government control? 

We know that he was undoubtedly persecuted by the energy power brokers of his day -- namely Thomas Edison, whom we are taught in school to revere as a genius.  He was also attacked by J.P. Morgan and other "captains of industry." Upon Tesla's death on January 7th, 1943, the U.S. government moved into his lab and apartment confiscating all of his scientific research, and to this day none of this research has been made public.

Besides his persecution by corporate-government interests (which is practically a certification of authenticity), there is at least one solid indication of Nikola Tesla's integrity -- he tore up a contract with Westinghouse that was worth billions in order to save the company from paying him his huge royalty payments.

But, let's take a look at what Nikola Tesla -- a man who died broke and alone -- has actually given to the world.  For better or worse, with credit or without, he changed the face of the planet in ways that perhaps no man ever has.

1. Alternating Current -- This is where it all began, and what ultimately caused such a stir at the 1893 World's Expo in Chicago.  A war was leveled ever-after between the vision of Edison and the vision of Tesla for how electricity would be produced and distributed.  The division can be summarized as one of cost and safety: The DC current that Edison (backed by General Electric) had been working on was costly over long distances, and produced dangerous sparking from the required converter (called a commutator).  Regardless, Edison and his backers utilized the general "dangers" of electric current to instill fear in Tesla's alternative: Alternating Current.  As proof, Edison sometimes electrocuted animals at demonstrations.  Consequently, Edison gave the world the electric chair, while simultaneously maligning Tesla's attempt to offer safety at a lower cost.  Tesla responded by demonstrating that AC was perfectly safe by famously shooting current through his own body to produce light.  This Edison-Tesla (GE-Westinghouse) feud in 1893 was the culmination of over a decade of shady business deals, stolen ideas, and patent suppression that Edison and his moneyed interests wielded over Tesla's inventions. Yet, despite it all, it is Tesla's system that provides power generation and distribution to North America in our modern era.




AC  producing coils

The nameplate on one of the Westinghouse alternating current generators installed at the Edward Dean Adams Station, Niagara Falls.

2. Light -- Of course he didn't invent light itself, but he did invent how light can be harnessed and distributed.  Tesla developed and used florescent bulbs in his lab some 40 years before industry "invented" them. At the World's Fair, Tesla took glass tubes and bent them into famous scientists' names, in effect creating the first neon signs.  However, it is his Tesla Coil that might be the most impressive, and controversial.  The Tesla Coil is certainly something that big industry would have liked to suppress: the concept that the Earth itself is a magnet that can generate electricity (electromagnetism) utilizing frequencies as a transmitter.  All that is needed on the other end is the receiver -- much like a radio.  

3. X-rays -- Electromagnetic and ionizing radiation was heavily researched in the late 1800s, but Tesla researched the entire gamut. Everything from a precursor to Kirlian photography, which has the ability to document life force, to what we now use in medical diagnostics, this was a transformative invention of which Tesla played a central role.  X-rays, like so many of Tesla's contributions, stemmed from his belief that everything we need to understand the universe is virtually around us at all times, but we need to use our minds to develop real-world devices to augment our innate perception of existence.

4. Radio -- Guglielmo Marconi was initially credited, and most believe him to be the inventor of radio to this day.  However, the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patent in 1943, when it was proven that Tesla invented the radio years previous to Marconi.  Radio signals are just another frequency that needs a transmitter and receiver, which Tesla also demonstrated in 1893 during a presentation before The National Electric Light Association.  In 1897 Tesla applied for two patents  US 645576, and US 649621. In 1904, however, The U.S. Patent Office reversed its decision, awarding Marconi a patent for the invention of radio, possibly influenced by Marconi's financial backers in the States, who included Thomas Edison and Andrew Carnegie. This also allowed the U.S. government (among others) to avoid having to pay the royalties that were being claimed by Tesla. 

Tesla's behemoth tower, to be used for trans-Atlantic wireless communications and the demonstration of wireless power transmission, was erected in 1901 at Wardenclyffe (now Shoreham) on Long Island.  Built almost entirely of wood, with a 55-ton skeleton spheroid of steel at the top, it was designed so that every spar could be taken out at any time and replaced if necessary.  Photo by Lillian McChesney, circa 1916.

