On occasion of National Science Day, we celebrate the spirit of curiosity! The same curiosity that led Sir C.V. Raman to discover the scattering property of light for which he got the Nobel Prize, and had February 28 dedicated to that discovery. (Read the article “Water Colours” in The Hindu Young World dated February 27, 2012: http://bit.ly/1U2AUNt )
Discovering something is all about having a curious mind. Curiosity leads to discovery. But the fun part is that some of these discoveries were not what the scientists had been curious about in the first place! They were by products of the journey on the way to discovering something else. But, being scientists, their alert minds were quick to catch on to something unexpectedly interesting. In the words of Nobel Prize winning biochemist, Albert Szent-Györgyi (we know Vitamin C because of him), “A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.”
Chance discovery
Way back in 1667, an alchemist called Henning Brandt was looking for the ‘philosopher’s stone’. Alchemists believed that with the right mix of special ingredients it was possible to synthesise gold in a laboratory. Ah! The yellow metal! Could it be done with a certain yellow liquid, thought the alchemist. The yellowest liquid on hand happened to be, well, urine, so being the dogged scientist that he was, Brandt collected barrels of urine and stored them in his basement, unmindful of the inconvenience it caused him (and anyone else who entered his house!) After weeks and weeks of boiling, distilling, cooling, filtering, heating, evaporating, passing through oils, condensing, heating with sand, and just letting be, he managed to obtain a putrid lump at the bottom of a barrel. But it wasn’t just any lump; it was a lump that glowed in the dark! What Brandt had done was isolate the element phosphorus from urine. In doing so, he became the first person to discover an element (other than gold and silver, which were discovered so long ago that there is no record of their discovery). Phosphorus went on to have innumerable uses, including in the manufacture of match sticks.
While on the subject of golden yellow, did you know that corn flakes came about because a certain Dr. Kellogg left his boiled wheat outside and went off on some errand, forgetting all about it, only to find when he came back that it had dried out completely. He baked it anyway, and was surprised to see a flaky result. He tried the same with different grains, and corn turned out to be the tastiest. Breakfast has never been the same ever since.
Are you sufficiently amused? If not, you could try inhaling a bit of nitrous oxide. Also known as laughing gas, this was used for recreational purposes well into the mid 1800s. They even had “laughing parties” where the only idea was to get together, inhale nitrous oxide, and laugh uncontrollably. This went on for the next 50 years, while elsewhere in hospitals, patients would go through unimaginable pain under the surgeon’s knife, because anaesthesia was not known. One day, at a laughing party, one of the participants fell off his chair laughing, and despite a huge gash from which blood gushed forth, continued to laugh. A dentist, Horace Wells, observed this, and used laughing gas on his next patient for a tooth extraction, with the happy result that the patient experienced very little pain.
Surgery with anaesthesia is all very well, but you would not have a great chance of recovering if not for antibiotics. And what do we have to thank for this but Alexander Fleming’s habit of not cleaning his lab! Leaving his petri dishes with their bacteria culture out on the table, Fleming went off on a two-week vacation, only to find mould growing on the petri dishes when he returned. Funny thing was, no bacteria grew in the spaces around the mould. He had a feeling that this might be a good thing, but couldn’t immediately figure out a safe way of administering this into patients. Still, he documented the details for further reference. Which was a good thing, because it wasn’t until 13 years later that other scientists put more thought into this and developed antibiotics. So scientific discoveries have resulted from other people’s accidents as well!
Talking of accidents, there was this carpenter’s son who once fell from a third floor window, miraculously survived only to get burned in a gunpowder accident and then burned again in a cooking misadventure, swallowed a pin, and as if that wasn't enough, went on to inhaling varnish fumes and nearly die of asphyxiation. It was a good thing for us that Adolphe Sax survived all this because when his father was commissioned to make musical instruments for the Dutch Army band, he fiddled around and came up with the saxophone.
Anything can happen if you’re curious enough! Could you be the next big serendipitous discoverer? I’d love to feature you here! Stay away from the urine, though. That one’s done.
