February 14, 2024 • 18 mins
Not all inventions are the product of careful experimentation. Sometimes, someone pulls a whoopsie and learns something new. This episode is all about those types of discoveries.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? You know, it isn't hard to be
reductive when we talk about genius inventors. You might imagine
(00:29):
the iconic Eureka moment now perhaps done when our inventor
is sitting in a quiet study and they're mulling over
a particularly difficult problem and then the proverbial light bulb
goes off. But in truth, innovation often follows in the
footsteps of other discoveries, right because our subject typically stands
upon the shoulders of giants, and they in turn stand
(00:51):
on other giant shoulders and so on all the way
back into history. It's very rare that we come across
an invention that truly comes out of an However, sometimes
innovation comes to us by way of a whipsie. That's
why this episode's all about accidental inventions. You know, maybe
the inventor was trying to do something else, but due
(01:13):
to a misunderstanding or a mistake or an oversight, they
created something else. That's kind of how our first story unfolds.
So doctor William great Batch was an engineer. He was
born in nineteen nineteen, and, like many young boys back
in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he became fascinated with
radio technology. During World War Two, he joined the Navy. Afterward,
(01:37):
he attended Cornell University. He received a Bachelor of Science
degree and then pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Buffalo,
focusing on electrical engineering. Now, while studying at Buffalo, he
also served as an assistant professor, and it was at
the University of Buffalo in nineteen fifty six when doctor
great Batch had his whipsie. He was attempting to build
(02:00):
a device that would monitor a person's heartbeat. They would
just listen for your heartbeat and keep track of how
fast or slow it was going. But doctor gray Batch
had chosen the wrong kind of resistor to go into
his device. So, a resistor is a component within electrical circuits,
(02:20):
and its purpose is to regulate the flow of electrical current.
So it's a limiter. It resists the flow of current. Now,
the resistor will allow some current to go through as
long as it's greater than what it can resist. So
the amount depends upon the resistor itself, and there are
lots of different kinds of resistors for different levels of
(02:41):
electrical current, and doctor great Batch accidentally used a resistor
that allowed more current to go through than he had intended. Now,
because of this, the device he created didn't just record
heart beats. It would generate electric pulses. Because doctor great
Batch considered his goof he realized something. These pulses were
similar to the rhythm of a healthy heart. So perhaps
(03:04):
his device could actually deliver electric pulses on purpose and
give mild shocks to a heart that would cause it
to contract. He could create a device that would assist
a heart to beat at a healthy rhythm, and thus
doctor great Batch invented the pacemaker. Now, clearly it took
a little while to go from an accidental discovery to
(03:27):
creating a true medical device that doctors could implant in
a patient, but by nineteen sixty great Batch's invention was
helping a patient's heart beat properly. Now, I'm sure someone
at some point would have figured out a similar means
to help regulate heartbeats using an electronic device, but we
got the invention early, all because of a little mistake.
(03:48):
Here's another example of an inventor who was working to
solve one problem only to accidentally solve a problem that
he wasn't even thinking about. Back in the nineteen thirties,
a Swiss engineer named Walter Jaeger wanted to create a
gadget that could detect poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, for example,
and he had personal reasons for doing this. One of
(04:10):
his closest friends had died in a poison gas accident
inside a laboratory. Now, obviously being able to alert people
to the presence of a dangerous gas that they otherwise
might not be able to detect, like carbon monoxide has
no odor, right, so you can't really detect it on
your own. Well, obviously this would have a huge benefit
if you could have a detector that could pick up
on the presence of such a gas. But Jaeger was
(04:32):
running into a bit of a problem. You see. His
approach was to create an ionization detector. So ionization is
when an atom either loses or gains an electron, and
that means your atom becomes a charged particle. So typically
when we talk about atoms, we're talking about particles that
have an equal number of negatively charged electrons and positively
(04:54):
charged protons, so on the whole, the atom has a
neutral charge because these posite charges cancel each other out. However,
if the atom were to shed an electron, then it
would have fewer electrons than protons and it would have
a net positive charge. If it were to gain an electron, well,
then it has a net negative charge. And these are ions. Now,
(05:17):
a flow of ions can carry an electric charge. You
likely have heard about plasma, which is an ionized gas.
