How failure can lead to success

The old phrase has it that “necessity is the mother of invention” – which is very true when everything goes according to plan. After all, Edison’s invention of the electric light bulb in the late 19^th century was something he had been striving for for several years. In fact of all the designs that didn’t succeed he famously said “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Daring to discover though, this year’s theme for Tomorrow’s Engineers Week, is all about that resilience being central to engineering and technology. And sometimes in the course of trying to invent something new, different unexpected discoveries can take place.

Let’s have a look at some of the times an inventor dared to discover and found something new.

The colour purple

18-year-old chemical engineering student William Perkin wanted to make a synthetic version of the naturally occurring, but very expensive, organic substance quinine. Coming from a Peruvian tree bark, quinine was one of the only available treatments at the time for treating malaria and was in much demand. He quite naturally hoped to make a breakthrough on his own and make a name for himself in the chemical world. He did just that, but not how he expected. Experimenting with synthesising quinine in his basic lab at home he accidentally created a lumpy black solid substance which he felt a failure. Which is understandable. However, when he washed out the flask with pure alcohol he found there was a purple residue.

What William Perkin had discovered was the first synthetic dye.

Up until that point all clothing dyes came from plants, shells and insects and were time consuming and expensive to make. They also faded or washed out of cloth over time. This brand-new substance, which he patented and named “mauvine”, had no such problems. William not only kickstarted a 19^th century fashion craze for the colour purple (Queen Victoria was a fan) but also launched the synthetic pigment industry!

Not sticky enough!

28-year-old chemist Spencer Silver was working on developing a really strong glue for use in aerospace components. A really strong glue. This was in 1968 in the laboratories of 3M and after many, many trial and error attempts all he managed to produce was a “low-tack” glue.

Not to be downhearted too long, he quickly realised he was on to something. This not very sticky glue was still ingenious - made of tiny acrylic balls which only stuck when they were at a tangent to the surface. It meant that it could stick papers together easily, but also pull them apart without tearing. It could be used and used again. Oddly useful!

For several years Spencer told people about his accidental non-paper-tearing glue invention, without provoking much interest. He got a patent for the glue, suggesting use in spray form, but nothing much happened. That is until one day a chemical engineer at 3M called Arthur Fry started using the glue to stop his bookmark from falling out of his hymnbook. It didn’t tear the thin pages of the book, and could be used and used again. Oddly useful! And after using Spencer’s glue for this purpose for a while he hit on a great idea. With a bit of trial and error of his own he produced reminder notes that could be stuck down, lifted up and moved around.

And that’s how Arthur, using Spencer’s discovery, invented the Post-It note!

Bullet proof tyres?

In 1964 Stephanie Kwolek was working at Du Pont (the inventors of nylon). She was trying to synthesise a lightweight but strong fibre to replace the use of steel in American car tyres. Du Pont’s speciality at the time was making polymers to be spun out of the chemical solution at high temperatures.  

Stephanie’s daring idea was to create polymers at a much lower temperature - between 0 to 40 degrees Celsius instead of around 200 degrees. The result was a kind of a thin buttermilk looking liquid, instead of the clear thicker substance polymers normally looked like! Hmm… unexpected! Normally something looking like that would just be thrown away. Daring to discover though, Stephanie wanted this to be put through the spinning machine like usual.

At first the people in charge of the machine that span out the fibres from solutions did not want to go anywhere near it. They thought it would clog up the workings! But Stephanie persisted with her trial and error suggestion - and inadvertently invented Kevlar. When the fibres were spun out, (on the cutely named ‘spinneret’), they didn’t break like nylon did. In fact Kevlar was strong. And not just strong, it was 5 times stronger than steel!

Spun from a liquid crystalline solution Kevlar is now used for numerous everyday products that need to be strong but lightweight.

But most notably Kevlar has been used in bullet proof vests since 1971 and has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Stephanie famously said “all sorts of things can happen when you're open to new ideas and playing around with things.”

The chocolate bar that melted

Electrical engineer Percy Spencer was an expert in building and installing magnetrons, a key part of radar equipment. This was during the Second World War in the USA, and installing the equipment was greatly required. Percy had already developed a more efficient manufacturing method of building magnetrons and was widely considered one of the world’s foremost radar brains. But an accident meant that he would change home cooking forever.

One day while standing in front of a turned-on radar set he noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Daring to discover, he realised that something strange was going on so he set up some experiments with an isolated magnetron. He tried different food stuffs, including some popping corn, which popped - and an egg, which exploded in the face of one the experiment observers!

After seeing these effects Percy then put a smaller magnetron into a metal box, to safely contain the electromagnetic field, and ran more experiments with food. It worked, brilliantly.

He had invented the microwave oven!

Springy fun

Naval engineer Richard James was trying to find a way of keeping things suspended and fixed in place on ship during rough seas. He was using springs. Torsion springs in fact (a type of spring which can store and release mechanical energy through their twisting motion).

During his experimentation one dropped off the table onto the ground and he watched as it coiled up after itself from one level to another. Flipping after itself end over end, “stepping” down to the floor. He thought “hmm,” and later that day he told his wife “I think I can make a toy out of this.”

He added “I think if I got the right property of steel and the right tension, I could make it walk.”

Trial and error testing and experimentation at home followed until he did that very thing. As it moved from one level to another the spring transferred energy along its length in a smooth longitudinal wave. After watching the spring in action, Richard’s wife Betty leafed through a dictionary and picked a word she thought best described its movement: slinky!

The Slinky Spring was born!

Several hundred million have been sold since then, and have entertained young and old alike around the world.

As Stephanie Kwolek said, being “open to new ideas and playing around with things,” is just an integral part of the inventing process. Daring to discover is at the heart of progress. You don’t have to get it right the first time! Trial and error are at the centre of all engineering and tech careers. And mistakes often make things better!

We hope discovering some of these stories gets your inventive muscles flexing and you continue daring to discover after Tomorrow’s Engineers Week!

Download the Tomorrow's Engineers Week Dare to discover resources and find out more!