WEBVTT - Invented by Accident 0:00:04.440 --> 0:00:12.319 Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, 0:00:12.320 --> 0:00:15.920 and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host Jonathan Strickland. 0:00:16.000 --> 0:00:19.200 I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and how the 0:00:19.280 --> 0:00:23.360 tech are you? You know, it isn't hard to be 0:00:23.440 --> 0:00:28.920 reductive when we talk about genius inventors. You might imagine 0:00:29.080 --> 0:00:33.720 the iconic Eureka moment now perhaps done when our inventor 0:00:33.800 --> 0:00:36.880 is sitting in a quiet study and they're mulling over 0:00:36.960 --> 0:00:40.600 a particularly difficult problem and then the proverbial light bulb 0:00:40.640 --> 0:00:43.880 goes off. But in truth, innovation often follows in the 0:00:43.920 --> 0:00:48.600 footsteps of other discoveries, right because our subject typically stands 0:00:48.680 --> 0:00:51.839 upon the shoulders of giants, and they in turn stand 0:00:51.880 --> 0:00:55.319 on other giant shoulders and so on all the way 0:00:55.360 --> 0:00:57.880 back into history. It's very rare that we come across 0:00:57.920 --> 0:01:02.880 an invention that truly comes out of an However, sometimes 0:01:03.480 --> 0:01:07.120 innovation comes to us by way of a whipsie. That's 0:01:07.120 --> 0:01:10.440 why this episode's all about accidental inventions. You know, maybe 0:01:10.480 --> 0:01:13.520 the inventor was trying to do something else, but due 0:01:13.600 --> 0:01:17.560 to a misunderstanding or a mistake or an oversight, they 0:01:17.680 --> 0:01:21.480 created something else. That's kind of how our first story unfolds. 0:01:21.680 --> 0:01:25.560 So doctor William great Batch was an engineer. He was 0:01:25.600 --> 0:01:29.360 born in nineteen nineteen, and, like many young boys back 0:01:29.360 --> 0:01:32.160 in the nineteen twenties and thirties, he became fascinated with 0:01:32.319 --> 0:01:37.320 radio technology. During World War Two, he joined the Navy. Afterward, 0:01:37.360 --> 0:01:41.160 he attended Cornell University. He received a Bachelor of Science 0:01:41.200 --> 0:01:45.240 degree and then pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Buffalo, 0:01:45.400 --> 0:01:49.640 focusing on electrical engineering. Now, while studying at Buffalo, he 0:01:49.800 --> 0:01:53.440 also served as an assistant professor, and it was at 0:01:53.440 --> 0:01:56.880 the University of Buffalo in nineteen fifty six when doctor 0:01:56.920 --> 0:02:00.360 great Batch had his whipsie. He was attempting to build 0:02:00.400 --> 0:02:04.320 a device that would monitor a person's heartbeat. They would 0:02:04.360 --> 0:02:07.680 just listen for your heartbeat and keep track of how 0:02:08.160 --> 0:02:10.800 fast or slow it was going. But doctor gray Batch 0:02:10.840 --> 0:02:14.440 had chosen the wrong kind of resistor to go into 0:02:14.480 --> 0:02:20.320 his device. So, a resistor is a component within electrical circuits, 0:02:20.480 --> 0:02:23.600 and its purpose is to regulate the flow of electrical current. 0:02:23.919 --> 0:02:28.240 So it's a limiter. It resists the flow of current. Now, 0:02:28.280 --> 0:02:32.040 the resistor will allow some current to go through as 0:02:32.120 --> 0:02:35.120 long as it's greater than what it can resist. So 0:02:35.240 --> 0:02:37.960 the amount depends upon the resistor itself, and there are 0:02:38.040 --> 0:02:41.560 lots of different kinds of resistors for different levels of 0:02:41.600 --> 0:02:45.240 electrical current, and doctor great Batch accidentally used a resistor 0:02:45.520 --> 0:02:49.799 that allowed more current to go through than he had intended. Now, 0:02:49.840 --> 0:02:53.040 because of this, the device he