Zigzag roads to success

Inventors make life simpler for us with their inventions, but the road to innovation is not smooth, it’s paved with many trials and tribulations and some quirky incidents. Here are some happenstance incidents of three famous scientists’ lives.

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931) was the inventor of the electric light bulb and has 1,093 patents to his credit. As a teenager, Edison, who had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, got a job with the Associated Press Bureau and requested to work night shifts so that he could also work on his scientific experiments. One night in 1867, the 19-year-old inventor was working on a power storage battery and spilled sulfuric acid on the floor. Unluckily for him, the acid found its way between the floorboards and dripped onto his boss’ desk in the room below! Edison was fired by his very angry boss the next morning.

René Laennec (1781-1826), a French physician who invented the stethoscope, owes a big thank you to a group of school students! Sometime in 1816, Laennec saw a bunch of children playing with long, hollow sticks. They took turns placing their ears at one end of the stick while someone scratched the other end with a pin. Laennec realised that the stick transmitted the sound. It didn’t take him long to build his first prototype of the stethoscope — a 25 cm by 2.5 cm hollow wooden cylinder that he later modified with detachable parts!

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), inventor of the barometer, was only three years old when his mother died. His father, Etienne Pascal was a judge. When the family moved to Paris, Etienne decided to homeschool Blaise and his two sisters. When young Blaise gave more importance to maths over all the other subjects, his father ordered him not to study the subject till he was 15 and to instead focus on Latin and Greek. But genius cannot be hidden under a bushel so, at the age of 12, Blaise, using a piece of coal, wrote on a wall an equation to prove that the sum of the angles of a triangle was equal to two right angles. His father was impressed and allowed him to study his favourite subject!