Sometimes we talk about that as like the fourth state
of matter. Well, the ionization detector the Jaeger was working
on had two charged plates inside of it. Then these
charge plates would attract ions. And because we know opposites attract,
(05:39):
a negatively charged plate attracts the positively charged ions toward it.
The positively charged plate will attract negatively charged ions toward it.
And Jaeger's hypothesis was that this poison gas would interact
with those ions and bind with them and thus impede
their flow, which would alter their electric current running through
(06:00):
the device. And this change in electric current would then
activate an alarm and cause a light to light up.
So if something were to interfere with that electric current,
the detector would go off. So the problem was Jeger
wasn't seeing any results. He had been testing and testing,
and it just wasn't working. The amount of gas that
(06:22):
would actually make it into the detector didn't seem to
be sufficient enough to make an appreciable change in the
ionic flow, so nothing was happening. So he got discouraged
and he decided he was gonna light up a cigarette
and smoke away in frustration. And to his surprise, shortly
after he started puffing away, the alarm went off. Yeger
(06:43):
discovered that while the poison gas wasn't setting off his alarm,
the smoke from his cigarette could do it. So Jaeger
accidentally invented the world's first smoke detector. Now, other engineers
would improve upon Yeager's initial design to make it more effective,
and many modern SPA detectors work by using radioactive material
inside them. But don't worry, it's a very small amount
(07:05):
of radioactive material. It's also very well shielded. But it's
this that generates the ions in the first place. Anyway, Boom,
we get smoke detectors because a Swiss physicist had to
have a cigarette when his invention wasn't working properly. Speaking
of booms, let's talk dynamite. Now. I think I might
be stretching the word technology a little bit here, But
(07:27):
then considering that the guy who invented dynamite would go
on to fund to prestigious award that recognizes achievements and
fields that include technology, I think it's forgivable. So this
is the story of Alfred Nobel, a Swiss engineer who
is trying to figure out if there might be a
safe way to leverage the rather spectacularly explosive power of
(07:48):
nitroglycerin for useful purposes such as, you know, mining and
that kind of stuff. The problem was that nitroglycerin is
awfully unstable. It's an oily liquid, it's doless. You wouldn't
think it could cause an explosion, but you'd be dead
wrong there, perhaps literally now. No Bell had worked in
the lab that actually discovered nitroglycerin, and his compatriot who
(08:14):
was responsible for that discovery, was skeptical that it could
ever do anything useful, but no Bell had higher hopes.
But here's how nitroglycerin works. It contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen, and these are bound together in molecules. But
if those molecular bonds should break, then the molecules will
shift to form new molecules and they'll create stuff like
(08:36):
carbon monoxide and other types of gases. Now, these gases
will bubble and start breaking other molecular bonds, so it
speeds up this molecular change at a rate that's so
fast you get a massive release of energy all at
the same time. Essentially you get an explosion. And the
really bad news is that just knocking into the stuff
could be enough to trigger the reaction. It might not,
(08:58):
but it could. No Bell was attempting to make nitroglycerin
a useful tool for industry again, particularly in stuff like
mining or maybe clearing land for things like building tunnels,
but the unstable nature of the chemical remained a huge concern,
and tragically, there were accidents that led to fatalities, including
Nobel's own brother back in Stockholm in a lab. So
(09:19):
no Bell needed a solution not just to save his
own reputation, but to prevent future catastrophes, and he hoped
that by mixing nitroglycerin with the dust of otherwise solid
material like wood or brick, could decrease its volatility, so
he tried lots of different stuff, but diatomaceous earth turned
out to do the trick. And while I can't say
for certain that this discovery was completely incidental or accidental,
(09:42):
it shows up in a lot of articles as an
accidental invention. I'm not so sure about that, but I'm
including it here anyway. Anyway, dinamacious earth is made up
of skeletons, not human skeletons, but diatom skeletons. So diatoms
are these single celled algae, and their skeletons are cellular
walls composed of silica. So really it's kind of like
(10:05):
silica powder. No Bell had no reason to believe that
silica powder would be a great match for nitroglycerin, but
he was desperate to find something, so maybe this is
the by chance that we're looking for. Anyway, he discovered
that mixing nitroglycerin with silica created a kind of putty
or paste, and you could shape the stuff into rods,
and using a blasting cap that no Bell also had invented,
(10:26):
you could create dynamite. The playto like texture meant that
nitroglycerin couldn't form bubbles when it got bumped into so
it could no longer initiate that runaway chain reaction that
would make you know, explosions happen with the liquid nitroglycerin
stuff and the rod shape mean that you could do
things like drill a hole in a rock face and
(10:47):
sort of stick a dynamite into the hole, light the
fuse and get the heck out of dodge, and boom,
you remove a whole lot of rock. No Bell had
high hopes that his invention would create an enormous benefit
for humans, but as he neared the end of his day,
he worried about his legacy, partly because a French newspaper
published his obituary a little bit prematurely. Turned out, Nobel's
(11:07):
brother Ludwig had passed away, and the reporter assumed it
was Alfred Nobel who had shuffled off the mortal coil.