created didn't just record 0:02:53.160 --> 0:02:57.200 heart beats. It would generate electric pulses. Because doctor great 0:02:57.240 --> 0:03:01.280 Batch considered his goof he realized something. These pulses were 0:03:01.320 --> 0:03:04.560 similar to the rhythm of a healthy heart. So perhaps 0:03:04.800 --> 0:03:08.800 his device could actually deliver electric pulses on purpose and 0:03:08.840 --> 0:03:12.000 give mild shocks to a heart that would cause it 0:03:12.120 --> 0:03:15.920 to contract. He could create a device that would assist 0:03:16.240 --> 0:03:19.400 a heart to beat at a healthy rhythm, and thus 0:03:19.680 --> 0:03:24.040 doctor great Batch invented the pacemaker. Now, clearly it took 0:03:24.040 --> 0:03:27.120 a little while to go from an accidental discovery to 0:03:27.480 --> 0:03:30.840 creating a true medical device that doctors could implant in 0:03:30.919 --> 0:03:34.480 a patient, but by nineteen sixty great Batch's invention was 0:03:34.520 --> 0:03:38.640 helping a patient's heart beat properly. Now, I'm sure someone 0:03:38.680 --> 0:03:40.680 at some point would have figured out a similar means 0:03:40.720 --> 0:03:44.120 to help regulate heartbeats using an electronic device, but we 0:03:44.240 --> 0:03:47.760 got the invention early, all because of a little mistake. 0:03:48.280 --> 0:03:50.800 Here's another example of an inventor who was working to 0:03:50.840 --> 0:03:54.840 solve one problem only to accidentally solve a problem that 0:03:54.880 --> 0:03:57.920 he wasn't even thinking about. Back in the nineteen thirties, 0:03:58.320 --> 0:04:02.800 a Swiss engineer named Walter Jaeger wanted to create a 0:04:03.160 --> 0:04:07.760 gadget that could detect poisonous gases like carbon monoxide, for example, 0:04:08.120 --> 0:04:10.360 and he had personal reasons for doing this. One of 0:04:10.360 --> 0:04:13.520 his closest friends had died in a poison gas accident 0:04:13.560 --> 0:04:17.599 inside a laboratory. Now, obviously being able to alert people 0:04:17.600 --> 0:04:20.080 to the presence of a dangerous gas that they otherwise 0:04:20.200 --> 0:04:22.800 might not be able to detect, like carbon monoxide has 0:04:22.800 --> 0:04:26.040 no odor, right, so you can't really detect it on 0:04:26.080 --> 0:04:28.400 your own. Well, obviously this would have a huge benefit 0:04:28.400 --> 0:04:30.360 if you could have a detector that could pick up 0:04:30.360 --> 0:04:32.840 on the presence of such a gas. But Jaeger was 0:04:32.920 --> 0:04:35.159 running into a bit of a problem. You see. His 0:04:35.240 --> 0:04:40.000 approach was to create an ionization detector. So ionization is 0:04:40.040 --> 0:04:44.040 when an atom either loses or gains an electron, and 0:04:44.040 --> 0:04:47.880 that means your atom becomes a charged particle. So typically 0:04:47.880 --> 0:04:50.359 when we talk about atoms, we're talking about particles that 0:04:50.440 --> 0:04:54.360 have an equal number of negatively charged electrons and positively 0:04:54.440 --> 0:04:57.920 charged protons, so on the whole, the atom has a 0:04:57.960 --> 0:05:02.360 neutral charge because these posite charges cancel each other out. However, 0:05:02.880 --> 0:05:06.320 if the atom were to shed an electron, then it 0:05:06.320 --> 0:05:09.240 would have fewer electrons than protons and it would have 0:05:09.279 --> 0:05:12.920 a net positive charge. If it were to gain an electron, well, 0:05:12.960 --> 0:05:17.080 then it has a net negative charge. And these are ions. Now, 0:05:17.120 --> 0:05:20.560 a flow of ions can carry an electric charge. You 0:05:20.800 --> 0:05:24.120 likely have heard about plasma, which is an ionized gas. 0:05:24.400 --> 0:05:26.760 Sometimes we talk about that as like the fourth state 0:05:26.800 --> 0:05:30.960 of matter. Well, the ionization detector the Jaeger was working 0:05:31.000 --> 0:05:34.839 on had two charged plates inside of it. Then these 0:05:35.000 --> 0:05:38.880 charge plates would attract ions. And because we know opposites attract, 0:05:39.160 --> 0:05:43.800 a negatively charged plate attracts the positively charged ions toward it. 0:05:44.080 --> 0:05:48.400 The positively charged plate will attract negatively charged ions toward it. 0:05:48.680 --> 0:05:52.480 And Jaeger's hypothesis was that this poison gas would interact 0:05:52.520 --> 0:05:56.000 with those ions and bind with them and thus impede 0:05:56.200 --> 0:05:59.880 their flow, which would alter their electric current running through 0:06:00.240 --> 0:06:04.440 the device. And this change in electric current would then 0:06:04.600 --> 0:06:07.839 activate an alarm and cause a light to light up. 0:06:08.040 --> 0:06:10.719 So if something were to interfere with that electric current, 0:06:11.160 --> 0:06:16.159 the detector would go off. So the problem was Jeger 0:06:16.279 --> 0:06:19.400 wasn't seeing any results. He had been testing and testing, 0:06:19.440 --> 0:06:22.120 and it just wasn't working. The amount of gas that 0:06:22.160 --> 0:06:25.040 would actually make it into the detector didn't seem to 0:06:25.080 --> 0:06:27.599 be sufficient enough to make an appreciable change in the 0:06:27.640 --> 0:06:31.719 ionic flow, so nothing was happening. So he got discouraged 0:06:32.080 --> 0:06:34.880 and he decided he was gonna light up a cigarette 0:06:35.279 --> 0:06:39.360 and smoke away in frustration. And to his surprise, shortly 0:06:39.440 --> 0:06:43.200 after he started puffing away, the alarm went off. Yeger 0:06:43.240 --> 0:06:46.360 discovered that while the poison gas wasn't setting off his alarm, 0:06:46.800 --> 0:06:49.840 the smoke from his cigarette could do it. So Jaeger 0:06:50.080 --> 0:06:54.560 accidentally invented the world's first smoke detector. Now, other engineers 0:06:54.560 --> 0:06:58.520 would improve upon Yeager's initial design to make it more effective, 0:06:58.839 --> 0:07:02.799 and many modern SPA detectors work by using radioactive material 0:07:02.880 --> 0:07:05.799 inside them. But don't worry, it's a very small amount 0:07:05.880 --> 0:07:09.800 of radioactive material. It's also very well shielded. But it's 0:07:09.840 --> 0:07:13.840 this that generates the ions in the first place. Anyway, Boom, 0:07:14.200 --> 0:07:17.560 we get smoke detectors because a Swiss physicist had to 0:07:17.600 --> 0:07:21.160 have a cigarette when his invention wasn't working properly. Speaking 0:07:21.240 --> 0:07:24.440 of booms, let's talk dynamite. Now. I think I might 0:07:24.480 --> 0:07:27.520 be stretching the word technology a little bit here, But 0:07:27.600 --> 0:07:30.120 then considering that the guy who invented dynamite would go 0:07:30.160 --> 0:07:33.480 on to fund to prestigious award that recognizes achievements and 0:07:33.520 --> 0:07:37.800 fields that include technology, I think it's forgivable. So this 0:07:37.880 --> 0:07:41.120 is the story of Alfred Nobel, a Swiss engineer who 0:07:41.160 --> 0:07:42.840 is trying to figure out if there might be a 0:07:42.880 --> 0:07:47.880 safe way to leverage the rather spectacularly explosive power of 0:07:48.000 --> 0:07:51.800 nitroglycerin for useful purposes such as, you know, mining and 0:07:51.880 --> 0:07:56.080 that kind of stuff. The problem was that nitroglycerin is 0:07:56.360 --> 0:08:01.000 awfully unstable. It's an oily liquid, it's doless. You wouldn't 0:08:01.040 --> 0:08:03.840 think it could cause an explosion, but you'd be dead 0:08:03.880 --> 0:08:07.480 wrong there, perhaps literally now. No Bell had worked in 0:08:07.480 --> 0:08:14.200 the lab that actually discovered nitroglycerin, and his compatriot who 0:08:14.280 --> 0:08:17.480 was responsible for that discovery, was skeptical that it could 0:08:17.480 --> 0:08:20.360 ever do anything useful, but no Bell had higher hopes. 