The Greatest Mistakes of All Time



The Greatest Mistakes of All Time |[pic] | |

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|"Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius! ... I've failed my way to success." |

|--Thomas Edison |

|Sit down. Pour yourself a Coke, have a chocolate chip cookie--whatever you like. Then, grab a yellow sticky note and write this |

|down: |

|MISTAKES ARE GOOD |

|You may have heard this before, but I bet you still hate the idea of screwing up and embarrassing yourself in front of |

|everybody. This is understandable. We aren't very nice to people who make mistakes. |

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|Reader questions answered: Why do we get 'brain freeze' when drinking something cold? |

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|Unless you somehow manage not to do anything ever again, you will mess up, somehow, somewhere. I promise. |

|If you have the right frame of mind, though, that mistake could turn out to be one of the most valuable, most important, most |

|memorable, or most delicious accidents in history. |

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|It's happened before--too many times for me to describe without giving you severe eyestrain. There's a great little book on the |

|topic called Mistakes that Worked, by Charlotte Foltz Jones. It's written for kids, but it's the sort of thing that's a fun read|

|even for adults. |

|I've picked my favorite mistakes from history, science, and folklore. Some are familiar. We already know, for instance, that |

|Christopher Columbus meant to sail to Asia, not America. |

|We may never have pondered other mistakes, however. Where would Jack be if his mother hadn't tossed his magic beans out the |

|window? Not up the beanstalk getting golden eggs from the giant's goose, that's for sure. |

|And where would Cinderella be had she not dropped her glass slipper? Cleaning the fireplace, that's where. (By the way, did you |

|know that the original Cinderella story had her wearing a fur shoe? A French writer made a mistake when he wrote the story down |

|in 1697, confusing two homonyms--vair, an Old French word for fur, and verre, which is French for glass. But it was a good |

|mistake, making for much more romantic story, and much better fashion.) |

|And now for the rest ... |

|Coca-Cola, chocolate chip cookies, and yellow sticky notes |

|Did you wonder why I invited you to have a snack at the beginning of this story? It was because both Coca-Cola and chocolate |

|chip cookies were mistakes--or at least unexpected delights. And yellow sticky notes were the result of a failure. Here's what |

|happened. |

|Innkeeper Ruth Wakefield was baking Butter Drop Do cookies one day in the 1930s using a recipe that dated back to colonial |

|times. She cut up a Nestlé chocolate bar and put the chunks in the batter, expecting them to melt. Wakefield thought she'd be |

|pulling chocolate-flavored cookies out of the oven. Instead, what she got were butter cookies studded with gooey chocolate |

|chips. Her mistake became one of the most favorite cookies of all time. |

|Coca-Cola was the result of another delicious accident. In 1886 a pharmacist named John Pemberton cooked up a medicinal syrup in|

|a large brass kettle slung over an open fire, stirring it with an oar. When he was done, he figured he had created a fine tonic |

|for people who were tired, nervous, or plagued with sore teeth. |

|He and his assistant mixed it with ice water, sipped it, and proclaimed it tasty. They wanted some more, and the assistant |

|accidentally used carbonated water to mix the second batch. Voila! Instead of medicine, these men had created a fizzy |

|beverage--one that is now consumed around the world. |

|Today people guzzle 1 billion drinks a day from the Coca-Cola company (they make more than Coke). Even more encouraging for us |

|everyday screw-ups: This new beverage wasn't an instant success. In the first year, Pemberton spent $73.96 promoting his new |

|product but managed to sell only $50 worth. |

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|Want to Learn More? |

|Are you a young inventor? Did you know that the National Inventors Hall of Fame has summer camp? Already have an invention? You |

|might want to check and see if someone else already has the patent. Need help getting a patent? The U.S. Patent and Trademark |

|Office can assist you. Need to know exactly what a patent is? |

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|Yellow sticky notes, officially known as Post-it Notes, got their start in 1968 when a 3M researcher tried to improve adhesive |

