Ten Serendipitous Discoveries in Chemistry

Chemistry doesn t always go as plcmned. This chapter presents ten stories of good scientists who discovered something they didn t know they were looking for. 

Archimedes was a Greek mathematician who lived in the third century B.C. I know this is supposed to be about scientists and not mathematicians, but back then, Archimedes was as close to a scientist as you could get. 

Needing some relaxation, he decided to bathe at the public baths. As he stepped into the full tub and saw the water overflow, he realized that the volume of his body that was submerged was equal to the volume of water that overflowed. He had his answer for measuring the volume of the crown. He got so excited that he ran home naked through the streets, yelling Eureka, eureka G ve found it ) And this method of determining the volume of an irregular solid is still used today. (By the way, the crown was an alloy, and the dishonest jeweler received swift justice.) 

Rubber, in the form of latex, was discovered in the early 16th century in South America, but it gained little accept mce because it became sticky and lost its shape in the heat. 

Charles Goodyear was trying to find a way to make the rubber stable when he accidentally spilled a batch of rubber mixed with sulfur on a hot stove. He noticed that the resulting compound didn t lose its shape in the heat. Goodyear went on to patent the vulcanization process, which is the chemical process used to treat crude or S5mthetic rubber or plastics to give them useful properties such as elasticity, strength, and stability. 

In 1884, the French wine industry hired Louis Pasteur to study a compound left on wine casks during fermentation — racemic acid. Pasteur knew that racemic acid was identical to tartaric acid, which was known to be optically active — that is, it rotated polarized light in one direction or another. 

---

In this part, I introduce you to ten great serendipitous chemical discoveries, ten great chemistry nerds (nerds ruleQ, and ten useful chemistry Internet sites. I started to put in my ten favorite chemistry songs, but I could only think of nine. Bummer. 

---