0:08:21.240 --> 0:08:26.480 But here's how nitroglycerin works. It contains carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, 0:08:26.520 --> 0:08:29.520 and nitrogen, and these are bound together in molecules. But 0:08:29.560 --> 0:08:33.240 if those molecular bonds should break, then the molecules will 0:08:33.280 --> 0:08:36.160 shift to form new molecules and they'll create stuff like 0:08:36.200 --> 0:08:39.560 carbon monoxide and other types of gases. Now, these gases 0:08:39.640 --> 0:08:42.600 will bubble and start breaking other molecular bonds, so it 0:08:42.640 --> 0:08:44.960 speeds up this molecular change at a rate that's so 0:08:45.160 --> 0:08:49.000 fast you get a massive release of energy all at 0:08:49.040 --> 0:08:52.080 the same time. Essentially you get an explosion. And the 0:08:52.120 --> 0:08:54.720 really bad news is that just knocking into the stuff 0:08:54.800 --> 0:08:57.440 could be enough to trigger the reaction. It might not, 0:08:58.080 --> 0:09:02.360 but it could. No Bell was attempting to make nitroglycerin 0:09:02.400 --> 0:09:05.520 a useful tool for industry again, particularly in stuff like 0:09:05.600 --> 0:09:08.880 mining or maybe clearing land for things like building tunnels, 0:09:09.120 --> 0:09:12.120 but the unstable nature of the chemical remained a huge concern, 0:09:12.200 --> 0:09:15.760 and tragically, there were accidents that led to fatalities, including 0:09:15.800 --> 0:09:19.120 Nobel's own brother back in Stockholm in a lab. So 0:09:19.240 --> 0:09:22.160 no Bell needed a solution not just to save his 0:09:22.200 --> 0:09:25.839 own reputation, but to prevent future catastrophes, and he hoped 0:09:25.840 --> 0:09:29.720 that by mixing nitroglycerin with the dust of otherwise solid 0:09:29.760 --> 0:09:33.440 material like wood or brick, could decrease its volatility, so 0:09:33.440 --> 0:09:37.199 he tried lots of different stuff, but diatomaceous earth turned 0:09:37.200 --> 0:09:39.240 out to do the trick. And while I can't say 0:09:39.240 --> 0:09:42.840 for certain that this discovery was completely incidental or accidental, 0:09:42.880 --> 0:09:45.199 it shows up in a lot of articles as an 0:09:45.240 --> 0:09:48.480 accidental invention. I'm not so sure about that, but I'm 0:09:48.480 --> 0:09:52.280 including it here anyway. Anyway, dinamacious earth is made up 0:09:52.320 --> 0:09:57.079 of skeletons, not human skeletons, but diatom skeletons. So diatoms 0:09:57.120 --> 0:10:02.000 are these single celled algae, and their skeletons are cellular 0:10:02.040 --> 0:10:05.320 walls composed of silica. So really it's kind of like 0:10:05.720 --> 0:10:08.760 silica powder. No Bell had no reason to believe that 0:10:08.800 --> 0:10:11.719 silica powder would be a great match for nitroglycerin, but 0:10:11.760 --> 0:10:14.120 he was desperate to find something, so maybe this is 0:10:14.160 --> 0:10:17.120 the by chance that we're looking for. Anyway, he discovered 0:10:17.120 --> 0:10:20.120 that mixing nitroglycerin with silica created a kind of putty 0:10:20.320 --> 0:10:23.160 or paste, and you could shape the stuff into rods, 0:10:23.400 --> 0:10:26.360 and using a blasting cap that no Bell also had invented, 0:10:26.720 --> 0:10:30.760 you could create dynamite. The playto like texture meant that 0:10:30.880 --> 0:10:34.440 nitroglycerin couldn't form bubbles when it got bumped into so 0:10:34.920 --> 0:10:38.080 it could no longer initiate that runaway chain reaction that 0:10:38.120 --> 0:10:42.160 