Tech Blog

Famous Accidental Discoveries Part - II

Here are some famous accidental discoveries whcih I didn't mention in my previous post. 

20. Post-It Notes

In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but at the time nobody took notice. Four years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver and later applied some of Silver’s weak yet non-damaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M through an internal idea incubator. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today it is hard to imagine life without the sticky post-it note.

19. Superglue

Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known ascyanoacrylates, which it was discovered polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. This was not going to work for the task at hand and so research moved on. Six years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when testing showed that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (full name: Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition) was born. It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam – the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers. A discovery made during an effort to improve guns ended up saving lives.

18. Fingerprinting

Although the science of fingerprinting began with the work of Francis Galton in the nineteenth century, detectives still had trouble locating the tell-tale marks. In 1982, some researchers at the US Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory in Japan cracked a fish tank. When they patched it together with superglue (cyanoacrylate), they noticed the fingerprints on the glass standing out in relief. The fumes from the glue had condensed on oils in the prints, rendering them highly visible. Cyanoacrylate is now an important weapon in the forensic scientist’s armoury.

17. Velcro