B Y I S A B E L L A D U N N E A N D H A N N A H B E R G I N I N V E N T I O N S M A D E B Y M I S TA K E
I N V E N T I O N S M A D E B Y M I S TA K E • There are many inventions made by mistake, alot of inventors set out to make something so simple yet there accidental inventions went on to be some of the most known items in the world today , here are a few
T H E S L I N K Y • Mechanical engineer Richard James was the man who invented the slinky. In 1943, he was working to devise springs that could keep sensitive ship equipment steady at sea. After accidentally knocking some samples off a shelf ,he watched in amazment as they gracefully ‘ walked ‘ down instead of falling. The fist 400 slinkys he made sold within minutes. At the end of the 20th century and 250 million slinkys later they are still being bought world wide.
C O C A C O L A • In 1886 , Coca-Cola was invented by a pharmacist named John Pemberton , otherwise known as “Doc”. He fought in the Civil War, and at the end of the war he decided to try and invent something that would bring him comercial success.
• After many failed attempts in medicine making , his last resort was a cough medicene that he had orginally thought of years before. His medicene was turned down by many pharmacies and he was about to give up on his idea completely when a friend of his tried the syrup and told him he should bring this to the soft drink business , a growing idea at the time. Now coca- cola is a company with a net worth of 179.3 billion. Contrary to popular belief , coca cola flavour is not celery and caramel extract , but insead the original flavour comes from the kola fruit , found in africa and parts of italy
The microwave In 1945, Percy Spencer, an american self taught engineer, was working in a lab testing magnetrons , the high powered vacuum tubes inside radars. One day while working near the magnetrons that produced microwaves, Spencer noticed a penut butter candy in his pocket had begun to melt. Shortly after, the microwave oven was born.
P O TAT O C R I S P S • The potato crisp was invented in 1853 by George Crum. Crum was a naitive american chef at the Moon Lake lodge in Saratoga Springs , New York. French fries were popular at the restaurant and one day a diner complained that the fries were too thick. Although Crum made a thinner batch, the customer was still unsatisfied. Crum finally made fries that were too thin to eat with a fork, hoping to annoy the extremely fussy customer. The customer, surprisingly enough, was happy - and potato chips were invented!
P O S T I T N O T E S • There were actually 2 accidents that lead to the invention of the post-it note. The first was by Spencer Silver. Silver was trying to create super strong adhesives for use in the aerospace industry in building planes. Instead of a super strong adhesive though, he accidentally managed to create an incredibly weak, pressure sensitive adhesive agent called Acrylate Copolymer Microspheres. This adhesive did not interest 3M management ( the company that the adhesive was originally meant for ) as it was seen as too weak to be of any use. It did have 2 interesting features though. The first is that , when stuck to a surface , it can be peeled away without leaving any residue.
• The second big feature is that the adhesive is re-usable , thanks to the fact that the spheres are incredibly strong and resist breaking, dissolving or melting. Despite these two notable features , no one , not even Silver himself could think up a good marketable use for it. Thus , even with Silver promoting it for five years straight to various 3M employees , the adhesive was more or less shelved. • Finally , in 1973 , when Geoff Nicholson was made products laboratory manager at 3M , Silver approached him immediately with the adhesive and gave him samples to play with. Silver also suggested what he saw as his best idea for what to use his adhesive for , making a bulletin board with the adhesive sprayed on it . One could then stick peices of paper to the bulletin board without tacks or tape.
• The paper could subsequently be easily removed without any residue being left on the sheets. While this was a decent idea, it wasn’t seen as potentially profitable enough as annual bulletin board sales are fairly low. • The second accident was by chemical engineer Art Fry. Besides working at 3M as a product Development Engineer and being familiar with Silver’s adhesive thanks to attending one of Silver’s seminars on the low tack adhesive, he also sung in a church choir in St.Paul , Minnesota. One little problem he continually had to deal with was accidentally losing his song page markers in his hymn book while singing , with them falling out of the hymnal. From this , he eventually had the stroke of genius to use some of silvers adhesive to help keep the slips of paper in the hymnal. Fry then suggested to Nicholson and Silver that they were using the adhesive backwards. Instead of sticking the adhesive to the bulletin board , they should “ put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything “. Thus creating the post it note.
T H A N K Y O U 😋
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