would make you know, explosions happen with the liquid nitroglycerin 0:10:42.280 --> 0:10:44.520 stuff and the rod shape mean that you could do 0:10:44.600 --> 0:10:46.960 things like drill a hole in a rock face and 0:10:47.040 --> 0:10:49.320 sort of stick a dynamite into the hole, light the 0:10:49.360 --> 0:10:51.120 fuse and get the heck out of dodge, and boom, 0:10:51.160 --> 0:10:54.000 you remove a whole lot of rock. No Bell had 0:10:54.080 --> 0:10:57.640 high hopes that his invention would create an enormous benefit 0:10:57.679 --> 0:11:00.160 for humans, but as he neared the end of his day, 0:11:00.280 --> 0:11:03.800 he worried about his legacy, partly because a French newspaper 0:11:03.800 --> 0:11:07.640 published his obituary a little bit prematurely. Turned out, Nobel's 0:11:07.640 --> 0:11:10.640 brother Ludwig had passed away, and the reporter assumed it 0:11:10.679 --> 0:11:13.760 was Alfred Nobel who had shuffled off the mortal coil. 0:11:14.160 --> 0:11:16.880 And this is when Nobel decided to dedicate a large 0:11:16.920 --> 0:11:20.080 amount of his enormous fortune toward establishing a trust that 0:11:20.120 --> 0:11:23.600 would reward those who made significant contributions to humanity. And 0:11:23.720 --> 0:11:27.240 that's how we got the Nobel Prizes. What a blast. 0:11:27.440 --> 0:11:28.920 All right, We're going to take a quick break. When 0:11:28.920 --> 0:11:41.800 we come back, We've got some more accidental inventions. We're back. 0:11:42.440 --> 0:11:44.360 So this next one I'm sure I've talked about before, 0:11:44.400 --> 0:11:47.840 but it's a fun one. The story follows Richard T. James, 0:11:47.880 --> 0:11:50.240 and he was enlisted in the Navy and served as 0:11:50.240 --> 0:11:54.440 an engineer working in shipyards in Philadelphia during World War Two. 0:11:54.840 --> 0:11:57.400 And James was trying to solve a tricky problem. See, 0:11:57.400 --> 0:12:00.480 warships create a lot of vibration. They have these powerful 0:12:00.480 --> 0:12:03.080 engines that are on the ocean, which has lots of 0:12:03.120 --> 0:12:06.319 you know, waves. Obviously, also they tend to have these 0:12:06.360 --> 0:12:09.600 really big guns that occasionally fire great big shells that 0:12:09.679 --> 0:12:12.920 cause vibrations. But they also have lots of sensitive instruments 0:12:12.920 --> 0:12:16.800 on board, and sensitive instruments don't mix really well with 0:12:16.920 --> 0:12:19.559 violent vibrations. And so mister James was trying to figure 0:12:19.559 --> 0:12:22.720 out a way to stabilize these instruments and kind of 0:12:22.760 --> 0:12:26.320 isolate them from all the vibrations. His solution was to 0:12:26.360 --> 0:12:29.520 create a tension spring, but he needed to find just 0:12:29.640 --> 0:12:32.800 the right amount of tension. If it was too stiff, 0:12:33.200 --> 0:12:35.319 then it would almost be like there was no stabilization 0:12:35.400 --> 0:12:37.880 at all. And if it wasn't stiff enough, the darn 0:12:37.920 --> 0:12:40.480 instruments would be flopping around all over the place. So 0:12:40.520 --> 0:12:42.760 the story goes, he was working at his desk and 0:12:42.800 --> 0:12:45.520 he had all these different kinds of springs stacked all 0:12:45.559 --> 0:12:48.040 over the desk. When one of them, which had just 0:12:48.160 --> 0:12:51.400 the right amount of tension, tipped over. Now, instead of 0:12:51.440 --> 0:12:54.840 just bouncing all over the place or whatever, it walked, 0:12:55.360 --> 0:12:57.520 the top end of the spring moved in an arc, 0:12:57.800 --> 0:13:00.720 and gravity would pull that top down as well as 0:13:00.720 --> 0:13:03.080 the rest of the spring along. And as the bottom 0:13:03.120 --> 0:13:05.120 of the spring got pulled up, it became the new 0:13:05.200 --> 0:13:07.920 top and likewise would move in an arc, and the 0:13:07.960 --> 0:13:10.520 process would continue for as long as the spring could 0:13:10.520 --> 0:13:13.640 stroll downward until it hit the floor, and then just 0:13:13.760 --> 0:13:16.960 would end up writing itself and stopping. And James, in 0:13:17.040 --> 0:13:21.880 his effort to stabilize naval instruments, had accidentally invented the slinky. 