6 Accidental Discoveries (Part 1).

At TrippNT our business is organization.  We believe that an organized laboratory is a safer, happier laboratory and in general creates a better atmosphere for scientific discovery. However there are some cases where complete disorganization, mistakes and a good old “lets just try this and see what happens” attitude have lead to some of the most important discoveries ever made.  Such as…

6. The Fountain of Youth and the Fourth of July:

China has always epitomized the idea of “lets just do it and see where it goes”.  This is no more evident than when they started building a wall to protect the northern boundaries of their country and ended up with a five thousand mile long wonder of the world.

That's a really great wall

So in the ninth century when a group of Chinese alchemists got together to do what it is alchemists do, create an “elixir of immortality” of course, it should be no real surprise when they just started mixing together random things to see what happened.  They soon began heating together a combination of saltpeter, sulfur, realgar and honey (all of which the Chinese knew had some medicinal properties).  What they got was less of an elixir of immortality and a lot more of burnt hands and smoke in their face.  What these alchemists had stumbled upon is what is what we know today as gunpowder.  The Chinese quickly figured out that they could use this newfound discovery to scare the pants off their enemies by loading the gunpowder in rockets and shooting them in their general direction.

Uh oh!

Centuries later we use a more refined version of this alchemist elixir in our own rockets to celebrate the Fourth of July.

5. Glowing Urine…What?:

Every now and again a scientist comes along and conducts an experiment that leaves you saying “why would you do that?”  German alchemist Hennig Brand is one of those scientists.  Mr. Brand, in good old alchemist tradition (what is it with these guys?) was searching for what is referred to in alchemist lore as the Philosopher’s Stone, a substance that would turn normal base metals into gold.  For whatever reason Brand had an idea that the mystical Philosopher’s Stone may be urine.  Yes, urine.  Having formed his postulate: Urine makes regular metal in to golden metal, one might think that he would follow through with the scientific method by simply going out back and urinating on the first piece of lead that he came across and after seeing that what he had was not a piece of gold but instead a wet, disgusting piece of lead he would have shrugged his shoulders and called it a day.  That wasn’t Brand’s style though.  Instead he jumped on the crazy train and rode it until it went well off the deep end.  Brand began storing buckets of urine in his cellar until he had accumulated around fifty buckets worth!   Next he did the only logical thing a man with fifty buckets of urine could do:  He boiled it.

17th century R Kelley... With a better beard.

After reducing it to some sort of urine residue, he heated the residue in a retort.  What resulted was a white, waxy substance that would emit a greenish glow in the dark and spontaneously burst into flames.  Brand had failed to make gold but had instead produced phosphorus, a chemical element found commonly in many household items including detergents and toothpaste.   Don’t worry, the process for producing phosphorus today is different. There is no urine in your toothpaste.

4. A Slick Discovery:

In the late 1930’s a young chemist named Roy Plunkett was working in the labs at DuPont with a new type of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) called Tetraflouroethylene (TFE).  His goal was to produce a new kind of refrigerant to… refrigerate things?  Plunkett ordered a bunch of TFE and stored the gas in pressurized cylinders until it was time to do scientific stuff with it.  When he and his assistant, Jack Rebok (not the shoe person) went to discharge the gas from the pressurized cylinder nothing came out.  This problem undoubtedly generated a lot of confusion and chin rubbing.  So Plunkett, in order to get to the bottom of this mystery, did the only safe, reasonable thing he could think to do:  He decided to cut open the cylinder of flammable, pressurized, gas to see what was in there besides maybe a large, skin graft inducing explosion.  Much to his delight when he opened the canister he found no explosion, and no gas.  Instead he found the canister was now full of a white powdery substance (no not cocaine).

Party time!

Using science, Plunkett discovered that placing the TFE under pressure had caused it to polymerize thereby making it into an even longer and even more unpronounceable word, polytetrafluoethylene (PTFE).  Plunkett began conducting experiments with the new polymer and found that it was non-reactive, had an extremely high melting point and that nothing would stick to it.  Plunkett showed it to his superiors and by 1941 DuPont began mass producing PTFE and had patented it under the name Teflon.  Today Teflon is widely used in aerospace, communication, and electronics industries as well as it’s most important use of keeping your omlet from sticking to the frying pan.

Check out Formmetry next Thursday for part 2 of  ”6 Accidental Discoveries”

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Tags: accidental discoveries, funny, gunpowder, humor, lab organization, lab safety, laboratory, organization, phosphorus, teflon, TrippNT