Many innovations emerge out of accidents. Ken Chowder documents the history of innovations through accidents. Yet, Chowder makes this most important distinction: Accident plus reflection and observation creates innovation, not just accident alone. For instance, Eli Whitney watched a cat pull bird feathers through a birdcage. (Poor Tweety bird!) Many people have observed this phenomenon and thought nothing of it. Eli Whitney saw an idea of how to comb cotton mechanically. Much labor was saved at the expense of one little bird.
Many innovations have come from accidents. Some of them are well known. A 3M scientist spilled some chemical on her new shoes, and it did not come off. Aha! Scotchgard was invented. Also at 3M, Art Fry developed a glue that did not stick very well; he thought about it and created Post-it Notes. 1928, Alexander Fleming left a window open next to a petri dish with a colony of bacteria. He looked through a microscope, but instead of seeing just another ruined experiment, he observed mold destroying the bacteria, and developed penicillin.
Then there was that French guy who got tired of pulling burrs out of his hunting dog. In his irritation, he developed Velcro.
The Pacemaker
How many inventors does it take to keep a heart beating? In 1932 an American scientist named Albert S. Hyman hypothesized that a man-made pacemaker could replace the electrical impulses from the brain that stimulated nerves in the heart. His invention resembled a miniature sewing machine that attached to the heart through wires inserted in the chest. By the late 1950s, Sweden’s Rune Elmqvist and Ake Senning had invented a battery-powered pace-maker that could be implanted in the chest, and Britain’s Wilson Greatbatch had come up with a casing to shield the heart from battery chemicals.
Since then technology has continued to improve, making the little machines as light as nine grams and able to run for months on lithium or nuclear-powered batteries. The result: more than half a million people have been fitted with pacemakers worldwide.
Other accidental innovations are not as well known:
• Percy Lebaron Spencer had 120 patents, mostly in the defense industry. One day, he walked by a magnetron, a machine used in radar. The candy bar in his pocket melted. He grabbed a handful of popcorn kernels and put them in front of the magnetron— they popped! He invented the microwave oven.
• Pharmacist John Walker was mixing chemicals to produce a drug. Some of the mixture stuck to the mixing stick. He tried to scrape it off and it burst into flames. He called them “sulphuretted peroxide strikables.” Granted, the name of his invention needed a bit of refining: matches.
• 11-year-old Frank Epperson left a mixture of soda powder and water that froze to a mixing stick. 20 years later he decided to add some flavors and lo and behold, we had the “Eppsicles.” Again, the name needed some refinement—popsicles. He got royalties for 60 million of them. His innovation, of course, became more than a food: it became a way of keeping hot and tired kids from getting too ornery.
• And let us all give thanks to Tim Berniers-Lee, who was trying to figure out a way to organize his copious notes in order to keep track of his random associations. Today, we have the Internet. He was just being a self-centered researcher, yet his idea became the basis for something billions of people worldwide now rely on.
The key question we should ask ourselves based on looking at all of these examples is: How we can refine our power of observation in order to see innovations instead of accidents, mistakes, or random occurrences?