0:13:22.320 --> 0:13:24.760 His wife Betty came up with the name. She was 0:13:25.080 --> 0:13:28.240 responsible for a lot of very smart business decisions, and 0:13:28.320 --> 0:13:30.320 James would work to find just the right type of 0:13:30.320 --> 0:13:33.520 wire intention to replicate his happy accident, and he settled 0:13:33.520 --> 0:13:36.600 on eighty feet of wire that was coiled into almost 0:13:36.679 --> 0:13:39.720 one hundred loops. In nineteen forty five, he began to 0:13:39.760 --> 0:13:42.199 sell the slinky through a new company that he had founded, 0:13:42.400 --> 0:13:45.400 and they sold like hotcakes. All it took was a 0:13:45.440 --> 0:13:48.400 simple demonstration and they would fly, or at the very 0:13:48.480 --> 0:13:52.360 least walk off the shelves. The invention story gets pretty 0:13:52.400 --> 0:13:56.440 weird after that. James would later become involved in a 0:13:56.480 --> 0:13:59.480 religious group as the popularity of the slinky was starting 0:13:59.520 --> 0:14:02.480 to fly lag, and he would leave his family behind 0:14:02.520 --> 0:14:05.600 to go off to Bolivia and spent most of his 0:14:05.679 --> 0:14:09.840 money with this religious group. His wife, Betty, actually rescued 0:14:09.880 --> 0:14:14.200 the slinky business and actually successfully brought slinky back to popularity. 0:14:14.440 --> 0:14:16.760 So it's good to see that with the wise leadership 0:14:16.760 --> 0:14:21.000 of Betty, the toy could you know spring back? Now? Finally, 0:14:21.240 --> 0:14:24.240 I would like to talk about chocolate bars, not the 0:14:24.240 --> 0:14:26.960 invention of chocolate bars. It's just that chocolate bars play 0:14:26.960 --> 0:14:29.600 an important part in this story, all right. So again, 0:14:29.680 --> 0:14:33.320 the year is nineteen forty five, big year for accidental inventions, 0:14:33.680 --> 0:14:36.040 and a feller by the name of Percy Spencer was 0:14:36.080 --> 0:14:39.520 working with radar systems. Now. One of the components that 0:14:39.560 --> 0:14:43.240 Spencer worked around was a magnetron, which I know sounds 0:14:43.320 --> 0:14:46.280 kind of like a transformer, but while there is more 0:14:46.360 --> 0:14:49.720 than meets the eye, it's actually a device that emits 0:14:49.880 --> 0:14:54.600 short electromagnetic waves, specifically in the microwave range. So in 0:14:54.600 --> 0:14:58.160 many ways it's similar to a cathode ray tube, which 0:14:58.200 --> 0:15:02.440 is the light bulb like device that's inside old television sets. 0:15:02.720 --> 0:15:05.720 So cathode ray tubes generate a stream of electrons which 0:15:05.760 --> 0:15:08.520 then collide with phosphor on the backside of a TV 0:15:08.560 --> 0:15:12.320 screen and cause that phosphor to illuminate. But a magnetron 0:15:12.440 --> 0:15:16.840 generates something else again, it generates microwaves. And Spencer was 0:15:16.880 --> 0:15:21.400 working near magnetrons and noticed something his pocket had become sticky. 0:15:21.880 --> 0:15:24.200 That's because he had a chocolate bar in his pocket 0:15:24.480 --> 0:15:26.720 and he was meaning to snack on it later, but 0:15:26.840 --> 0:15:29.680 something had caused the chocolate to melt. Now, the lab's 0:15:29.680 --> 0:15:33.520 temperature wasn't really warm enough to do that, so Spencer 0:15:33.560 --> 0:15:37.120 theorized that the microwaves generated by magnetrons had heated up 0:15:37.160 --> 0:15:41.080 the chocolate bar someway that got the wheels turning. So 0:15:41.160 --> 0:15:45.840 Spencer's accidental discovery would lead to the invention of microwave ovens. 