And this is when Nobel decided to dedicate a large
amount of his enormous fortune toward establishing a trust that
would reward those who made significant contributions to humanity. And
that's how we got the Nobel Prizes. What a blast.
All right, We're going to take a quick break. When
(11:28):
we come back, We've got some more accidental inventions. We're back.
So this next one I'm sure I've talked about before,
but it's a fun one. The story follows Richard T. James,
and he was enlisted in the Navy and served as
(11:50):
an engineer working in shipyards in Philadelphia during World War Two.
And James was trying to solve a tricky problem. See,
warships create a lot of vibration. They have these powerful
engines that are on the ocean, which has lots of
you know, waves. Obviously, also they tend to have these
really big guns that occasionally fire great big shells that
cause vibrations. But they also have lots of sensitive instruments
(12:12):
on board, and sensitive instruments don't mix really well with
violent vibrations. And so mister James was trying to figure
out a way to stabilize these instruments and kind of
isolate them from all the vibrations. His solution was to
create a tension spring, but he needed to find just
the right amount of tension. If it was too stiff,
(12:33):
then it would almost be like there was no stabilization
at all. And if it wasn't stiff enough, the darn
instruments would be flopping around all over the place. So
the story goes, he was working at his desk and
he had all these different kinds of springs stacked all
over the desk. When one of them, which had just
the right amount of tension, tipped over. Now, instead of
just bouncing all over the place or whatever, it walked,
(12:55):
the top end of the spring moved in an arc,
and gravity would pull that top down as well as
the rest of the spring along. And as the bottom
of the spring got pulled up, it became the new
top and likewise would move in an arc, and the
process would continue for as long as the spring could
stroll downward until it hit the floor, and then just
would end up writing itself and stopping. And James, in
(13:17):
his effort to stabilize naval instruments, had accidentally invented the slinky.
His wife Betty came up with the name. She was
responsible for a lot of very smart business decisions, and
James would work to find just the right type of
wire intention to replicate his happy accident, and he settled
on eighty feet of wire that was coiled into almost
one hundred loops. In nineteen forty five, he began to
(13:39):
sell the slinky through a new company that he had founded,
and they sold like hotcakes. All it took was a
simple demonstration and they would fly, or at the very
least walk off the shelves. The invention story gets pretty
weird after that. James would later become involved in a
religious group as the popularity of the slinky was starting
to fly lag, and he would leave his family behind
(14:02):
to go off to Bolivia and spent most of his
money with this religious group. His wife, Betty, actually rescued
the slinky business and actually successfully brought slinky back to popularity.
So it's good to see that with the wise leadership
of Betty, the toy could you know spring back? Now? Finally,
I would like to talk about chocolate bars, not the
(14:24):
invention of chocolate bars. It's just that chocolate bars play
an important part in this story, all right. So again,
the year is nineteen forty five, big year for accidental inventions,
and a feller by the name of Percy Spencer was
working with radar systems. Now. One of the components that
Spencer worked around was a magnetron, which I know sounds
kind of like a transformer, but while there is more
(14:46):
than meets the eye, it's actually a device that emits
short electromagnetic waves, specifically in the microwave range. So in
many ways it's similar to a cathode ray tube, which
is the light bulb like device that's inside old television sets.
So cathode ray tubes generate a stream of electrons which
then collide with phosphor on the backside of a TV
(15:08):
screen and cause that phosphor to illuminate. But a magnetron
generates something else again, it generates microwaves. And Spencer was
working near magnetrons and noticed something his pocket had become sticky.
