Accidents May Happen* Read online

  Published by

  Delacorte Press

  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  Text copyright © 1996 by Charlotte Foltz Jones

  Illustrations copyright © 1996 by John O’Brien

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The trademark Delacorte Press® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55412-3

  Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press.

  v3.1

  Dedicated to today’s children,

  who will invent the world we will live in tomorrow

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Gretchen B. Beede, General Mills; Diane Dickey, Kellogg Company; Danielle M. Frizzi, The Gillette Company; Nancy Glaser, Avon Products, Inc.; David R. Haarz, Borden, Inc.; Jerry Hills, Masonite; Jerry Kramper, Lynn Peavey Company; Pat Munka, The Inventure Place; Bruce Norton, Boulder, Colorado, Sheriff’s Department; Linda M. Sacco, Union Carbide Corporation; Sara B. Stanley, Lea & Perrins, Inc.; and Linda A. Wood, California Raisin Advisory Board.

  Special thanks to Mary Cash for her support, encouragement, and amazing insight.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1 FED UP

  BREAD

  BREAKFAST CEREALS

  Corn and Wheat Flakes

  Wheaties

  COFFEE

  CRACKER JACK

  CRÊPES SUZETTE

  THE ICE CREAM SODA

  PEANUT BRITTLE

  RAISINS

  VINEGAR

  WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE

  CHAPTER 2 CHILD’S PLAY

  KITES

  NURSERY RHYMES

  “Humpty Dumpty”

  “Jack and Jill”

  “Little Jack Horner”

  “Ring Around the Rosey”

  THE YO-YO

  CHAPTER 3 PATRIOTIC ACCIDENTS

  THE CRACK IN THE LIBERTY BELL

  INDEPENDENCE DAY

  THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

  CHAPTER 4 A DOSE OF MEDICINE

  ETHER AND NITROUS OXIDE

  INOCULATION

  QUININE

  ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS

  Saccharin

  Sucaryl

  NutraSweet

  CHAPTER 5 HANDY AROUND THE HOUSE

  AVON COSMETICS

  BUTTONS ON JACKET SLEEVES

  CELLOPHANE

  DRY CLEANING

  DYES FOR FABRICS

  MASONITE

  MATCHES

  MICROWAVE COOKING

  RAYON

  STAINLESS STEEL

  CHAPTER 6 THINGS TO WRITE HOME ABOUT

  LIQUID PAPER

  MODERN PAPER

  QWERTY

  CHAPTER 7 TRICKS OF THE TRADE

  ARC WELDING

  BAKELITE

  FINGERPRINTING

  GRAVITY

  PHOTOGRAPHY

  THE TELEPHONE

  CHAPTER 8 EXPLOSIVE DISCOVERIES

  CELLULOID

  GUNCOTTON (NITROCELLULOSE)

  NITROGLYCERIN

  DYNAMITE

  The National Inventors Hall of Fame

  Camp Invention

  Project XL

  Bibliography

  INTRODUCTION

  About twenty-two hundred years ago, a man named Archimedes lived in Syracuse, a Greek colony on the island of Sicily.

  Archimedes was a mathematician. One day King Hieron II, the ruler of Syracuse, asked for Archimedes’ help. He had bought a crown from a local goldsmith, but he suspected that the goldsmith had cheated him by adding some other metal to the gold. Hieron asked Archimedes to measure the gold content without damaging the crown.

  Archimedes worked on the problem for days but couldn’t find a solution. Then one afternoon he stepped into a bathtub full of water and watched as the water overflowed. He realized that the amount of water that was displaced from the bathtub was equal to the volume of his body as it entered the water.

  This was the answer to his problem!

  If he placed Hieron’s crown in a full basin of water and measured the water the crown displaced, he would know the volume of the crown. Then he would weigh the crown and compare the weight with what the crown’s volume of pure gold should weigh. If the weights were the same, it would mean the crown was pure gold. If the weights were different, it would mean another metal had been mixed with the gold.

  It’s said that when Archimedes figured out the solution to his problem, he was so excited that he ran naked from his bathroom into the streets of Syracuse crying, “Eureka!”

  People still use that expression, shouting “Eureka!” when they discover something exciting.

  The “law of buoyancy” is known today as Archimedes’ Principle.

  This story points out an important fact: People had been stepping into bathtubs of water for centuries, and all they’d discovered was that they had a mess to clean up!

  It takes intelligence, creativity, and often a fresh approach to make something out of an accident. The people discussed in this book didn’t just make a mess and clean it up. They were smart enough to stop, analyze what had happened, and try to make something successful out of the mistake.

  Oh, yes, are you wondering about the goldsmith who made King Hieron’s crown? Well, the good king was right. The crown the goldsmith claimed was pure gold turned out to contain a sizable amount of base metal. King Hieron had the man put to death.

  1. Fed Up

  “The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”

  —Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

  BREAD

  An old superstition says that if bread does not rise in the oven, the Devil is hiding inside. Centuries ago cooks began cutting a cross on top of their loaves to force the Devil out and help the bread rise.

