There is increasing clamour around “Industry 4.0” with the main protagonists telling whoever will listen that UK companies must either adopt the principles or get left behind.
The most recent of our accidental inventions, smart dust was discovered this side of the millennium by a chemistry graduate student at the University of California, San Diego.
If seeing is believing, what happens when the R&D you’re working on simply disappears? That’s what happened to American chemist Roy Plunkett at the DuPont Company’s Jackson Laboratory in Deepwater, New Jersey.
Here’s an oddity: an accidental discovery that starts with one of today’s most likely contenders for R&D tax credit claims (chemical sciences) and ends with arguably one of the less likely qualifiers (textiles).
Everyone deserves a bit of luck. An Charles Goodyear, he deserved more than most. A self-taught chemist and manufacturing engineer, he got one of those ideas in his head you just can’t shake.
Talk about bringing your work home with you! Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg was experimenting with coal tar derivatives at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland when he landed his big, unexpected break.
Here’s something that’ll be music to most people’s ears who are involved in R&D. Speaking to the Associated Press, lifelong inventor Wilson Greatbatch said: “Nine things out of 10 don’t work”. But don’t despair, “The 10th one will pay for the other nine”.
You know the saying about ‘tidy desk, tidy mind’? Well a bit of clutter never did Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and botanist Sir Alexander Fleming any harm. In fact, scientific sloppiness was partly responsible for one of the milestones in 20th century pharmaceutical history.
