Speaker 1: Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the
Speaker 1: tech are you? You know, it isn't hard to be
Speaker 1: reductive when we talk about genius inventors. You might imagine
Speaker 1: the iconic Eureka moment now perhaps done when our inventor
Speaker 1: is sitting in a quiet study and they're mulling over
Speaker 1: a particularly difficult problem and then the proverbial light bulb
Speaker 1: goes off. But in truth, innovation often follows in the
Speaker 1: footsteps of other discoveries, right because our subject typically stands
Speaker 1: upon the shoulders of giants, and they in turn stand
Speaker 1: on other giant shoulders and so on all the way
Speaker 1: back into history. It's very rare that we come across
Speaker 1: an invention that truly comes out of an However, sometimes
Speaker 1: innovation comes to us by way of a whipsie. That's
Speaker 1: why this episode's all about accidental inventions. You know, maybe
Speaker 1: the inventor was trying to do something else, but due
Speaker 1: to a misunderstanding or a mistake or an oversight, they
Speaker 1: created something else. That's kind of how our first story unfolds.
Speaker 1: So doctor William great Batch was an engineer. He was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen nineteen, and, like many young boys back
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he became fascinated with
Speaker 1: radio technology. During World War Two, he joined the Navy. Afterward,
Speaker 1: he attended Cornell University. He received a Bachelor of Science
Speaker 1: degree and then pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Buffalo,
Speaker 1: focusing on electrical engineering. Now, while studying at Buffalo, he
Speaker 1: also served as an assistant professor, and it was at
Speaker 1: the University of Buffalo in nineteen fifty six when doctor
Speaker 1: great Batch had his whipsie. He was attempting to build
Speaker 1: a device that would monitor a person's heartbeat. They would
Speaker 1: just listen for your heartbeat and keep track of how
Speaker 1: fast or slow it was going. But doctor gray Batch
Speaker 1: had chosen the wrong kind of resistor to go into
Speaker 1: his device. So, a resistor is a component within electrical circuits,
Speaker 1: and its purpose is to regulate the flow of electrical current.
Speaker 1: So it's a limiter. It resists the flow of current. Now,
Speaker 1: the resistor will allow some current to go through as
Speaker 1: long as it's greater than what it can resist. So
Speaker 1: the amount depends upon the resistor itself, and there are
Speaker 1: lots of different kinds of resistors for different levels of
Speaker 1: electrical current, and doctor great Batch accidentally used a resistor
Speaker 1: that allowed more current to go through than he had intended. Now,
Speaker 1: because of this, the device he created didn't just record
Speaker 1: heart beats. It would generate electric pulses. Because doctor great
Speaker 1: Batch considered his goof he realized something. These pulses were
Speaker 1: similar to the rhythm of a healthy heart. So perhaps
Speaker 1: his device could actually deliver electric pulses on purpose and
Speaker 1: give mild shocks to a heart that would cause it
Speaker 1: to contract. He could create a device that would assist
Speaker 1: a heart to beat at a healthy rhythm, and thus
Speaker 1: doctor great Batch invented the pacemaker. Now, clearly it took
Speaker 1: a little while to go from an accidental discovery to
Speaker 1: creating a true medical device that doctors could implant in
Speaker 1: a patient, but by nineteen sixty great Batch's invention was
Speaker 1: helping a patient's heart beat properly. Now, I'm sure someone
Speaker 1: at some point would have figured out a similar means
Speaker 1: to help regulate heartbeats using an electronic device, but we
Speaker 1: got the invention early, all because of a little mistake.
Speaker 1: Here's another example of an inventor who was working to
Speaker 1: solve one problem only to accidentally solve a problem that
Speaker 1: he wasn't even thinking about. Back in the nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: a Swiss engineer named Walter Jaeger wanted to create a
Speaker 1: gadget that could detect poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, for example,
Speaker 1: and he had personal reasons for doing this. One of
Speaker 1: his closest friends had died in a poison gas accident
Speaker 1: inside a laboratory. Now, obviously being able to alert people
Speaker 1: to the presence of a dangerous gas that they otherwise
Speaker 1: might not be able to detect, like carbon monoxide has
Speaker 1: no odor, right, so you can't really detect it on
Speaker 1: your own. Well, obviously this would have a huge benefit
Speaker 1: if you could have a detector that could pick up
Speaker 1: on the presence of such a gas. But Jaeger was
Speaker 1: running into a bit of a problem. You see. His
Speaker 1: approach was to create an ionization detector. So ionization is
Speaker 1: when an atom either loses or gains an electron, and
Speaker 1: that means your atom becomes a charged particle. So typically
Speaker 1: when we talk about atoms, we're talking about particles that
Speaker 1: have an equal number of negatively charged electrons and positively
Speaker 1: charged protons, so on the whole, the atom has a
Speaker 1: neutral charge because these posite charges cancel each other out. However,
Speaker 1: if the atom were to shed an electron, then it
Speaker 1: would have fewer electrons than protons and it would have
Speaker 1: a net positive charge. If it were to gain an electron, well,
Speaker 1: then it has a net negative charge. And these are ions. Now,
Speaker 1: a flow of ions can carry an electric charge. You
Speaker 1: likely have heard about plasma, which is an ionized gas.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we talk about that as like the fourth state
Speaker 1: of matter. Well, the ionization detector the Jaeger was working
Speaker 1: on had two charged plates inside of it. Then these
Speaker 1: charge plates would attract ions. And because we know opposites attract,
Speaker 1: a negatively charged plate attracts the positively charged ions toward it.
