FORTUNE FAVOURS THE CARELESS.

Northern Advocate, 2 September 1913, Page 6

FORTUNE FAVOURS THE CARELESS.

GREAT DISCOVERIES DUE TO HAPPY ACCIDENTS.

I It is repetitive history that many a person who has spent hours upon (hours combining and recombining the factors of his problem, has had the solution burst upon his attention by some casuality of daily life. Such occurence, says Mr G. E. Chamberlain, in an interesting paper, are the spice of research. In our own time every beet-sugar factory was confronted! (with these two problems: How most cheaply to move the beets from the storage sheds to the slicers: and how to cleanse the beets from the dirt, small stones, and rubbish carried from the earth silos. A German factory happened to have a considerably quantity of beets piled alongside an open drain. A very heavy rainstorm came on, and when it was over, it was found that the beets had not only been carried to the verydoor of the factory but were cleansed ,as well. From that time on every factory has flushed its beets along a pipe from storage to plant and saved money by combining the two operations of transportation and washing. Thomas Kingsford discovered the process of making starch from Indian corn by chance. Starch could be made from potatoes and from wheat, but it had always been found impossible to separate cornstarch from the accompanying gluten. The wheat-starch methods did not answer. Kingsford was a mechanic working long hours, and all his experiments were made in his own kitchen with his wife's pans, tubs, and buckets as his laboratory utensils. The unsatisfactory result of one of his experiments—a mush of cornmeal and water —he disgustedly threw into a garbage tub. A little later his wife threw into the same tub some lye wastes (potash solutions). Upon emptying the tub the next day, Kingsford was surprised to find a small amount of fairly pure starch at the bottom. His wife fortunately remembered throwing in the lye, and thus the basic principle was discovereed. Kingsford soon worked out a practical process for making cornstarch commercially., and made a great fortune.

In 1742, Thomas Bolsover, a mechanic, of Sheffield, discovered the art of silverplating. He was repairing the handle of a knife in which both copper and silver were used. Accidentally the two metals were fused together. Based upon this observation he developed the new process. Upon a thick ingot of copper he bound by iron wire a thinner ingot of silver. The whole was then heated in a reverberatory furnace until the edges of the silver ingot were observed to begin to j melt. The two ingots were then removed from the furnace, slowly cooled and pickled, cleaned and rolled to the desired thickness. The result was a plate of copper more or less thinly covered with silver on one side. This was the first Sheffield plate. For 50 years following, the copper was plated on one side only, and the cut edges showed the copper. Later, the process was so per- I fected that no copper was left ex-'

posed. All the silverplate of the world was made by this process, until electroplating was discovered and made commercial.

Vitruvius is our authority for the statement that the manufacture of red lead was the result of an accidental fire. He also tells us that red lead made by calcining white lead in a furnace was much superior to that obtained directly from the mines.

Vitruvius again tells us that in Spain were found certain stones which, after having been "punished" (beaten) with iron rods, for a sufficient length of time, began to "perspire," aand the "perspiration*' was mercury. Certainly, it was a crude manner of reducing the mercuric ore, cinnabar, with metallic iron, but surely feasible. He fails to tell, and one cannot but wonder, by what happy accident this method was discovered. Could it be that hammering stone was an official punishment then as it is now?

Roentgen was not looking for X. rays but, after an experiment on an entirely different subject, he noticed that some photographic plates, which had been left near by, were fogged. He sought the reason, and his great X-ray discovery was the result.

In ISB4, Dr Reusen was conducting an extensive hesearch into a certain ■family of coal-tar derivatives. One of his students was a German, named Fah 1 berg. This young man, one evening after returning to his boarding house, ate his dinner without having washed his hands. During the course of the meal in some manner he became aware that he had some extremely sweet substance on his fingers. He at once returned to the laboratory and tasted of every solution there. In a certain beaker he found the source of that sweetness.

He gave the new substance a commercial nick/name, saccharin. Whether the fortune he made was due to a lucky accident or his board-ing-house training, remains a moot point among his contemporaries. It is also curious to note, in this connection, that after more than 25 years of general use by diabetic sufferers as a harmless substitute for sugar, this substance has recently been put under the ban. It is now forbidden, in one country, not only to the sick, who consumed great quantities of it, but to the well, who have unknowingly eaten their share under the guise of table syrups.— "Popular Science- Sittings.