|tape. What he got was a semisticky adhesive--not exactly what you want out of tape. Even so, he knew he had something cool--he |

|just didn't know what to do with it. |

|Four years later, another 3M scientist was getting frustrated. This scientist was a member of his church choir, and he kept |

|dropping the bookmarks stuck in his hymnal. What he needed was something that would stick without being too sticky--something |

|just like that weak glue his colleague had accidentally created. In 1980 the Post-it Note became an official product and a huge |

|hit. |

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|(Another 3M scientist came up with a cool substance called Scotchgard, which helps prevent dirt from staining fabric. But that |

|wasn't what she set out to create: Scotchgard grew out of an attempt to make a synthetic rubber to be used in airplane fuel |

|lines. One day some of the new substance spilled on her assistant's canvas shoe, and they couldn't get it off. As the tennis |

|shoe grew older, it got dingy--everywhere except where the substance had spilled. It took three more years of tinkering, but |

|they had their Scotchgard.) |

|Tires and Silly Putty |

|Rubber got its name when English scientist Joseph Priestley discovered that a wad of it was good at "rubbing out" pencil |

|mistakes on paper. But the rubber really hit the road--literally--when someone figured out how to stabilize it for use in boots,|

|tires, and the like. The problem was that rubber melted if it got too hot and shattered if it got too cold. |

|A colorful character named Charles Goodyear tried to fix this problem in several ways, but it wasn't until (according to legend)|

|he accidentally dropped a blob of rubber and sulfur on a hot stove that he found something that worked. Goodyear denied this was|

|a mistake, but the point is that he had the savvy to know he was on to something good. |

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|Want to Learn More? On the Web |

|Charles Goodyear died in debt, but he died satisfied. How so? Read his story on the Goodyear Web site. |

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|Rubber shortages during World War II prompted the U.S. government to look for a synthetic rubber. It seemed like a good idea to |

|try to make this substitute for rubber out of something plentiful, and researchers eventually settled on silicone. An inventor |

|at General Electric added a little boric acid to silicone oil and developed a gooey, bouncy substance. |

|This substance failed as a substitute for rubber, but after the war it became an extremely popular toy known as Silly Putty. |

|Apollo 8 astronauts later used it to stabilize their tools in zero gravity. (The astronauts carried their Silly Putty in |

|sterling silver eggs.) Today, Binney & Smith (the company that makes Silly Putty) produces 20,000 eggs' worth of Silly Putty a |

|day. |

|The implantable cardiac pacemaker and penicillin |

|Some errors have saved lives. Before Wilson Greatbatch came along, people with irregular heartbeats had to control their pulse |

|using a sometimes painful external device invented in 1952 by Paul Zoll. The external pacemaker was about the size of a small |

|television, and administered life-saving jolts of electricity, which sometimes burned the skin. |

|Greatbatch, a medical researcher, was working on a device to record irregular heartbeats when he accidentally inserted a |

|resistor of the wrong size. He noticed that the circuit pulsed, stopped, and pulsed again--just like a human heart. |

|After two years of tinkering, Greatbatch had made the first implantable pacemaker. He later invented a corrosion-free lithium |

|battery to power it, and millions have benefited. |

|Penicillin is another famous example of a mistake turned good. In 1928 scientist Alexander Fleming noticed that mold spores had |

|contaminated one of the bacteria samples he had left by an open window. Instead of discarding his ruined experiment, Fleming |

|took a close look and noticed the mold was dissolving the harmful bacteria. And that's how we got penicillin, which helps people|

|around the world recover from infections. |

|This brings to mind a powerful quote by scientist Louis Pasteur, "Where observation is concerned, chance favors only the |

|prepared mind," and another, by writer James Joyce, "Mistakes are the portals for discovery." |

|What they mean is that you should look carefully--and study your errors. You may find things you were never looking for, things |

|that could change the world, or at the very least, taste really good. |

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