Accidental Inventions
When you search for accidental inventions online you’ll easily find numerous articles pointing to the top 9 or 14 brilliant inventions made by mistake. However, they are all the same ones that we’ve all heard about in grade school: post-it-notes, penicillin, Coca-Cola, breakfast cereal, the microwave, etcetera. In efforts to dive a bit deeper and learn something new I scoured the depth of internet to find something that was new to me, and hopefully new to you as well.
Smart Dust
Jamie Link, as graduate student of chemistry at UC San Diego, accidently discovered the idea of "Smart Dust" when a silicon chip she was working on exploded (Borowski, 2013). The chip was thin multi-layer film of porous silicon on a crystalline substrate. She apparently noticed that the small broken pieces of the chip still maintained some of their inherent properties, even when broken into microscopic pieces. Smart Dust as a technology has a wide array of potential uses such as medical diagnostics and research, environmental testing, drug delivery, pollution monitoring, equipment monitoring, and even bioterrorism surveillance (National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2003).
Jamie Link’s discovery however earned her the top prize of $50,000 at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003. Although the theoretical concept of Smart Dust was not novel and had been part of many research directives since the 1990s. Her discovery sparked new focus on the technology.
In 2005 Link and her Graduate advisor Michael Sailor published the results of their findings, examining how the miniature wireless semiconductor devices could be made using fabrication techniques derived from the current in production in the microelectronics industry (Link and Sailor, 2005). The UC San Diego Lab, with Sailor as the department lead, made Smart Dust a focal point of their research. In 2004 a fellow graduate researcher Jason Dorvee from the UC San Diego lab published a paper, where we showed that by adding superparamagnetic iron oxide particles to these microscopic smart chips of silicon would make it easier to handle (Bradley, 2004).
Post discovery, Smart Dust has found many technologies over the past 19 years in which it has potential applications. From sun-angle recording of honeybee flight tracking (Palmer and Molnar, 2021) to a low-cost and energy-efficient autonomous cleaning techniques for energy tech, Smart Dust has a wide array of possibilities.
Pop Rocks
While I wasn’t a big fan of Pop Rocks as a kid, preferring candy cigarettes and Squeezits, they were certainly in the rotation. Of course, like all kids I knew about the urban ledged of Pop Rocks killing the kid from the Life cereal commercials, eating them with Coca-Cola (O’Neill, 2017). But I never knew their origin.
Pop Rocks were the unintentional effect of their inventor William Mitchell’s attempt to create an instant carbonated soda (Post, 2004). Mitchell was an esteemed food scientist, making such iconic processed foods such as Cool Whip, quick-set Jell-O, and Tang. Prior to his life as a food scientist he worked at Kodak, helping to design a chemical process to develop the color green.
Now, just because I think we all want to know how the ‘pop’ in Pop Rocks is possible, here is the disrupts from Janice Lawandi or theKitchn.com:
“First, the ingredients (sugar, lactose, corn syrup, and flavors) are heated together and brought to a boil. Then the mixture is flushed with carbon dioxide, and as the candy cools, the carbon dioxide ends up trapped within as tiny bubbles. If the candy is kept in a cool, dry place, then it takes a while for the trapped carbon dioxide to escape. But if you pour Pop Rocks onto your tongue, the warm, humid environment will cause the candy to melt and dissolve, releasing the tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide into your mouth, along with an audible crackle sound and a fizzy, popping feeling.”
Carbon Dioxide, or more commonly referred to as C02, is in the end the key ingredient. It is what is used in soft drinks to prevent them from spoiling during storage, and this is also what makes them fizzy. Hence the tie to Mitchell’s initial attempt at creating an instant soda. While an interesting accident to say the least, as Pop Rocks brough Mitchell more fame than his other creations. I’d still take a fresh pack of Stallion Brand cigs any day of the week.
References
Borowski, S. (2013). Scientific breakthroughs that were 'accidents'. American Association of the Advancement of Science. https://www.aaas.org/scientific-breakthroughs-were-accidents
Bradley, D. (2004). Smart Dust Goes Magnetic. Wiley Analytical Science Magazine. https://analyticalscience.wiley.com/do/10.1002/sepspec.811ezine/
Eric [no last name]. (nd). Pop Rocks History. Old Time Candy. https://www.oldtimecandy.com/collections/walk-the-candy-aisle-pop-rocks#collection-desc
Lawandi, J. (2015). The science Behind Pop Rocks Candy. TheKitchn.com. https://www.thekitchn.com/the-science-behind-pop-rocks-candy-224718
Link, J., Sailor, M. (2005). “Smart Dust”: nanostructured devices in a grain of sand. The Journal of Chemical Communications, Issue 11. https://doi.org/10.1039/B417554A
Najeeb, N. S., Soori., P. K., Kumar, T. R. (2018). A Low-Cost and Energy-Efficient Smart Dust Cleaning Technique for Solar Panel System. 2018 International Conference on Smart Grid and Clean Energy Technologies (ICSGCE), 2018, pp. 125-129, doi: 10.1109/ICSGCE.2018.8556806.
National Inventors Hall of Fame. (2003). 2003 Winners of Collegiate Inventors Competition announced in NYC. National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/581587
O’Neill, N. (2017). How the Explosive 'Pop Rocks and Coke' Legend Destroyed an Iconic Candy Brand. Thrillist . https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/pop-rocks-urban-legend-mikey-death
Palmer, D. M., & Molnar, D. M. (2021). An Autonomous, Optically-Powered, Direct-to-Digital Sun-Angle Recorder for Honey Bee Flight Tracking. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, vol. 68, no. 5, pp. 1680-1684, May. DOI: 10.1109/TCSII.2021.3067033.
Post. (2004). William Mitchell Obituary. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/2004/08/02/william-mitchell
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