That's because he had a chocolate bar in his pocket
and he was meaning to snack on it later, but
something had caused the chocolate to melt. Now, the lab's
(15:29):
temperature wasn't really warm enough to do that, so Spencer
theorized that the microwaves generated by magnetrons had heated up
the chocolate bar someway that got the wheels turning. So
Spencer's accidental discovery would lead to the invention of microwave ovens.
The microwaves emitted by the magnetron will bounce around inside ovens.
(15:50):
Because these ovens are coated with metal, they reflect the microwaves,
and so eventually the microwaves will hit the food inside
the microwave, and at that point the microwaves will get
absorbed by water molecules in the food, and those water
molecules will begin to vibrate from absorbing this energy. That
(16:10):
vibration causes friction, and friction, as we all know, creates heat.
And so by vibrating these water molecules inside food and
making them vibrate super fast and create a lot of friction,
you reheat the food or heat up the food, and
it does it very quickly. And this is all because
(16:30):
of a melted chocolate bar in a radar laboratory. Now,
it's possible that every single one of the inventions I've
mentioned today would have come about on their own time
through some other means, that someone would have discovered it
at some point. But I think the lesson that we
should take from this is that the next time you
(16:51):
have a goofam up, you should really pay attention, because
you might just be on to something anyway. I always
think that it's fascinating to learn about inventions. As I said,
a lot of inventions, as you read about them, you realize, oh,
this is an iteration a refinement of a previous invention,
and you have to go back a bit. And then
(17:12):
when you go back a bit, you realize, oh, well,
this in turn was built on top of some other principles,
so you got to go back further. So whenever you
talk about the history of any invention, you are running
the risk of actually diving super deep into history until
you just have to make an executive decision of where
you cut it off. So I hope you enjoyed this
(17:32):
short episode about some of the accidental inventions that we
have been lucky enough to experience over the years. I'm
sure I'll do more episodes along these lines in the future.
There are things I didn't cover. I didn't cover things
like velcrow or silly putty, which is another famous accidental invention,
so maybe we'll chat about those in a future case.
I maybe we'll talk about some purposeful ones in the
(17:54):
future as well. In the meantime, I hope you are
all well and I'll talk to you again. Really, So,
app Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(18:14):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
tech are you? You know, it isn't hard to be
reductive when we talk about genius inventors. You might imagine
(00:29):
the iconic Eureka moment now perhaps done when our inventor
is sitting in a quiet study and they're mulling over
a particularly difficult problem and then the proverbial light bulb
goes off. But in truth, innovation often follows in the
footsteps of other discoveries, right because our subject typically stands
upon the shoulders of giants, and they in turn stand
(00:51):
on other giant shoulders and so on all the way
back into history. It's very rare that we come across
an invention that truly comes out of an However, sometimes
innovation comes to us by way of a whipsie. That's
why this episode's all about accidental inventions. You know, maybe
the inventor was trying to do something else, but due
(01:13):
to a misunderstanding or a mistake or an oversight, they
created something else. That's kind of how our first story unfolds.
So doctor William great Batch was an engineer. He was
born in nineteen nineteen, and, like many young boys back
in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he became fascinated with
radio technology. During World War Two, he joined the Navy. Afterward,
(01:37):
he attended Cornell University. He received a Bachelor of Science
degree and then pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Buffalo,
focusing on electrical engineering. Now, while studying at Buffalo, he
also served as an assistant professor, and it was at
the University of Buffalo in nineteen fifty six when doctor
great Batch had his whipsie. He was attempting to build
(02:00):
a device that would monitor a person's heartbeat. They would
just listen for your heartbeat and keep track of how
fast or slow it was going. But doctor gray Batch
had chosen the wrong kind of resistor to go into
his device. So, a resistor is a component within electrical circuits,
(02:20):
and its purpose is to regulate the flow of electrical current.
