Coincidence often helps: this is how Viagra, laughing gas and the solar cell were invented

Nowadays, electricity flows from the solar cells on the roof, we know how diseases spread, how people become unconscious or how men become potent. The beginnings of the most important inventions are not known because they go back too long, such as the making of fire or the discovery of coffee. Or because dozens of small pre-inventions were needed to hold a glowing light bulb, for example.

And yet they exist, the eureka moments. Archimedes of Syracuse is said to have understood during a bath why objects and bodies can float in water. Then he was naked and “Eureka!” (“I found it”) ran screaming through the city of Syracuse in Sicily. At the beginning of the year, the following stories of an important beginning for humanity:

Cholera broke out in London’s Golden Square in the mid-18th century. However, as Dr. John Snow pointed out, the disease did not break out in all households. He drew the households with cholera cases on a city map and marked the locations of the water pumps. Because he assumed that water is a source of infection for cholera.

In conversations with residents, he found that cholera cases increased in households that drew water from pump A. After Snow presented his findings to city officials, the handle was removed from this deadly pump and the epidemic ended. A subsequent study, again during a cholera outbreak, confirmed Snow’s theory of the disease’s distribution pattern. Thus was born the branch of science of epidemiology, which deals with the frequency and distribution of diseases in the population, with John Snow as father.

Today’s solar cell began with a surprising discovery by American scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey in the early 1950s. They noticed that silicon rectifiers delivered more current when exposed to sunlight. Silicon, also called quartz sand, is the second most abundant element in the earth’s crust, and the rectifier is a component that converts alternating current or three-phase current into direct current. This is crucial for converting solar energy into electricity.

Bell’s Morton Price discovered why more electricity was generated when the sun shone on silicon, and on the basis of this discovery, Bell developed the first silicon solar cells in 1953. The return was still a modest 4 percent. But the space industry quickly recognized the benefits of solar technology and equipped the first satellites with solar cells as early as 1958. These already had a return of 10.5 percent. Today that is about 22 percent for monocrystalline solar cells.

The German physicist and Nobel Prize winner Philipp Lenard had already explained the effect of photovoltaic cells in 1904. He found that when light rays hit certain metals, they eject electrons from their surfaces. So when sunlight hits certain cells, electrons in the cell are excited. They run on a cable and current flows, as later on in Bell’s solar cells.

In the 18th century, few medical professionals attempted to perform surgery. Because this was accompanied by excruciating pain for the patients, there was no anesthesia at that time. Some doctors resorted to cruel methods, such as drinking their patients or beating them into fainting spells.

At the time, dentist Horace Wells attended an event where the recreational drug laughing gas was used. Sam Cooley, a local drugstore clerk, took up a particularly large portion of it. Wells saw the man seriously injure his leg, but apparently felt no pain. From then on, Wells treated his patients under the influence of nitrous oxide. The sad end of the story: the anesthesia pioneer became addicted to his product and died.

In the 1990s, the American pharmaceutical company Pfizer developed a drug that should treat angina pectoris, a heart disease. To the chagrin of those affected, the study was initially sobering. Nevertheless, the male study participants refused to stop taking the drug. As the lead scientist discovered, some subjects had more erections than before. Pfizer recognized the unprecedented potential of the small pill, turned the clinical trial inside out and later marketed the wonder drug under the trade name Viagra with great success.

Thousands of scientists work at CERN, the European Nuclear Research Center in Geneva, many of whom spend most of their time at universities in their home countries. Wouldn’t it be practical if all collected data, programs and other information could be automatically shared with each other?

The computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, who worked at Cern at the time, thought the same thing – and he didn’t sit still: in late 1990 he put his first page, titled “World Wide Web”, on a computer that served as a server. To prevent it from being accidentally turned off, a note was taped to the computer that read: “This machine is a server. DON’T TURN OFF!!”. Just four years later, the web had 10,000 servers – and today hardly anyone can imagine a world without “WWW”.

It was a warm evening in 1666. Isaac Newton, lost in thought under an apple tree, was struck by a large red apple on his head. According to legend, why does an apple fall vertically to the ground? “The reason is certainly that the earth attracts it,” was his conclusion, by which he had discovered the principle of gravity. The story will probably not have happened in exactly the same way, but it has been embellished a bit over the centuries. But that doesn’t change the fact that Newton is one of the most influential physicists of all time.

British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming credits the discovery of penicillin to a coincidence: in 1928 he grew staphylococci on a culture medium plate, but forgot to cover them before going on vacation. When he returned, he noticed that a fungus had grown in the solution and the staphylococci could no longer multiply nearby.

As with many inventions, there are several that had similar ideas. In fact, Paul Ehrlich invented an antibiotic against syphilis way back in 1910. And as early as 1896, the French military doctor Ernest Duchesne found that the Arab grooms kept the saddles in a dark, damp room. This caused them to mold. Duchesne asked the grooms why, and they said that riding wounds would heal faster on such saddles. To test the theory, the military doctor administered a fungal solution to sick guinea pigs and they all recovered. But the 23-year-old was unable to expand his research: his dissertation was rejected by the Pasteur Institute.

We now know a surprising amount about the beginning of all beginnings, even though no one was there. 4.5 billion years ago, the remnants of a previous stellar explosion formed a cloud of gas and dust in space, which collapsed and formed into a new star: the sun. The planets are formed from the remaining gas and dust particles around them. Maria Schönbächler, a professor at the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at ETH Zurich, investigated how vital materials came to Earth: her research results show that while our planet was still growing, material came from further afield into the solar system.

The atmosphere eventually formed as the Earth cooled over the ensuing millions of years. “Crystals were formed in which volatile substances such as water and carbon dioxide no longer fit,” explains Schönbächler. These substances were outgassed and formed the Earth’s first atmosphere.

As the ETH writes, the first atmosphere consisted largely of water vapor and carbon dioxide. At the time, Earth was over 100 degrees hot and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere were half a million times higher than today, according to Derek Vance, also an ETH professor at the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology. It is not yet known how the earth lost so much CO2.

The later mechanisms of how the Earth keeps losing CO2 are well known – they just take millions of years: the carbon dioxide reaches the Earth’s surface through rain, where it is absorbed by the weathering processes in the rock. The rock is in turn washed into the seas where it is deposited. New rocks, ie new mountains, are constantly being formed by the tectonics. And the warmer it gets, the faster the weathering process goes.

“That means,” says Vance, “the more CO2 you add to the atmosphere, the more it removes.” This negative feedback provided the stable conditions on Earth necessary for the evolution of life over billions of years. His conclusion: “Our planet has the ability to repair itself with negative feedback as a stabilizing force – albeit over a very long period of time.”