Speaker 1: The positively charged plate will attract negatively charged ions toward it.
Speaker 1: And Jaeger's hypothesis was that this poison gas would interact
Speaker 1: with those ions and bind with them and thus impede
Speaker 1: their flow, which would alter their electric current running through
Speaker 1: the device. And this change in electric current would then
Speaker 1: activate an alarm and cause a light to light up.
Speaker 1: So if something were to interfere with that electric current,
Speaker 1: the detector would go off. So the problem was Jeger
Speaker 1: wasn't seeing any results. He had been testing and testing,
Speaker 1: and it just wasn't working. The amount of gas that
Speaker 1: would actually make it into the detector didn't seem to
Speaker 1: be sufficient enough to make an appreciable change in the
Speaker 1: ionic flow, so nothing was happening. So he got discouraged
Speaker 1: and he decided he was gonna light up a cigarette
Speaker 1: and smoke away in frustration. And to his surprise, shortly
Speaker 1: after he started puffing away, the alarm went off. Yeger
Speaker 1: discovered that while the poison gas wasn't setting off his alarm,
Speaker 1: the smoke from his cigarette could do it. So Jaeger
Speaker 1: accidentally invented the world's first smoke detector. Now, other engineers
Speaker 1: would improve upon Yeager's initial design to make it more effective,
Speaker 1: and many modern SPA detectors work by using radioactive material
Speaker 1: inside them. But don't worry, it's a very small amount
Speaker 1: of radioactive material. It's also very well shielded. But it's
Speaker 1: this that generates the ions in the first place. Anyway, Boom,
Speaker 1: we get smoke detectors because a Swiss physicist had to
Speaker 1: have a cigarette when his invention wasn't working properly. Speaking
Speaker 1: of booms, let's talk dynamite. Now. I think I might
Speaker 1: be stretching the word technology a little bit here, But
Speaker 1: then considering that the guy who invented dynamite would go
Speaker 1: on to fund to prestigious award that recognizes achievements and
Speaker 1: fields that include technology, I think it's forgivable. So this
Speaker 1: is the story of Alfred Nobel, a Swiss engineer who
Speaker 1: is trying to figure out if there might be a
Speaker 1: safe way to leverage the rather spectacularly explosive power of
Speaker 1: nitroglycerin for useful purposes such as, you know, mining and
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. The problem was that nitroglycerin is
Speaker 1: awfully unstable. It's an oily liquid, it's doless. You wouldn't
Speaker 1: think it could cause an explosion, but you'd be dead
Speaker 1: wrong there, perhaps literally now. No Bell had worked in
Speaker 1: the lab that actually discovered nitroglycerin, and his compatriot who
Speaker 1: was responsible for that discovery, was skeptical that it could
Speaker 1: ever do anything useful, but no Bell had higher hopes.