So it's a limiter. It resists the flow of current. Now,
the resistor will allow some current to go through as
long as it's greater than what it can resist. So
the amount depends upon the resistor itself, and there are
lots of different kinds of resistors for different levels of
(02:41):
electrical current, and doctor great Batch accidentally used a resistor
that allowed more current to go through than he had intended. Now,
because of this, the device he created didn't just record
heart beats. It would generate electric pulses. Because doctor great
Batch considered his goof he realized something. These pulses were
similar to the rhythm of a healthy heart. So perhaps
(03:04):
his device could actually deliver electric pulses on purpose and
give mild shocks to a heart that would cause it
to contract. He could create a device that would assist
a heart to beat at a healthy rhythm, and thus
doctor great Batch invented the pacemaker. Now, clearly it took
a little while to go from an accidental discovery to
(03:27):
creating a true medical device that doctors could implant in
a patient, but by nineteen sixty great Batch's invention was
helping a patient's heart beat properly. Now, I'm sure someone
at some point would have figured out a similar means
to help regulate heartbeats using an electronic device, but we
got the invention early, all because of a little mistake.
(03:48):
Here's another example of an inventor who was working to
solve one problem only to accidentally solve a problem that
he wasn't even thinking about. Back in the nineteen thirties,
a Swiss engineer named Walter Jaeger wanted to create a
gadget that could detect poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, for example,
and he had personal reasons for doing this. One of
(04:10):
his closest friends had died in a poison gas accident
inside a laboratory. Now, obviously being able to alert people
to the presence of a dangerous gas that they otherwise
might not be able to detect, like carbon monoxide has
no odor, right, so you can't really detect it on
your own. Well, obviously this would have a huge benefit
if you could have a detector that could pick up
on the presence of such a gas. But Jaeger was
(04:32):
running into a bit of a problem. You see. His
approach was to create an ionization detector. So ionization is
when an atom either loses or gains an electron, and
that means your atom becomes a charged particle. So typically
when we talk about atoms, we're talking about particles that
have an equal number of negatively charged electrons and positively
(04:54):
charged protons, so on the whole, the atom has a
neutral charge because these posite charges cancel each other out. However,
if the atom were to shed an electron, then it
would have fewer electrons than protons and it would have
a net positive charge. If it were to gain an electron, well,
then it has a net negative charge. And these are ions. Now,
(05:17):
a flow of ions can carry an electric charge. You
likely have heard about plasma, which is an ionized gas.
Sometimes we talk about that as like the fourth state
of matter. Well, the ionization detector the Jaeger was working
on had two charged plates inside of it. Then these
charge plates would attract ions. And because we know opposites attract,
(05:39):
a negatively charged plate attracts the positively charged ions toward it.
The positively charged plate will attract negatively charged ions toward it.
And Jaeger's hypothesis was that this poison gas would interact
with those ions and bind with them and thus impede
their flow, which would alter their electric current running through
(06:00):
the device. And this change in electric current would then
activate an alarm and cause a light to light up.
So if something were to interfere with that electric current,
the detector would go off. So the problem was Jeger
wasn't seeing any results. He had been testing and testing,
and it just wasn't working. The amount of gas that
(06:22):
would actually make it into the detector didn't seem to
be sufficient enough to make an appreciable change in the
ionic flow, so nothing was happening. So he got discouraged
and he decided he was gonna light up a cigarette
and smoke away in frustration. And to his surprise, shortly
after he started puffing away, the alarm went off. Yeger
(06:43):
discovered that while the poison gas wasn't setting off his alarm,
the smoke from his cigarette could do it. So Jaeger
accidentally invented the world's first smoke detector. Now, other engineers
would improve upon Yeager's initial design to make it more effective,
and many modern SPA detectors work by using radioactive material
inside them. But don't worry, it's a very small amount
(07:05):
of radioactive material. It's also very well shielded. But it's
this that generates the ions in the first place. Anyway, Boom,
we get smoke detectors because a Swiss physicist had to
have a cigarette when his invention wasn't working properly. Speaking
of booms, let's talk dynamite. Now. I think I might
be stretching the word technology a little bit here, But
(07:27):
then considering that the guy who invented dynamite would go
on to fund to prestigious award that recognizes achievements and
fields that include technology, I think it's forgivable. So this
is the story of Alfred Nobel, a Swiss engineer who
is trying to figure out if there might be a
safe way to leverage the rather spectacularly explosive power of
(07:48):
nitroglycerin for useful purposes such as, you know, mining and
that kind of stuff. The problem was that nitroglycerin is
awfully unstable. It's an oily liquid, it's doless. You wouldn't
think it could cause an explosion, but you'd be dead
wrong there, perhaps literally now. No Bell had worked in
the lab that actually discovered nitroglycerin, and his compatriot who
(08:14):
was responsible for that discovery, was skeptical that it could
ever do anything useful, but no Bell had higher hopes.
