Accidental Inventions

To begin with, often you just don’t know change is coming. Even if you’re personally involved, you may be looking the wrong way at the time, like young William Perkin of London in 1856. Around then, everybody wits looking for benzene rings and chemistry was the flavor of the month, and Perkin, a chemist, was trying to be the young science hero who would save the great British empire by discovering the way to make artificial quinine chemically. You see, our administration and army chaps were dropping like flies out in the Far Eastern colonies because of malaria, and artificial quinine would have fixed things up right. Besides that, we were having to buy natural quinine from the Dutch in Java, and they charged an outrageous price for it. So that great motivator, money, was also at work. Well, after a bit Perkin came up with some interesting sludge, but one thing it wasn’t was artificial quinine, so he threw it down the sink, and discovered that he had invented the world’s first aniline dye. Made a million.

Sometimes, though, you may be looking in the right direction, but you don’t see what’s happening. In 1778, just after you people had gone off on your own and left us with no more South Carolina pitch to put on the bottom of our ships to protect them from rot, the rather seedy ninth Earl of Dundonald in Scotland thought up a plan to recoup the family fortunes by getting tar out of the coal from a couple of mines on his land. This tar would replace the pitch and make Dundonald a rich man. Unfortunately, the British government had already shifted to copper-bottoming its ships, so Dundonald’s coal-heating kiln, where he made the tar, was useless, and so were the vapors he had been watching coming out of the kiln. In fact, he’d even been lighting them and generally playing around, shooting flames out of a tube. He happened to mention this to his friend James Watt, and three years later, Watt’s sidekick “invented” coal gas. Dundonald died in poverty.

However, even when you get what you’re looking for and you know you’ve got it, things can go haywire. Take Benjamin Huntsman, clockmaker, looking for a better clock spring in 1740 because pendulum clocks were no good at sea and you needed a clock to work out longitude, and in an era of great maritime expansion east and west, longitude was kind of essential. Now Huntsman happened to live near a glass works, and he saw the glassmakers putting in chips of old broken bottles, doing hightemperature remelts, and coming out with really great glass. So he tried the trick with steel. It worked, and there was what he wanted, the world’s greatest spring. The point was, Huntsman’s steel would also cut anything you could think of, so what it did for the lathe, and machine tools in general, and micrometers, and precision engineering, and steam engine cylinders, and the whole Industrial Revolution was something nobody could ever have dreamed of-least of all Huntsman, who sat there saying, “What happened?”

Sometimes the catalyst for major change will simply come in, totally unexpectedly, from outside your paradigm. Take the case of the compass. It came in from China via the Arabs in the twelfth century. Nothing much happened until Sir Francis Drake came back from over here complaining about the way the needle did funny things when you got across to this side of the Atlantic. Queen Elizabeth’s doctor took time off (18 years) to look at why, and decided that the Earth was a gigantic magnet with poles. OK, so what? Well, to carry out his experiments, he built himself a lot of balls of various substances-lodestone, amber, sulfur, glass, and so on-to represent the Earth, so he could see what they did to his compass. As he busily rubbed these balls to make them attractive to his needle, he noted somewhat disinterestedly that sulfur was very attractive, and added a minor footnote to that effect. Around 1640 the mayor of Magdeburg in Germany, one Otto Guericke, read the aforesaid footnote and tried the trick again. While he was rubbing his sulfur ball one day to make it attractive, it cracked and gave off a spark, and-yes, you guessed it-electricity. From the compass. From China. Even if you’d spoken Chinese you wouldn’t have seen that one coming!

One of the most common ways change is generated is through interaction between one factor and another, and usually in unexpected concatenations. Take the skills a goldsmith has. He’s good at working soft metals and using molten alloys, and the hallmark of a good goldsmith is just that, his hallmark, the punch that puts his impress on his work. If you are capable of seeing that punched image in reverse, you can see how to cast a shape in the pattern made by the punch. And the pattern could be a letter, in metal, which is why printing was invented by a goldsmith-that’s what Gutenberg was.

It is the search that produces revolutionary inventions, not the intention, discovering something useful is like winning the lottery in this passage, but you have to be knowledgeable enough to know that you have won it.