Speaker 1: But here's how nitroglycerin works. It contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
Speaker 1: and nitrogen, and these are bound together in molecules. But
Speaker 1: if those molecular bonds should break, then the molecules will
Speaker 1: shift to form new molecules and they'll create stuff like
Speaker 1: carbon monoxide and other types of gases. Now, these gases
Speaker 1: will bubble and start breaking other molecular bonds, so it
Speaker 1: speeds up this molecular change at a rate that's so
Speaker 1: fast you get a massive release of energy all at
Speaker 1: the same time. Essentially you get an explosion. And the
Speaker 1: really bad news is that just knocking into the stuff
Speaker 1: could be enough to trigger the reaction. It might not,
Speaker 1: but it could. No Bell was attempting to make nitroglycerin
Speaker 1: a useful tool for industry again, particularly in stuff like
Speaker 1: mining or maybe clearing land for things like building tunnels,
Speaker 1: but the unstable nature of the chemical remained a huge concern,
Speaker 1: and tragically, there were accidents that led to fatalities, including
Speaker 1: Nobel's own brother back in Stockholm in a lab. So
Speaker 1: no Bell needed a solution not just to save his
Speaker 1: own reputation, but to prevent future catastrophes, and he hoped
Speaker 1: that by mixing nitroglycerin with the dust of otherwise solid
Speaker 1: material like wood or brick, could decrease its volatility, so
Speaker 1: he tried lots of different stuff, but diatomaceous earth turned
Speaker 1: out to do the trick. And while I can't say
Speaker 1: for certain that this discovery was completely incidental or accidental,
Speaker 1: it shows up in a lot of articles as an
Speaker 1: accidental invention. I'm not so sure about that, but I'm
Speaker 1: including it here anyway. Anyway, dinamacious earth is made up
Speaker 1: of skeletons, not human skeletons, but diatom skeletons. So diatoms
Speaker 1: are these single celled algae, and their skeletons are cellular
Speaker 1: walls composed of silica. So really it's kind of like
Speaker 1: silica powder. No Bell had no reason to believe that
Speaker 1: silica powder would be a great match for nitroglycerin, but
Speaker 1: he was desperate to find something, so maybe this is
Speaker 1: the by chance that we're looking for. Anyway, he discovered
Speaker 1: that mixing nitroglycerin with silica created a kind of putty
Speaker 1: or paste, and you could shape the stuff into rods,
Speaker 1: and using a blasting cap that no Bell also had invented,
Speaker 1: you could create dynamite. The playto like texture meant that
Speaker 1: nitroglycerin couldn't form bubbles when it got bumped into so
Speaker 1: it could no longer initiate that runaway chain reaction that
Speaker 1: would make you know, explosions happen with the liquid nitroglycerin
Speaker 1: stuff and the rod shape mean that you could do
Speaker 1: things like drill a hole in a rock face and
Speaker 1: sort of stick a dynamite into the hole, light the
Speaker 1: fuse and get the heck out of dodge, and boom,
Speaker 1: you remove a whole lot of rock. No Bell had
Speaker 1: high hopes that his invention would create an enormous benefit
Speaker 1: for humans, but as he neared the end of his day,
Speaker 1: he worried about his legacy, partly because a French newspaper
Speaker 1: published his obituary a little bit prematurely. Turned out, Nobel's
Speaker 1: brother Ludwig had passed away, and the reporter assumed it
Speaker 1: was Alfred Nobel who had shuffled off the mortal coil.
Speaker 1: And this is when Nobel decided to dedicate a large
Speaker 1: amount of his enormous fortune toward establishing a trust that
Speaker 1: would reward those who made significant contributions to humanity. And
Speaker 1: that's how we got the Nobel Prizes. What a blast.
Speaker 1: All right, We're going to take a quick break. When
Speaker 1: we come back, We've got some more accidental inventions. We're back.
Speaker 1: So this next one I'm sure I've talked about before,
Speaker 1: but it's a fun one. The story follows Richard T. James,
Speaker 1: and he was enlisted in the Navy and served as
Speaker 1: an engineer working in shipyards in Philadelphia during World War Two.
Speaker 1: And James was trying to solve a tricky problem. See,
Speaker 1: warships create a lot of vibration. They have these powerful
Speaker 1: engines that are on the ocean, which has lots of
Speaker 1: you know, waves. Obviously, also they tend to have these
Speaker 1: really big guns that occasionally fire great big shells that
Speaker 1: cause vibrations. But they also have lots of sensitive instruments
Speaker 1: on board, and sensitive instruments don't mix really well with
Speaker 1: violent vibrations. And so mister James was trying to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to stabilize these instruments and kind of
Speaker 1: isolate them from all the vibrations. His solution was to
Speaker 1: create a tension spring, but he needed to find just
Speaker 1: the right amount of tension. If it was too stiff,
Speaker 1: then it would almost be like there was no stabilization
Speaker 1: at all. And if it wasn't stiff enough, the darn
Speaker 1: instruments would be flopping around all over the place. So
Speaker 1: the story goes, he was working at his desk and
Speaker 1: he had all these different kinds of springs stacked all
Speaker 1: over the desk. When one of them, which had just
Speaker 1: the right amount of tension, tipped over. Now, instead of
Speaker 1: just bouncing all over the place or whatever, it walked,
Speaker 1: the top end of the spring moved in an arc,
Speaker 1: and gravity would pull that top down as well as
Speaker 1: the rest of the spring along. And as the bottom
Speaker 1: of the spring got pulled up, it became the new
Speaker 1: top and likewise would move in an arc, and the
Speaker 1: process would continue for as long as the spring could
Speaker 1: stroll downward until it hit the floor, and then just
Speaker 1: would end up writing itself and stopping. And James, in
Speaker 1: his effort to stabilize naval instruments, had accidentally invented the slinky.
