NECESSITY OR LUCK

Greymouth Evening Star, 24 December 1934, Page 4

NECESSITY OR LUCK

THE MOTHER OF INVENTION? Necessity is not the mother of invention. If you examine the evidence you will find that often fortune is the mother and necessity is merely the father (writes Fenn Sherie in the Melbourne Argus). In other words, although a number of important inventions has been produced by painstaking research, many of - the world’s greatest brain-waves have been the result of accident. Even in the workshop and the laboratory many important 'discoveries have been made by accident, although credit is due to the inventors who have perceived the phenomena and have applied them to practical purposes. Take, for instance, Hans Lippershey, the Dutch spectacle-maker. One day, while busy in his shop in the little market town of Middleburg, he was about to insert some lenses into a spectacleframe when he held them up to the light to see which was which. By chance he happened to place them one .in front of the other, and, looking through them, he was amazed to discover that, the weathercock on tho distant church steeple appeared much nearer and more distinct. So he in- 1 serted the lenses at either end of a tube and thus produced what he described as an “instrument for seeing at a distance." That, was in 1608. A year later the Italian scientist Galileo adopted the idea, and received, the credit for making the first telescope. The modern sewing-machine is said to have been inspired by a drcam which came to Elias Howe, the son of nil American farmer. Several crude machines for sewing had been invented, but none of them would work properly owing to the difficulty of making the needle draw the thread through tho material in one brief action. Howe puzzled his brains to find an improvement. One night he dreamed that he had been set to make a sewing-machine for a savage king, and that he was surrounded by a body of native warriors armed with spears which were pierced through the heads. When he awoke lie realised that his dream had provided a. solution of the problem that find baffled him so long. Ho made a. needle with the eye near the point instead of at the opposite end, and the lock-stitch sewing-machine was born.

It was an accident —or. rather, the. prevention of an accident —that, led Edison into the field of electrical discovery. He happened to see the infant daughter of a railway official crawling along the (rack in front of a shunted box-car, and hurried to pick her up. Her father, out of gratitude, taught Edison the rudiments of telegraphy, and thus his interest in electricity was aroused. Some years later Edison was sitting in his laboratory late one night when his lingers sti.iycd toward a. little, pile of lamp-black, and picking up a piece he began to roll i< between hi-j linger mid thumb

until it became a. thin thread. "Carbon wire,” he said to himself. “I wonder ■whether that would serve as a filament for an electric lamp.” By chance he had hit upon the solution i of a puzzle that had worried him for months. Shortly afterward he succeeded in carbonising a piece of thread. He inserted it in a. glass globe, and, after he had exhausted the air, he passed an electric current through it. It glowed! He sat and watched it glowing for 15 hours. So tho electric lamp came into being. Routgen, the German scientist, was making experiments with a vacuum tube to discover how electricity was conducted through gases. By chance there happened to be close ai hand a screen coated with barium platinocyanide, and he was surprised to notice that this was shining with a peculiar blue radiance. He covered the vacuum tube with thick paper, but the screen continued to glow, and it was only when he placed a heavy object between the tube and the screen that the fluorescence disappeared. Obviously there was some sort of ray emanating from the tube which could penetrate thick paper. He did not know what it was, so ho called it the X-ray. That was in 1895. Four days after his discovery was known in America X-rays were used successfully to find a bullet which had penetrated five inches beyond the entrance wound in a man’s leg. A mechanical flaw in a weaving machine led to the invention of the bath towel. The threads became rucked up and tangled, and the manufacturer put the faulty material aside as waste. Later, when drying his hands upon it, ho noticed that it was pleasantly soft and absorbent. That gave him an idea which made him rich. Perhaps the most important chance invention of this century was the discovery of stainless steel. During the war Mr. Harry Brearley, tho metallurgist, was investigating the erosion of rifle barrels. He experimented with various kinds of steel, and among them was one containing a larger proportion of chromium than had been tried before. It failed and was discarded. About a fortnight later an assistant noticed that the broken test pieces which had been thrown away in a corner of the laboratory, had not rusted. Mr. Brearley immediately realised the possibilities of this discovery, and, -without saying anything about it, had a knife blade made of this steel, and left it exposed to the weather in his garden for about a month. At the end of that time it was still bright. That lucky chance led to a revolution in the cutlery industry and an important contribution toward the saving of labour in the home.