MISTAKES ARE GOOD

You may have heard this before, but I bet you still hate the idea of screwing up and embarrassing yourself in front of everybody. This is understandable. We aren't very nice to people who make mistakes.

Unless you somehow manage not to do anything ever again, you will mess up, somehow, somewhere. I promise.

If you have the right frame of mind, though, that mistake could turn out to be one of the most valuable, most important, most memorable, or most delicious accidents in history.

It's happened before--too many times for me to describe without giving you
severe eyestrain. There's a great little book on the topic called Mistakes
that Worked, by Charlotte Foltz Jones. It's written for kids, but it's the
sort of thing that's a fun read even for adults.

I've picked my favorite mistakes from history, science, and folklore. Some
are familiar. We already know, for instance, that Christopher Columbus meant
to sail to Asia, not America.

We may never have pondered other mistakes, however. Where would Jack be if
his mother hadn't tossed his magic beans out the window? Not up the
beanstalk getting golden eggs from the giant's goose, that's for sure.

And where would Cinderella be had she not dropped her glass slipper?
Cleaning the fireplace, that's where. (By the way, did you know that the
original Cinderella story had her wearing a fur shoe? A French writer made a
mistake when he wrote the story down in 1697, confusing two homonyms--vair,
an Old French word for fur, and verre, which is French for glass. But it was
a good mistake, making for much more romantic story, and much better
fashion.)

And now for the rest...

Coca-Cola, chocolate chip cookies, and yellow sticky notes
Did you wonder why I invited you to have a snack at the beginning of this
story? It was because both Coca-Cola and chocolate chip cookies were
mistakes--or at least unexpected delights. And yellow sticky notes were the
result of a failure. Here's what happened.

Innkeeper Ruth Wakefield was baking Butter Drop Do cookies one day in the
1930s using a recipe that dated back to colonial times. She cut up a Nestlé
chocolate bar and put the chunks in the batter, expecting them to melt.
Wakefield thought she'd be pulling chocolate-flavored cookies out of the
oven. Instead, what she got were butter cookies studded with gooey chocolate
chips. Her mistake became one of the most favorite cookies of all time.

Coca-Cola was the result of another delicious accident. In 1886 a pharmacist
named John Pemberton cooked up a medicinal syrup in a large brass kettle
slung over an open fire, stirring it with an oar. When he was done, he
figured he had created a fine tonic for people who were tired, nervous, or
plagued with sore teeth.

Coke didn't make it as medicine, and wasn't even an instant success as a
beverage. In the first year, Pemberton spent $73.96 promoting his new
product but managed to sell only $50 worth. Today people guzzle 1 billion
drinks a day from the Coca-Cola company (they make more than Coke), which is
quite encouraging for us everyday screw-ups.

Want to Learn More?
Are you a young inventor? Did you know that the National Inventors Hall of
Fame has summer camp? Already have an invention? You might want to check and
see if someone else already has the patent. Need help getting a patent? The
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office can assist you. Need to know exactly what a
patent is?

Want to hone your inventing skills? Try an online class in science and
engineering.

Yellow sticky notes, officially known as Post-it Notes, got their start in
1968 when a 3M researcher tried to improve adhesive tape. What he got was a
semisticky adhesive--not exactly what you want out of tape. Even so, he knew
he had something cool--he just didn't know what to do with it.

Four years later, another 3M scientist was getting frustrated. This
scientist was a member of his church choir, and he kept dropping the
bookmarks stuck in his hymnal. What he needed was something that would stick
without being too sticky--something just like that weak glue his colleague
had accidentally created. In 1980 the Post-it Note became an official
product and a huge hit.

Another 3M scientist came up with a cool substance called Scotchgard, which
helps prevent dirt from staining fabric. But that wasn't what she set out to
create: Scotchgard grew out of an attempt to make a synthetic rubber to be
used in airplane fuel lines. One day some of the new substance spilled on
her assistant's canvas shoe, and they couldn't get it off. As the tennis
shoe grew older, it got dingy--everywhere except where the substance had
spilled. It took three more years of tinkering, but they had their
Scotchgard.)

Tires and Silly Putty
Rubber got its name when English scientist Joseph Priestley discovered that
a wad of it was good at "rubbing out" pencil mistakes on paper. But the
rubber really hit the road--literally--when someone figured out how to
stabilize it for use in boots, tires, and the like. The problem was that
rubber melted if it got too hot and shattered if it got too cold.

A colorful character named Charles Goodyear tried to fix this problem in
several ways, but it wasn't until (according to legend) he accidentally
dropped a blob of rubber and sulfur on a hot stove that he found something
that worked. Goodyear denied this was a mistake, but the point is that he
had the savvy to know he was on to something good.

Charles Goodyear died in debt, but he died satisfied. How so? Read his story
on the Goodyear Web site.

Rubber shortages during World War II prompted the U.S. government to look
for a synthetic rubber. It seemed like a good idea to try to make this
substitute for rubber out of something plentiful, and researchers eventually
settled on silicone. An inventor at General Electric added a little boric
acid to silicone oil and developed a gooey, bouncy substance.

This substance failed as a substitute for rubber, but after the war it
became an extremely popular toy known as Silly Putty. Apollo 8 astronauts
later used it to stabilize their tools in zero gravity. (The astronauts
carried their Silly Putty in sterling silver eggs.) Today, Binney & Smith
(the company that makes Silly Putty) produces 20,000 eggs' worth of Silly
Putty a day.

The implantable cardiac pacemaker and penicillin
Some errors have saved lives. Before Wilson Greatbatch came along, people
with irregular heartbeats had to control their pulse using a sometimes
painful external device invented in 1952 by Paul Zoll. The external
pacemaker was about the size of a small television, and administered
life-saving jolts of electricity, which sometimes burned the skin.

Greatbatch, a medical researcher, was working on a device to record
irregular heartbeats when he accidentally inserted a resistor of the wrong
size. He noticed that the circuit pulsed, stopped, and pulsed again--just
like a human heart.

After two years of tinkering, Greatbatch had made the first implantable
pacemaker. He later invented a corrosion-free lithium battery to power it,
and millions have benefited.

Penicillin is another famous example of a mistake turned good. In 1928
scientist Alexander Fleming noticed that mold spores had contaminated one of
the bacteria samples he had left by an open window. Instead of discarding
his ruined experiment, Fleming took a close look and noticed the mold was
dissolving the harmful bacteria. And that's how we got penicillin, which
helps people around the world recover from infections.

What they mean is that you should look carefully--and study your errors. You
may find things you were never looking for, things that could change the
world, or at the very least, taste really good.