Unit 7, Listening 1, The Power of Serendipity


The Power of Serendipity

Mary Tanner: Nothing like starting off with a bang. In 1867, Alfred Nobel accidentally discovered dynamite after putting a popular but flammable salve on a cut finger. Call it serendipity[1]. Rubber—indispensable today. Before Charles Goodyear mixed it with sulfur and accidentally dropped it on a hot stove, it was a smelly, unreliable mess. Again, serendipity. The list of serendipity stories is as long as the history of discovery.

Dr. Morton Meyers: Serendipity refers to looking for one thing and stumbling over something else that proves to be of greater value.

Ms. Tanner: Radiologist Dr. Morton Meyers accidentally figured out how stomach cancer metastasizes by watching where dye he injected for X-rays would spread and then collect. He has written Happy Accidents about serendipity in medicine.

Dr. Meyers:        What serendipity means is misadventure, an inadvertent observation that a sharp, open mind can exploit to find its true benefit.

Mr. Adrian Jones: So, the story goes that Caldi, who happened to be a goat herder, stood back and watched his goats eating coffee in . . . coffee beans in Ethiopia. Wild coffee beans. And he sound . . . saw that they really engaged in some strange behavior afterwards, because of the caffeine.

Ms. Tanner:        Animals, according to food historian Adrian Jones, played an important role in early food serendipity. You like cheese? Think dead camel stomachs. Nomads filled them with milk and hung them like sacks from live camels’ saddles.

Mr. Jones:           . . . So, you got the shaking motion of the camels, you got the rennet of the stomach, you got the milk in the stomach, and that really is the beginning of cheese.

Ms. Tanner:        My favorite serendipity story, for obvious reasons? Post-it Notes. In 1968, a scientist at 3M made an adhesive that wasn’t sticky enough. A thousand Post-it products later, a world without them seems inconceivable. After the fact, serendipity seems so obvious. If there ever was a place literally in the serendipity business, the MIT Media Lab is it.

Mr. Wells:          The whole idea is to bring together people with vastly different backgrounds—scientists, engineers, designers, biologists—and have them interact in open, play-like environments, to experiment, not to be afraid of failure, and to build.

I think serendipity is mandatory. It’s not, it’s not a luxury.

Ms. Tanner:        But it can be fun. During World War II, GE tried to make synthetic rubber. It failed. Nobody could figure out what to do with it until a marketing genius put it in a little plastic egg and sold it as a novelty toy. More than 300 million little eggs have been sold. Here’s the best part: When Silly Putty turned 50 in the year 2000, it got the white glove treatment[2], as it was solemnly installed in the Smithsonian Institution.


[1] serendipity: noun the fact of something interesting or pleasant happening by chance

[2] white glove treatment: (phrase) handling something in a very careful and respectful way

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