But here's how nitroglycerin works. It contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
and nitrogen, and these are bound together in molecules. But
if those molecular bonds should break, then the molecules will
shift to form new molecules and they'll create stuff like
(08:36):
carbon monoxide and other types of gases. Now, these gases
will bubble and start breaking other molecular bonds, so it
speeds up this molecular change at a rate that's so
fast you get a massive release of energy all at
the same time. Essentially you get an explosion. And the
really bad news is that just knocking into the stuff
could be enough to trigger the reaction. It might not,
(08:58):
but it could. No Bell was attempting to make nitroglycerin
a useful tool for industry again, particularly in stuff like
mining or maybe clearing land for things like building tunnels,
but the unstable nature of the chemical remained a huge concern,
and tragically, there were accidents that led to fatalities, including
Nobel's own brother back in Stockholm in a lab. So
(09:19):
no Bell needed a solution not just to save his
own reputation, but to prevent future catastrophes, and he hoped
that by mixing nitroglycerin with the dust of otherwise solid
material like wood or brick, could decrease its volatility, so
he tried lots of different stuff, but diatomaceous earth turned
out to do the trick. And while I can't say
for certain that this discovery was completely incidental or accidental,
(09:42):
it shows up in a lot of articles as an
accidental invention. I'm not so sure about that, but I'm
including it here anyway. Anyway, dinamacious earth is made up
of skeletons, not human skeletons, but diatom skeletons. So diatoms
are these single celled algae, and their skeletons are cellular
walls composed of silica. So really it's kind of like
(10:05):
silica powder. No Bell had no reason to believe that
silica powder would be a great match for nitroglycerin, but
he was desperate to find something, so maybe this is
the by chance that we're looking for. Anyway, he discovered
that mixing nitroglycerin with silica created a kind of putty
or paste, and you could shape the stuff into rods,
and using a blasting cap that no Bell also had invented,
(10:26):
you could create dynamite. The playto like texture meant that
nitroglycerin couldn't form bubbles when it got bumped into so
it could no longer initiate that runaway chain reaction that
would make you know, explosions happen with the liquid nitroglycerin
stuff and the rod shape mean that you could do
things like drill a hole in a rock face and
(10:47):
sort of stick a dynamite into the hole, light the
fuse and get the heck out of dodge, and boom,
you remove a whole lot of rock. No Bell had
high hopes that his invention would create an enormous benefit
for humans, but as he neared the end of his day,
he worried about his legacy, partly because a French newspaper
published his obituary a little bit prematurely. Turned out, Nobel's
(11:07):
brother Ludwig had passed away, and the reporter assumed it
was Alfred Nobel who had shuffled off the mortal coil.
And this is when Nobel decided to dedicate a large
amount of his enormous fortune toward establishing a trust that
would reward those who made significant contributions to humanity. And
that's how we got the Nobel Prizes. What a blast.
All right, We're going to take a quick break. When
(11:28):
we come back, We've got some more accidental inventions. We're back.
So this next one I'm sure I've talked about before,
but it's a fun one. The story follows Richard T. James,
and he was enlisted in the Navy and served as
(11:50):
an engineer working in shipyards in Philadelphia during World War Two.
And James was trying to solve a tricky problem. See,
warships create a lot of vibration. They have these powerful
engines that are on the ocean, which has lots of
you know, waves. Obviously, also they tend to have these
really big guns that occasionally fire great big shells that
cause vibrations. But they also have lots of sensitive instruments
(12:12):
on board, and sensitive instruments don't mix really well with
violent vibrations. And so mister James was trying to figure
out a way to stabilize these instruments and kind of
isolate them from all the vibrations. His solution was to
create a tension spring, but he needed to find just
the right amount of tension. If it was too stiff,
(12:33):
then it would almost be like there was no stabilization
at all. And if it wasn't stiff enough, the darn
instruments would be flopping around all over the place. So
the story goes, he was working at his desk and
he had all these different kinds of springs stacked all
over the desk. When one of them, which had just
the right amount of tension, tipped over. Now, instead of
just bouncing all over the place or whatever, it walked,
(12:55):
the top end of the spring moved in an arc,
and gravity would pull that top down as well as
the rest of the spring along. And as the bottom
of the spring got pulled up, it became the new
top and likewise would move in an arc, and the
process would continue for as long as the spring could
stroll downward until it hit the floor, and then just
would end up writing itself and stopping. And James, in
(13:17):
his effort to stabilize naval instruments, had accidentally invented the slinky.
