Discovery by AccidentIn the long history of man's inventiveness, discoverers seem to fall

Discovery by Accident

In the long history of man's inventiveness, discoverers seem to fall into two classes. The first is the ingenious person who sets out to find the solution to a problem. The second is the lucky one who appears to stumble upon something by accident.

But we should be clear what we mean by "accident." For the "accidental" aspect of many great discoveries is that something unusual has happened when there is an observant person present who notices what has happened, and sets to work to find out why.

The best example of this happened so long ago that no one now can say who was the inventor. Consider the wheel, without which we should have neither clocks nor motorcars, neither airplanes nor steamships.

But men had been making wheels for tens of thousands of years before someone thought of using them to make work easier.Skeletons of people who died fifty thousand years ago were discovered to be wearing little wheels as articles of personal adornment; wheels are painted on their pottery and carved on their bone implements. Their children must have played with small wheels, yet thousands of years had to pass before someone thought of making a larger wheel and fitting it to a sled, thus making a cart.

During the First World War, Mr. Harry Brearley, a well-known expert in metals, was asked to investigate the problem of the "pitting" (凹痕) which spoiled gun barrels after being fired for a certain length of time. In his research, the first thing that Mr. Brearley did was to order a number of barrels to be made of new steel alloys. One of these alloys contained a higher percentage of chromium (铬) than had ever been used before.

A gun barrel was made of this new "chromium steel;" but the first shot fired through it broke it into a dozen pieces. So the scraps were thrown on to the waste heap. A week or two afterwards, Mr. Brcarley noticed that among the now rusty scraps of metal were a few which were as bright as when they had left the foundry. These were the broken pieces of the chromium steel barrel. From this accidental discovery developed the enormous benefits of "stainless steel.

The same desire to find out why lies behind one of the most valuable inventions of all time: that of penicillin. A culture of deadly bacteria that Dr. Alexander Fleming was experimenting with became mouldy (发霉的). He noticed that where the mould had formed, the deadly micro-organisms were dying fast. Had he then, he asked himself, found something which would actually kill the bacteria？ With the help of some other scientists, he was able to cultivate the mould, which had been identified as Pencillium Notatum (特异青霉). Eventually, that mould was mass produced, and given to the world as the "wonder-drug," penicillin.

Behind the great rubber industry of today lies a story of one man's search and of his lucky discovery by accident. Charles Goodyear was an American who had been trying for years to find a way in which rubber could be made to produce a hard, non-sticky, and yet elastic substance. For the trouble is that rubber, in its natural state, is hard when cold and soft and sticky when heated.

One day, by chance, Goodyear dropped a small piece of molded rubber on to a stove at the same time that a piece of sulphur (硫磺) slipped out of his hand. The smell of burning rubber mixed with burning sulphur was horrible, and he hastily got a knife to scrape the mess from the stove top.

Feverishly he scraped away and threw the bits of boiling rubber on to a plate. But when it had cooled down, what a different sort of rubber it was! It was cold, and yet flexible. It was not sticky, even when it was reheated. Goodyear had invented —by accident —the basic method of preparing rubber for commercial use. He had invented the process that we now call "vulcanizing" (橡胶的硫化).

The pneumatic (充气式) tire had bee

A．Y

B．N

C．NG