Items14The creator’s order
  1. 1GalvanismGalvanismLuigi Galvani's twitching frog legs, Bologna, 1780s Galvani was dissecting frogs near an electrostatic generator when an assistant touched a scalpel to an exposed nerve and the leg kicked. The chance part was the timing; the years of follow-up were deliberate, and he waited until 1791 to publish,…0
  2. 2ElectromagnetismElectromagnetismHans Christian Ørsted's compass needle, Copenhagen, 1820 During a lecture in 1820, Ørsted saw a compass needle near a current-carrying wire swing away from magnetic north. It moved so slightly that the audience did not notice. Accounts differ on whether the demonstration was set up to look for a…0
  3. 3VulcanizationVulcanizationCharles Goodyear's rubber on the stove, Woburn, Massachusetts, 1839 Goodyear had already spent years adding things to rubber, sulfur included, trying to make it less sticky and less sensitive to heat and cold. Then a sample mixed with sulfur landed on a hot stove and came out tough instead of…0
  4. 4MauveineMauveineWilliam Henry Perkin's failed quinine, London, 1856 Perkin was 18 and on Easter vacation from the Royal College of Chemistry when he tried to make quinine, the malaria drug, from chemicals derived from coal tar. He failed, but one product was a purple substance, and instead of discarding it he…0
  5. 5SaccharinSaccharinConstantin Fahlberg's sweet dinner roll, Johns Hopkins University, 1878 Fahlberg was working in Ira Remsen's Baltimore lab and had spilled an experimental compound over his hands. At dinner he picked up a roll and bit into a remarkably sweet crust, then ran back to the lab and tasted everything on…0
  6. 6X-rayX-rayWilhelm Röntgen's glowing screen, Würzburg, November 8, 1895 Röntgen was studying cathode rays and had wrapped his tube in heavy black cardboard, yet a fluorescent screen about nine feet away began to glow. Nothing he knew about could cross that gap, and he spent the following weeks testing the…0
  7. 7Radioactive decayRadioactive decayHenri Becquerel's cloudy week, Paris, March 1, 1896 Inspired by X-rays, Becquerel suspected that glowing uranium salts absorbed sunlight and gave it back out as X-rays. To test it he needed sun, and Paris stayed overcast for several days in late February, so the wrapped photographic plates and…0
  8. 8Laminated glassLaminated glassÉdouard Bénédictus's dropped beaker, France, 1903 The French chemist knocked a glass beaker to the floor and watched it crack without falling apart. A cellulose nitrate solution had dried inside it into a thin film that held the shards in place. Plenty of people have dropped a dirty beaker; the…0
  9. 9PolyethylenePolyethyleneEric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson's waxy solid, ICI Winnington, England, March 1933 The two ICI chemists were pushing ethylene and benzaldehyde together at very high pressure, looking for new reactions rather than a plastic. On March 27 they found a waxy solid in the vessel: polymerized ethylene.…0
  10. 10PolytetrafluoroethylenePolytetrafluoroethyleneRoy Plunkett's empty cylinder, DuPont's Jackson Laboratory, April 6, 1938 Plunkett was making tetrafluoroethylene gas for refrigerant research when a cylinder refused to release any, even though it weighed the same as before. Instead of writing it off as faulty, he and his assistant Jack Rebok…0