His wife Betty came up with the name. She was
responsible for a lot of very smart business decisions, and
James would work to find just the right type of
wire intention to replicate his happy accident, and he settled
on eighty feet of wire that was coiled into almost
one hundred loops. In nineteen forty five, he began to
(13:39):
sell the slinky through a new company that he had founded,
and they sold like hotcakes. All it took was a
simple demonstration and they would fly, or at the very
least walk off the shelves. The invention story gets pretty
weird after that. James would later become involved in a
religious group as the popularity of the slinky was starting
to fly lag, and he would leave his family behind
(14:02):
to go off to Bolivia and spent most of his
money with this religious group. His wife, Betty, actually rescued
the slinky business and actually successfully brought slinky back to popularity.
So it's good to see that with the wise leadership
of Betty, the toy could you know spring back? Now? Finally,
I would like to talk about chocolate bars, not the
(14:24):
invention of chocolate bars. It's just that chocolate bars play
an important part in this story, all right. So again,
the year is nineteen forty five, big year for accidental inventions,
and a feller by the name of Percy Spencer was
working with radar systems. Now. One of the components that
Spencer worked around was a magnetron, which I know sounds
kind of like a transformer, but while there is more
(14:46):
than meets the eye, it's actually a device that emits
short electromagnetic waves, specifically in the microwave range. So in
many ways it's similar to a cathode ray tube, which
is the light bulb like device that's inside old television sets.
So cathode ray tubes generate a stream of electrons which
then collide with phosphor on the backside of a TV
(15:08):
screen and cause that phosphor to illuminate. But a magnetron
generates something else again, it generates microwaves. And Spencer was
working near magnetrons and noticed something his pocket had become sticky.
That's because he had a chocolate bar in his pocket
and he was meaning to snack on it later, but
something had caused the chocolate to melt. Now, the lab's
(15:29):
temperature wasn't really warm enough to do that, so Spencer
theorized that the microwaves generated by magnetrons had heated up
the chocolate bar someway that got the wheels turning. So
Spencer's accidental discovery would lead to the invention of microwave ovens.
The microwaves emitted by the magnetron will bounce around inside ovens.
(15:50):
Because these ovens are coated with metal, they reflect the microwaves,
and so eventually the microwaves will hit the food inside
the microwave, and at that point the microwaves will get
absorbed by water molecules in the food, and those water
molecules will begin to vibrate from absorbing this energy. That
(16:10):
vibration causes friction, and friction, as we all know, creates heat.
And so by vibrating these water molecules inside food and
making them vibrate super fast and create a lot of friction,
you reheat the food or heat up the food, and
it does it very quickly. And this is all because
(16:30):
of a melted chocolate bar in a radar laboratory. Now,
it's possible that every single one of the inventions I've
mentioned today would have come about on their own time
through some other means, that someone would have discovered it
at some point. But I think the lesson that we
should take from this is that the next time you
(16:51):
have a goofam up, you should really pay attention, because
you might just be on to something anyway. I always
think that it's fascinating to learn about inventions. As I said,
a lot of inventions, as you read about them, you realize, oh,
this is an iteration a refinement of a previous invention,
and you have to go back a bit. And then
(17:12):
when you go back a bit, you realize, oh, well,
this in turn was built on top of some other principles,
so you got to go back further. So whenever you
talk about the history of any invention, you are running
the risk of actually diving super deep into history until
you just have to make an executive decision of where
you cut it off. So I hope you enjoyed this
(17:32):
short episode about some of the accidental inventions that we
have been lucky enough to experience over the years. I'm
sure I'll do more episodes along these lines in the future.
There are things I didn't cover. I didn't cover things
like velcrow or silly putty, which is another famous accidental invention,
so maybe we'll chat about those in a future case.
I maybe we'll talk about some purposeful ones in the
(17:54):
future as well. In the meantime, I hope you are
all well and I'll talk to you again. Really, So,
app Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts
from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(18:14):
you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Host
Jonathan Strickland
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