0:15:46.120 --> 0:15:50.480 The microwaves emitted by the magnetron will bounce around inside ovens. 0:15:50.520 --> 0:15:55.680 Because these ovens are coated with metal, they reflect the microwaves, 0:15:55.800 --> 0:15:59.680 and so eventually the microwaves will hit the food inside 0:15:59.680 --> 0:16:03.400 the microwave, and at that point the microwaves will get 0:16:03.400 --> 0:16:07.200 absorbed by water molecules in the food, and those water 0:16:07.200 --> 0:16:10.520 molecules will begin to vibrate from absorbing this energy. That 0:16:10.640 --> 0:16:15.640 vibration causes friction, and friction, as we all know, creates heat. 0:16:15.840 --> 0:16:20.120 And so by vibrating these water molecules inside food and 0:16:20.120 --> 0:16:23.640 making them vibrate super fast and create a lot of friction, 0:16:24.000 --> 0:16:27.480 you reheat the food or heat up the food, and 0:16:27.640 --> 0:16:30.600 it does it very quickly. And this is all because 0:16:30.720 --> 0:16:35.320 of a melted chocolate bar in a radar laboratory. Now, 0:16:36.120 --> 0:16:39.200 it's possible that every single one of the inventions I've 0:16:39.200 --> 0:16:42.200 mentioned today would have come about on their own time 0:16:42.440 --> 0:16:45.600 through some other means, that someone would have discovered it 0:16:46.160 --> 0:16:49.240 at some point. But I think the lesson that we 0:16:49.280 --> 0:16:51.640 should take from this is that the next time you 0:16:51.680 --> 0:16:54.480 have a goofam up, you should really pay attention, because 0:16:54.520 --> 0:16:58.640 you might just be on to something anyway. I always 0:16:58.680 --> 0:17:02.240 think that it's fascinating to learn about inventions. As I said, 0:17:02.280 --> 0:17:05.240 a lot of inventions, as you read about them, you realize, oh, 0:17:05.440 --> 0:17:10.240 this is an iteration a refinement of a previous invention, 0:17:10.440 --> 0:17:12.240 and you have to go back a bit. And then 0:17:12.240 --> 0:17:13.800 when you go back a bit, you realize, oh, well, 0:17:13.840 --> 0:17:16.720 this in turn was built on top of some other principles, 0:17:16.760 --> 0:17:19.240 so you got to go back further. So whenever you 0:17:19.320 --> 0:17:22.399 talk about the history of any invention, you are running 0:17:22.400 --> 0:17:26.520 the risk of actually diving super deep into history until 0:17:26.560 --> 0:17:29.400 you just have to make an executive decision of where 0:17:29.400 --> 0:17:32.280 you cut it off. So I hope you enjoyed this 0:17:32.440 --> 0:17:36.159 short episode about some of the accidental inventions that we 0:17:36.320 --> 0:17:39.720 have been lucky enough to experience over the years. I'm 0:17:39.720 --> 0:17:42.280 sure I'll do more episodes along these lines in the future. 0:17:42.480 --> 0:17:44.480 There are things I didn't cover. I didn't cover things 0:17:44.520 --> 0:17:49.119 like velcrow or silly putty, which is another famous accidental invention, 0:17:49.359 --> 0:17:51.760 so maybe we'll chat about those in a future case. 0:17:51.800 --> 0:17:54.080 I maybe we'll talk about some purposeful ones in the 0:17:54.119 --> 0:17:56.639 future as well. In the meantime, I hope you are 0:17:56.680 --> 0:17:59.959 all well and I'll talk to you again. Really, So, 0:18:00.080 --> 0:18:09.840 app Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts 0:18:09.840 --> 0:18:14.320 from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever 0:18:14.400 --> 0:18:15.959 you listen to your favorite shows.