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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|Thanks for all the questions you've sent in! I want more. Send me mail, and check my future columns to see if I answer your |
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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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