  The person who “invented” bread was probably less worried about the Devil and more worried about losing his head. Legend says that about 2600 B.C. an Egyptian slave was making flour-and-water cakes for his master. One evening he fell asleep and the fire went out before the cakes finished baking.

  During the night the dough fermented and puffed up. By the time the slave awoke, the dough was twice the size it had been the night before. He quickly shoved the dough back into the oven so that no one would know he’d carelessly fallen asleep without finishing his work.

  When the bread was baked, both the slave and the master discovered that it tasted much better than the flat pancake they were used to. It was also lighter and airier.

  The flour, liquids, sweetener (perhaps honey) in the dough had probably been exposed to wild yeast or bacteria in the air. When they were kept warm for an extended time, yeast cells grew and spread through the dough.

  Egyptians continued to experiment with making yeast and became the world’s first professional bakers.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  Other superstitions about bread:

  • It’s bad luck to cut bread at both ends of the loaf

  • It’s bad luck to break bread in anyone’s hand.

  • It’s bad luck to leave a knife stuck in a loaf of bread.

  • To drop bread on the floor is a good sign: Make a wish when you pick it up and the wish
will come true.

  • Dream about bread and something good will happen.

  • If two people reach for bread at the same time, visitors will soon arrive.

  BREAKFAST CEREALS

  Corn and Wheat Flakes

  In 1894 Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was superintendent of a famous hospital and health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan. His younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, was the business manager. The hospital stressed healthful living and kept its patients on a diet that eliminated caffeine, meat, alcohol, and tobacco.

  The brothers invented many foods that were made from grains, including a coffee substitute and a type of granola, which they forced through rollers and rolled into long sheets of dough.

  One day, after cooking some wheat, the men were called away. When they finally returned, the wheat had become stale. They decided to force the tempered grain through the rollers anyway.

  Surprisingly, the grain did not come out in long sheets of dough. Instead each wheat berry was flattened and came out as a thin flake. The brothers baked the flakes and were delighted with their new invention. They realized they had discovered a new and delicious cereal, but they had no way of knowing they had accidentally invented a whole new industry. Will Keith Kellogg eventually opened his own cereal business, and its most famous product is still sold today: Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.

  Wheaties

  Wheaties breakfast cereal was also invented accidentally.

  In 1921 a diet clinician in Minneapolis was mixing bran gruel (a thin porridge) for his patients. He accidentally spilled some of the mixture on the hot stove. The spill turned into a crisp, thin wafer. When the clinician tasted it, he realized that the toasted wafer was more appetizing than the gruel.

  The Washburn Crosby Company bought the rights to the cereal. The company spent three years developing the product and introduced Wheaties breakfast cereal in 1924. Washburn Crosby became General Mills, Inc., in 1928.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • Wheaties cereal was named through an employee contest of the Washburn Crosby Company. An export manager’s wife suggested the name.

  • According to General Mills’ research, customers make two thirds of their purchasing decisions at the store shelf. On the average, a customer takes one to three seconds to look at a package and decide to buy it instead of a competitor.

  COFFEE

  Coffee has been very popular throughout history. Napoleon called coffee the “intellectual’s drink,” and it is said that the French philosopher and writer Voltaire needed seventy-two cups of coffee per day. (That’s more than four gallons!)

  In the Near East, Arabs would stop on their journeys to brew coffee by the roadside. At one time a Turkish woman could divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with coffee. Saudi Arabia had a similar law.

  In 1735 the German composer Johann Sebastian Bach completed his Coffee Cantata, which sings the praises of coffee. Another German composer, Ludwig van Beethoven, is said to have counted out sixty coffee beans for each cup he made. That’s strong!

  So where did all this coffee drinking begin?

  According to popular legend, a young goatherd named Kaldi discovered coffee by accident. He was watching his goats in the hills near the Red Sea one day almost two thousand years ago. His goats began chewing on berries that grew on bushes. Soon after they ate the berries, they pranced around excitedly.

  Kaldi decided to try the fruit himself. Soon he began prancing too.

  When a monk from a nearby monastery saw this strange behavior, he tried some of the berries himself. He poured hot water over them and liked what he tasted. When he served the drink to the brothers in the monastery, they all stayed awake and alert during nighttime prayers.

  Coffee, of course, is still enjoyed around the world today. The people of Sweden drink the most coffee, on average 5.7 cups a day. Four out of every five American adults drink coffee. Those coffee drinkers average 1.87 cups of coffee a day. One estimate says that 5,537,000 tons of coffee are produced worldwide each year.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  Coffee is served around the world. Here’s how to order it in other languages:

  French: café German: Kaffee Japanese: koohi

  Turkish: Kahve Swahili: kahawy Arabic: qahwa

  CRACKER JACK

  In 1896 Grover Cleveland was serving his second term as president of the United States. The carousel was invented in Leavenworth, Kansas. And the first automobile accident occurred in New York City.

