Prologue

Serendipity, to make an unexpected discovery or stumble upon fortunate chance. In simpler terms, it means an event happens or develops by chance in a happy or beneficial way. At least that is the definition I shamelessly lifted from noisli.com.

Our lives are filled with moments of serendipity that often go unnoticed. In this piece, we follow the lives of 3 individuals who, through their own moments of serendipity, went on to make life easier for millions. Whether it is dealing with seemingly insignificant nuisances or saving lives on a massive scale, the lesson remains the same and with this piece I hope to bring that to light.

May their stories remind us to pay closer attention to the rare moments of serendipity in our own lives. Enjoy. 

A Sticky Situation

In 1942, the world was at war. The US needed a way to manufacture clear plastics for their gunsights as glass was prone to shattering. Harry Coover, a chemist working with Eastman Kodak Company, a wartime manufacturing firm, was tasked with figuring this out. He set out to make the perfect plastic for this, except he kept encountering the same frustrating flaw. Every variation of the polymer he made was sticky. It stuck to everything. It stuck to his equipment, his shirt, his gloves, and it even stuck together. No matter how much he altered the formulation, the result was the same. Coover felt stuck (See what I did there).

Coover eventually gave up on his project and was moved to a different division in Eastman Kodak. Nine years later, in 1951, when the US needed to make durable plastics for fighter jet canopies, Coover was approached again. This time, he was determined to make it work, but as fate would have it, the same issue kept rising. He kept making changes to his polymer structure but on his 910th experiment, he had a shift in perspective. He took his polymer and began sticking things together in his laboratory. It adhered to everything: plastic, metal, glass, leather, every material. 

He sent a sample to the head of Eastman Kodak along with a proposal outlining its potential. The company agreed. The polymer was marketed as Eastman 910. You may or may not have already figured it out, but this completes the origin story of what would later become known as super glue. 

A Sweet Accident 

Three years after Harry Coover’s first attempt at making gunsights, Percy Spencer was at work when he walked past a magnetron. Spencer was a self taught engineer working for Raytheon Corporation. His role at the time was to produce large amounts of radar equipment for use in WW2. One critical component of this technology is the magnetron Spencer found himself walking past. It is the part of the radar system that generates microwave radiation used to detect aircrafts and ships. 

As Spencer stood by the contraption, he felt a warm sensation in his pocket. He reached into it and pulled out a glob of messy goo wrapped in what he identified to be candy wrapper. A previously well shaped chocolate bar he had kept in his pocket for later had melted. Spencer was intrigued. The lab was cool and he hadn’t been around any heat sources. He decided to investigate further. He asked a technician to bring him a bag of corn kernels and placed it near the magnetron. Within minutes, the lab began to fill with the sound of kernels popping and the smell of fresh popcorn. He was not done, the next morning he returned with eggs. They exploded.

Spencer realized the invisible waves weren’t just for detecting planes, they were generating some kind of heat that was cooking food from the inside. Cooking had accidentally progressed from fire to frequency. In 1947, a few years after this accidental discovery, the first commercial microwave was made. 

Birth of Antibiotics 

Antibiotics have been lauded by some as the single greatest advancement in modern medicine. Rightfully so, because prior to their discovery, anything from a simple scratch on the knee to a bacterial sore throat could prove fatal. Since their introduction, antibiotics are estimated to have saved over 200 million lives.

How did this miracle of science come to be? Alexander Fleming’s story is often mistold as one of meticulous planning and research, when actually it is one of chance and circumstance. Fleming was a Scottish microbiologist who was studying Staphylococcus Aureus, a bacterium notorious for wound infections, boils and other serious illnesses. One day in 1928, Fleming came back from a long vacation and found that some of the bacterial cultures in his lab had died. What he did not know was that some fungal spores had drifted in through his window and settled on the bacteria. Fleming would later discover that this fungus had a substance called penicillium which destroyed the surrounding bacteria. 

As a former soldier and survivor of WWI, Fleming had seen his fair share of men dying from wound infections. Recognising the significance of what he had stumbled upon, he immediately shifted the focus of his research. Although Fleming himself did not succeed in creating a usable antibiotic, his work laid the foundation for Howard Florey and Ernst Chain who would later develop Penicillin, the world’s first true antibiotic.

Today, Fleming is credited for the discovery of Penicillin not because he was looking for it but because he was attentive enough to notice when chance placed it before him.

Amor fati

Uncertainty is the price we pay for being human. Each day we wake up with an idea of how our lives are supposed to unfold. Today, I will eat out with my friend, finish reading this book, and watch the sunset at the end of the day. To live is to plan. We plan for the near future, we plan for the distant future. But if you are anything like me(human), you find that our plans do not always materialise exactly as we imagined. Sometimes, we end up with less than we hoped for. Other times, we leave with more.

The underlying truth, as the stories you’ve just read show, is that there is no guaranteed way to make life unfold as planned. We can only plan and do our best. But just because your plans don’t go according to design doesn’t mean you come out with nothing. And when those moments of Serendipity find you, I hope you are not too blinded by the loss of your plans, that you suffer and ignore the gain of something better.