ACCIDENTS AND INVENTIONS

Shannon News, 16 February 1926, Page 1

ACCIDENTS AND INVENTIONS

i ♦ SOME CURIOUS OASES. • | DIAMONDS AND GREASE. ) When the Prince of Wales visited Kimberley recently he was shown the grease process of extracting- the very last diamond from the sticky mess in which it is hidden. This used lo be a hopeless job, but one-morning an ' engine hand thrust his his greasesmeared fingers into the diamond paste,, and thus accidentally discovered that an admixture of grease caused the diamonds to remain behind (when the water washed away the waste material in which they were embedded. It is possible that more useful discoveries and inventions have been made by accident than by design. The pointed spade or shoved was the result of a workman grinding off the corners of his square spade when digging stiff clay. It brought him a fortune, says a writer in 'Titbits." The burning of a starch factory on the banks of the Liffey first revealed the adhesive qualities of scorched starch mixed with water, and intro-" duced to the world a new and cheap gum. To the upsetting, by William Murdoch, of a tool chest we are indebted ' for cast-iron cement; and the acci- | dent of a child playing with a bottomless flask which his brother, a Swiss mechanic named Argand, placed over the flame of Iris crude oil lamp, resulted in the invention of the lamp chimney. A Nuremberg glass-cutter ■'Accidentally let some aqua fortis drop on his spectacles, and etching on glass quickly followed. Automatic Signalling. The inventor of automatic signalling oh railways got his idea of track circuiting from a spirit-rapping seance. He found that the table stood on two brass rails running across the stage, and immediately suspected the use of electricity. Talcing a piece of insulated wire, the ends of which were open, he laid it across the two rails, and the spirit ceased to "rap." Years afterwards, when he was a signal engineer, this early experiment recurred to his mind, and he used the idea for the protection of millions of railway passengers. A traveller through the Yellowstone Park stumbled on a dead horse. The animal had been lying there for a long time, but was wonderfully preserved. Oil examining the carcase it was found to be covered with borax, hithei'to used only in glazing linen, but destined to become one of the most useful chemical compounds in >ndustry through this accidental discovery of its preservative qualities. The placing together of two spectacle glasses by the children of a Dutch optician led to Galileo's construction of the first telescope, and a mere accident helped Senefelder lo the invention of lithograph. One day, when he was polishing on a stone for etching, his mother asked him to write out a list of the linen that the laundress was waiting to carry. No paper being available, he wrote the list on the stone in some printing ink. A few days later, when he was about to rub the writing off the stone, he thought he would try the effect of writing on stone bitten in with aqua fortis. He bit away several impressions of the writing, and discovered he had invented the art of I lithography. Fortune Caine From Fluke.

Alucky accident laid the foundation of the Nobel fortune. Alfred Nobel was assisting his father in the manufacture of nitro-glycerine, whdii in 1867 he discovered a cask leaking and some of the nitro-glycerine mingling with the siliceous sand used for packing. This trivial circumstance suggested a method of preparing a safe and manageable explosive ,and the result was dynamite. A young Bolton engineer, out for an evening stroll, noticed that the seeds of a sycamore falling to the ground acquired a rotary motion as they fell. He noticed, further, that the two wings were turned in opposite directions. This provided the first idea of the screw propeller.