Speaker 1: His wife Betty came up with the name. She was
Speaker 1: responsible for a lot of very smart business decisions, and
Speaker 1: James would work to find just the right type of
Speaker 1: wire intention to replicate his happy accident, and he settled
Speaker 1: on eighty feet of wire that was coiled into almost
Speaker 1: one hundred loops. In nineteen forty five, he began to
Speaker 1: sell the slinky through a new company that he had founded,
Speaker 1: and they sold like hotcakes. All it took was a
Speaker 1: simple demonstration and they would fly, or at the very
Speaker 1: least walk off the shelves. The invention story gets pretty
Speaker 1: weird after that. James would later become involved in a
Speaker 1: religious group as the popularity of the slinky was starting
Speaker 1: to fly lag, and he would leave his family behind
Speaker 1: to go off to Bolivia and spent most of his
Speaker 1: money with this religious group. His wife, Betty, actually rescued
Speaker 1: the slinky business and actually successfully brought slinky back to popularity.
Speaker 1: So it's good to see that with the wise leadership
Speaker 1: of Betty, the toy could you know spring back? Now? Finally,
Speaker 1: I would like to talk about chocolate bars, not the
Speaker 1: invention of chocolate bars. It's just that chocolate bars play
Speaker 1: an important part in this story, all right. So again,
Speaker 1: the year is nineteen forty five, big year for accidental inventions,
Speaker 1: and a feller by the name of Percy Spencer was
Speaker 1: working with radar systems. Now. One of the components that
Speaker 1: Spencer worked around was a magnetron, which I know sounds
Speaker 1: kind of like a transformer, but while there is more
Speaker 1: than meets the eye, it's actually a device that emits
Speaker 1: short electromagnetic waves, specifically in the microwave range. So in
Speaker 1: many ways it's similar to a cathode ray tube, which
Speaker 1: is the light bulb like device that's inside old television sets.
Speaker 1: So cathode ray tubes generate a stream of electrons which
Speaker 1: then collide with phosphor on the backside of a TV
Speaker 1: screen and cause that phosphor to illuminate. But a magnetron
Speaker 1: generates something else again, it generates microwaves. And Spencer was
Speaker 1: working near magnetrons and noticed something his pocket had become sticky.
Speaker 1: That's because he had a chocolate bar in his pocket
Speaker 1: and he was meaning to snack on it later, but
Speaker 1: something had caused the chocolate to melt. Now, the lab's
Speaker 1: temperature wasn't really warm enough to do that, so Spencer
Speaker 1: theorized that the microwaves generated by magnetrons had heated up
Speaker 1: the chocolate bar someway that got the wheels turning. So
Speaker 1: Spencer's accidental discovery would lead to the invention of microwave ovens.
Speaker 1: The microwaves emitted by the magnetron will bounce around inside ovens.
Speaker 1: Because these ovens are coated with metal, they reflect the microwaves,
Speaker 1: and so eventually the microwaves will hit the food inside
Speaker 1: the microwave, and at that point the microwaves will get
Speaker 1: absorbed by water molecules in the food, and those water
Speaker 1: molecules will begin to vibrate from absorbing this energy. That
Speaker 1: vibration causes friction, and friction, as we all know, creates heat.
Speaker 1: And so by vibrating these water molecules inside food and
Speaker 1: making them vibrate super fast and create a lot of friction,
Speaker 1: you reheat the food or heat up the food, and
Speaker 1: it does it very quickly. And this is all because
Speaker 1: of a melted chocolate bar in a radar laboratory. Now,
Speaker 1: it's possible that every single one of the inventions I've
Speaker 1: mentioned today would have come about on their own time
Speaker 1: through some other means, that someone would have discovered it
Speaker 1: at some point. But I think the lesson that we
Speaker 1: should take from this is that the next time you
Speaker 1: have a goofam up, you should really pay attention, because
Speaker 1: you might just be on to something anyway. I always
Speaker 1: think that it's fascinating to learn about inventions. As I said,
Speaker 1: a lot of inventions, as you read about them, you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: this is an iteration a refinement of a previous invention,
Speaker 1: and you have to go back a bit. And then
Speaker 1: when you go back a bit, you realize, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this in turn was built on top of some other principles,
Speaker 1: so you got to go back further. So whenever you
Speaker 1: talk about the history of any invention, you are running
Speaker 1: the risk of actually diving super deep into history until
Speaker 1: you just have to make an executive decision of where
Speaker 1: you cut it off. So I hope you enjoyed this
Speaker 1: short episode about some of the accidental inventions that we
Speaker 1: have been lucky enough to experience over the years. I'm
Speaker 1: sure I'll do more episodes along these lines in the future.
Speaker 1: There are things I didn't cover. I didn't cover things
Speaker 1: like velcrow or silly putty, which is another famous accidental invention,
Speaker 1: so maybe we'll chat about those in a future case.
Speaker 1: I maybe we'll talk about some purposeful ones in the
Speaker 1: future as well. In the meantime, I hope you are
Speaker 1: all well and I'll talk to you again. Really, So,
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