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Interesting Patents

Three Accidental Inventions That Changed the World


1. Penicillin

penicillin          The story of the discovery of Penicillin is a story that all should know. The brilliant, absent-minded biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so he threw it away! It wasn't until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mold. This discovery wasn't given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was slow-acting - it wasn't until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.


2. The Pacemaker

pacemaker          Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatch was working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the world's first implantable cardiac pacemaker. Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patient's body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.


3. Superglue

          Superglue was invented in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldn't work, so research moved on. 6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates,recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue was born. It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam - the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.


(Information contained in this article was excerpted from pocketgadget.org)

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For the Inventor




          Quinine has been used in the un-extracted form by Europeans, at least since the early 1600’s. It was first used to treat malaria in Rome in 1631. It was originally extracted from the bark of the Cinchona tree, native to Peru. Historically, quinine was the prime reason Africa ceased to be known as the white man’s grave, providing colonists fresh opportunities to swarm into the Gold Coast, Nigeria and other parts of Africa. Still used today as the first treatment of choice for malaria, the chemical route of quinine synthesis was first developed and patented by American chemists R.B. Woodward and W.E. Doering.
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