Saccharin
The year was 1879 and Fahlberg was trying to come up with new and interesting uses for coal tar. After a productive day at the office, he went home and something strange happened. He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularly sweet. He asked his wife if she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but she hadn’t. They tasted normal to her. Fahlberg realized the taste must have been coming from his hands — which he hadn’t washed. The next day he went back to the lab and started tasting his work until he found the sweet spot.
Smart Dust
Jamie Link was doing her doctoral work in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, one of the silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward, however, that the tiny pieces still functioned as sensors. The resulting “smart dust” won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003. These teensy sensors can also be used to monitor the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical or biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumor cells in the body.
Vulcanized Rubber
One day Charles Goodyear spilled a mixture of rubber, sulfur and lead onto a hot stove. The heat charred the mixture, but didn’t ruin it. When Goodyear picked up the accident, he noticed that the mixture had hardened but was still quite usable. At last! The breakthrough he had been waiting for! His vulcanized rubber is used in everything from tires, to shoes, to hockey pucks.
Plastic
In 1907 shellac was used as insulation in electronics. It was costing the industry a pretty penny to import shellac, which was made from Southeast Asian beetles, and at home chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland thought he might turn a profit if he could produce a shellac alternative. Instead his experiments yielded a mouldable material that could take high temperatures without distorting. Baekeland thought his “Bakelite” might be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear that the product had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived from Bakelite, is used for everything from telephones to iconic movie punch lines.
Radioactivity
Back in 1896 Becquerel was fascinated by two things: natural fluorescence and the newfangled X-ray. He ran a series of experiments to see if naturally fluorescent minerals produced X-rays after they had been left out in the sun. One problem – he was doing these experiments in the winter, and there was one week with a long stretch of overcast skies. He left his equipment wrapped up together in a drawer and waited for a sunny day. When he got back to work, Becquerel realized that the uranium rock he had left in the drawer had imprinted itself on a photographic plate without being exposed to sunlight first. There was something very special about that rock. Working with Marie and Pierre Curie, he discovered that that something was radioactivity.
Mauve
In 1856 Perkin was trying to come up with artificial quinine. Instead of a malaria treatment, his experiments produced a thick murky mess. But the more he looked at it, the more Perkin saw a beautiful colour in his mess. Turns out he had made the first-ever synthetic dye. His dye was far better than any dyes that came from nature; the colour was brighter, more vibrant, and didn’t fade or wash out. His discovery also turned chemistry into a money-generating science – making it attractive for a whole generation of curious-minded people.
Pacemaker
Greatbatch was working on making a circuit to help record fast heart sounds. He reached into a box for a resistor in order to finish the circuit and pulled out a 1-megaohm resistor instead of a 10,000-ohm one. The circuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for one second. Then it repeated. The sound was as old as man: a perfect heartbeat.
Teflon
After all the damage they’ve done to the ozone layer, chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are persona non grata. Back in the 1930s, however, they were (pardon the pun) the hot new thing in the science of refrigeration. Young DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was working to make a new a new kind of CFC. He had a theory that if he could get a compound called TFE to react with hydrochloric acid, he could produce the refrigerant he wanted. So, to start his experiment Plunkett got a whole bunch of TFE gas, cooled it and pressured it in canisters so it could be stored until he was ready to use it. When the time came to open the container and put the TFE and hydrochloric acid together so they could react, nothing came out of the canister. The gas had disappeared. Only it hadn’t. Frustrated and angry, Plunkett took off the top of the canister and shook it. Out came some fine white flakes. Luckily for everyone who’s ever made an omelet, he was intrigued by the flakes and handed them off to other scientists at DuPont.
