Discovery of Plastics

Can you imagine carrying water bottles made of clay or using disposable utensils made of eggs and

animal blood? The legend of the discovery of plastic says that were it not for two accidents, those

might be the materials we'd be stuck with today.

The first tale starts in the lab of Charles Goodyear (yes, that Goodyear), who combined rubber and

sulfur and accidentally put it on the stove for a period of time. When he came back, he found a tough

and durable material--created through a process eventually called vulcanization.

The second was a spill in John Wesley Hyatt's shop. Inspired by a $10,000 contest to find a

replacement for elephant ivory in billiard balls, Hyatt accidentally spilled a bottle of collodion, only to

discover that when it dried it formed a flexible-yet-strong material. He didn't win the contest (nor did

anyone, for that matter), but by 1872 his brother Isaiah coined the term celluloid to describe what was

becoming the first commercially successful plastic--even used in the first motion-picture film used by

George Eastman.

Discovery of Penicillin

If Alexander Fleming's mother were around, we all might be a lot sicker.

Like anyone eager to go on vacation, Alexander Fleming left a pile of dirty petri dishes stacked up at

his workstation before he left town. When he returned from holiday on September 3, 1928, he began

sorting through them to see if any could be salvaged, discovering most had been contaminated--as

you might expect would happen in a bacteria lab in a hospital.

As has been well-documented in history books, Fleming dumped most of the dishes in a vat of Lysol.

But when he got to a dish containing staphylococcus, something odd caught his eye. The dish was

covered in colonies of bacteria, except in one area where a blob of mold was growing. Around the

mold was an area free of bacteria, as if the mold had blocked the bacteria from spreading. He

realized it could be used to kill a wide range of bacteria--and penicillin was identified.

From that minor act of scientific sloppiness, we got one of the most widely used antibiotics today.