Mary, Queen of Scots: champion paper folder. “Coffee spill art.” Redesigning the binder clip. The smartest toaster was invented in 1949. An Internet-enabled cutting system for printers. A monocle/eyewear system for display graphics. Is it really better to invest in Lego’s than gold? The future of the swag bag? Birds aren’t real! Taping Canada’s strategic maple syrup reserves. The future of work from home? Miller High Life’s gingerbread dive bar. All that and more in WhatTheyThink’s weekly miscellany.
The Unintentional Discoveries: Serendipity And Science
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By: Wheels July 19, 2021 Comments
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The Michelin brothers had no intention of becoming pioneers in the tire-making business. One brother began as a brilliant engineer and then became a marketing genius. The other brother began as an artist and then became an inventor. Rubber got the ball rolling.
Rubber revolutionized a family, a country and a way of life as it became a symbol of perpetual motion.
Follow its path and you’ll also follow the wheels of progress just the way Edouard and Andre Michelin did.
Aristide Barbier, the maternal grandfather of the Michelin brothers, had already joined his cousin Nicolas Daubree and discovered the advantages of rubber when they formed a small manufacturing business in Clermont, France, in 1832.
1. Under the clouds
I left home in Fife and went to live in Glasgow when I was eighteen. When I think of it now, the distance seems laughably small – forty miles, little more than an hour in the train – but the contrast between a village on the east coast and a city, Scotland’s largest, on the west coast was sharp and exciting. I had a bedsit in a dark street of better-class tenements, with a Polish delicatessen, a dance hall and a cinema just round the corner. Glasgow seemed an infinite place, never to be known completely no matter how many suburban bus terminals you reached or exploratory walks you made. It was 1963. The last trams had run the year before, but the city was still much its old self – smoke-blackened, run-down, Victorian, majestic, tipsy on beer and whisky on a Saturday night, hushed on a Sunday. More than a million people lived there then; forty years later, that figure had almost halved.
1 It’s at times like these when we can all be grateful for Glaswegian chemist Charles Macintosh. The constant rain that has been battering the city over the last few days would have been a lot harder to deal with had it not been for his marvellous invention of 1823 - the raincoat. 2 Born on December 29, 1766, Macintosh worked as a clerk for a Glasgow merchant, but by the age of 19 he had already given it up to pursue his true passion of chemistry. By 1797, at the age of 23, he had established Scotland’s first alum works at Hurlet in Renfrewshire using as a raw material waste shale from oil shale mines. He also went into partnership with Charles Tennant, producing bleaching powder at a chemical works at St Rollox in Glasgow.
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