5. Remote Control -- This invention was a natural outcropping of radio. Patent No. 613809 was the first remote controlled model boat, demonstrated in 1898.  Utilizing several large batteries; radio signals controlled switches, which then energized the boat's propeller, rudder, and scaled-down running lights. While this exact technology was not widely used for some time, we now can see the power that was appropriated by the military in its pursuit of remote controlled war. Radio controlled tanks were introduced by the Germans in WWII, and developments in this realm have since slid quickly away from the direction of human freedom.

6. Electric Motor -- Tesla's invention of the electric motor has finally been popularized by a car brandishing his name.  While the technical specifications are beyond the scope of this summary, suffice to say that Tesla's invention of a motor with rotating magnetic fields could have freed mankind much sooner from the stranglehold of Big Oil.  However, his invention in 1930 succumbed to the economic crisis and the world war that followed. Nevertheless, this invention has fundamentally changed the landscape of what we now take for granted: industrial fans, household applicances, water pumps, machine tools, power tools, disk drives, electric wristwatches and compressors.

7. Robotics -- Tesla's overly enhanced scientific mind led him to the idea that all living beings are merely driven by external impulses.  He stated: "I have by every thought and act of mine, demonstrated, and does so daily, to my absolute satisfaction that I am an automaton endowed with power of movement, which merely responds to external stimuli."  Thus, the concept of the robot was born.  However, an element of the human remained present, as Tesla asserted that these human replicas should have limitations -- namely growth and propagation. Nevertheless, Tesla unabashedly embraced all of what intelligence could produce.  His visions for a future filled with intelligent cars, robotic human companions, and the use of sensors, and autonomous systems are detailed in a must-read entry in the Serbian Journal of Electrical Engineering, 2006 (PDF). 

8. Laser -- Tesla's invention of the laser may be one of the best examples of the good and evil bound up together within the mind of man.  Lasers have transformed surgical applications in an undeniably beneficial way, and they have given rise to much of our current digital media. However, with this leap in innovation we have also crossed into the land of science fiction.  From Reagan's "Star Wars" laser defense system to today's Orwellian "non-lethal" weapons' arsenal, which includes laser rifles and directed energy "death rays," there is great potential for development in both directions.

9 and 10. Wireless Communications and Limitless Free Energy -- These two are inextricably linked, as they were the last straw for the power elite -- what good is energy if it can't be metered and controlled?  Free?  Never.  J.P. Morgan backed Tesla with $150,000 to build a tower that would use the natural frequencies of our universe to transmit data, including a wide range of information communicated through images, voice messages, and text.  This represented the world's first wireless communications, but it also meant that aside from the cost of the tower itself, the universe was filled with free energy that could be utilized to form a world wide web connecting all people in all places, as well as allow people to harness the free energy around them.  Essentially, the 0's and 1's of the universe are embedded in the fabric of existence for each of us to access as needed.  Nikola Tesla was dedicated to empowering the individual to receive and transmit this data virtually free of charge.

Science made easy.STATIC ELECTRICITY

I CAN READ

What is Static Electricity?

Everything we see is made up of tiny little parts called atoms. The atoms are made of even smaller parts. These are called protons, electrons and neutrons. They are very different from each other in many ways. One way they are different is their "charge." Protons have a positive (+) charge. Electrons have a negative (-) charge. Neutrons have no charge.Usually, atoms have the same number of electrons and protons. Then the atom has no charge, it is "neutral." But if you rub things together, electrons can move from one atom to another. Some atoms get extra electrons. They have a negative charge. Other atoms lose electrons. They have a positive charge. When charges are separated like this, it is called static electricity.
If two things have different charges, they attract, or pull towards each other. If two things have the same charge, they repel, or push away from each other.


So, why does your hair stand up after you take your hat off? When you pull your hat off, it rubs against your hair. Electrons move from your hair to the hat. Now each of the hairs has the same positive charge. Things with the same charge repel each other. So the hairs try to move away from each other. The farthest they can get is to stand up and away from all the other hairs.

If you walk across a carpet, electrons move from the rug to you. Now you have extra electrons. Touch a door knob and ZAP! The electrons move from you to the knob. You get a shock.

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