  But in Chicago, F. W. Rueckheim and his brother Louis were busy popping popcorn.

  Their business had begun in 1871 on $200 and had grown beyond their expectations. They had branched out to many types of confections. Their combination of popcorn, peanuts, and molasses was a big hit at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which was Chicago’s first world’s fair.

  The snack didn’t have a name and didn’t seem to need one. But in 1896 a salesman who was munching on the mixture commented, “That’s a cracker jack!”

  Every year slang changes. What’s “cool” one year is “hot” the next. What’s “rad” one year is “far out” the next. In 1896 “a cracker jack” was about as good as you could get. F. W. Rueckheim liked the sound of “cracker jack,” and his popular snack—named by an offhand remark—has been Cracker Jack for a century.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  According to Borden, Inc., the company that now manufactures Cracker Jack:

  • Enough boxes of Cracker Jack have been sold to stack end to end more than sixty-three times around the earth.

  • In 1912 F. W. Rueckheim began putting a toy in each box. Since that time, more than 17 billion toys have been given out.

  • Three electronic eyes on every packing machine make sure that there’s a toy in every box of Cracker Jack.

  • Some old Cracker Jack prizes are worth more than $7,000 to collectors.

  CRÊPES SUZETTE

  A wonderful dessert served in the finest restaurants is called crêpes Suzette.

  Crêpes are thin pancakes. Chefs often wrap crêpes around a delicious filling.

  Crêpes Suzette, probably the most famous crêpe dessert of all, was first made as the result of an accident in the 1890s—or so an old story goes.

  A famous chef (some say his name was Henri Charpentier) at the Café de Paris in Monte Carlo knew he would be preparing dinner for the Prince of Wales and a guest named Suzette. The chef made a special dessert for the party using crêpes and a sauce flavored with oranges and liqueur.

  When it was time to serve the dessert, the chef heated the sauce. Somehow, quite by accident, the liqueur in the sauce caught fire. The chef was horrified that he had ruined the dessert. When the flames died down, he tasted the sauce and realized that the flame had actually improved the flavor.

  He served the dessert, and it was named crêpes Suzette in honor of the prince’s guest.

  THE ICE CREAM SODA

  Gustavus D. Dows of Lowell, Massachusetts, opened the first soda fountain in 1858. It’s strange that the ice cream soda wasn’t invented until sixteen years later.

  In October 1874 a man named Robert M. Green was selling soda fountain drinks at the semicentennial celebration of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. One of his most popular drinks was a mixture of sweet cream, syrup, and carbonated water.

  One day Green ran out of the sweet cream for his drinks. He had no way of getting more that day, so he decided to use vanilla ice cream instead, hoping no one would notice.

  Well, someone noticed.

  In fact, everyone noticed. The new concoction was a big success. Green had been taking in $6 per day with his original drink. His profits jumped to more than $600 a day!

  The ice cream soda proved so delicious and became so popular that religious leaders declared it sinful. By the 1890s some cities and towns passed laws prohibiting the sale of sodas on Sunday. For this reason the ice cream sundae was invented. It was first called the soda-less soda, then renamed the Sundae (spe
lled with an “ae” so as not to offend).

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  • Mr. Green’s first ice cream sodas sold for ten cents a glass.

  • The City of Seattle credits G. O. Guy with inventing the ice cream soda there in 1872. They say he accidentally dropped a scoop of ice cream in some soda.

  PEANUT BRITTLE

  Oops!

  In about 1890 a woman (nobody seems to remember her name) who lived in New England was making peanut taffy.

  Maybe the dog barked. Maybe the baby cried. Maybe the woman just wasn’t paying attention.

  She got through the first four ingredients in her recipe. But then, instead of adding the cream of tartar the recipe called for, she accidentally used baking soda.

  The result was a very brittle—yes, a very brittle—peanut taffy. It was delicious but so brittle that the only fitting name for it was peanut brittle.

  FLABBERGASTING FACTS

  Many new sweets were invented around the turn of the last century. The reason is that until that time, sugar had been very expensive. When the sugar tariffs were lifted in the 1880s, the price of sugar dropped and more people could afford to buy it and experiment with it.

  RAISINS

  Grapes are wonderful. But grapes left to wither and wrinkle and turn brown are better! They are so fantastic, they have been given a name of their own: raisins.

  No one knows who first discovered the goodness of raisins. But it’s almost certain they were an accident. No one would intentionally leave a vine of delicious grapes to wrinkle and turn brown in the sun.

  It’s believed that raisins were discovered in the Middle East, where they were treasured. Any food that wouldn’t spoil in the hot sun was very valuable.

  Prehistoric drawings in France show that raisins have been enjoyed in southern Europe for thousands of years. They have been used for necklaces and as religious symbols; in 1000 B.C. the Israelites paid their taxes with raisins. Two jars of raisins in ancient Rome could buy one slave boy, and Roman doctors believed raisins could cure anything from mushroom poisoning to old age.