The Value of Accident

“I HAVE ever,”remarks Mr. Shandy, when the celebrated sermon on conscience tumbles out of my Uncle Toby’s copy of Stevinus, “a strong propensity to look into things which cross my way by such strange fatalities as these" ; an observation which shows that this gentleman, or rather the author whose mouthpiece he is, was possessed of a large measure of sagacity and knowledge of the world. Nor does the Rev. Mr. Sterne by any means stand alone in thus bearing witness to the value of accidental suggestion. There is a similar testimony contained in one of the lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which that wise and experienced teacher informs his listeners that “ it is a great matter to be in the way of accident, and to be watchful and ready to take advantage of it” ; a precept which this great man was himself ever ready to carry out, as the following anecdote, related to the author by a personal friend of the late Mrs. Siddons, will show. When this great actress gave her first sitting to Reynolds for the picture of the tragic muse, the artist, on his mettle to do his very best, placed her in all sorts of different positions of his own devising, such as seemed to him the best calculated to develop his own conception and the peculiar beauties and characteristics of his sitter. He was not satisfied with any of them; and desisting for a while from the attempt to force his model into such a pose as should agree with the ideal in his own mind, he fell into talk with his sitter, and for the moment forgot all about his intended picture. The artistic faculty, never entirely dormant in the mind of a great genius, was however destined to be quickly called into action ; for suddenly, while discussing some subject which interested her, the great actress, as she reposed in the sitters’ arm-chair, fell, of herself, into an attitude which expressed all that the artist sought to portray, and which was at once entirely graceful and entirely easy. "Don’t move,” said Reynolds, speaking in a hushed tone lest he should startle his sitter; and then putting away his eartrumpet and resuming his palette and brushes, he hastened to trace the outlines of that glorious figure which has now taken its place forever among the masterpieces of art. Many another great artist besides Reynolds has doubtless been similarly indebted to accident for the suggestion of combinations which the connoisseurs have vaunted as the results of deep study and learned arrangement. Nor is it any disparagement to the genius of such artists to make this assertion ; the profoundest professional knowledge and the keenest and most cultivated judgment being needed to enable the artist to take advantage of the chance which has so come in his way, and something of the spirit of self-sacrifice, as well, to make him ready to abandon his own conception in favor of the new one thus unexpectedly thrown in his way. Selfabnegation, vigilance, anticipation of results, are great qualities, and he who possesses them will be no small man.¹

But it is not alone in connection with the pursuit of the arts that accident is valuable and worthy of consideration. A faithful and exhaustive history of accident— and a worse subject for a treatise on a much more extensive scale than this might be found — would reveal many astonishing instances of the part which this element of chance has played in the world’s history, and how it has led to all sorts of discoveries, inventions, and achievements, which have in a variety of practical ways been of exceeding use to mankind. The variety of the discoveries thus attributable to accident is very great: scientific, mechanical, even medical discoveries are among them. One of these last may be taken as a specimen to begin with. Those persons who have had experience of the disease called ague, and who have shivered and burned in its alternate fits of heat and cold, may be interested to hear of the accidental origin of the one special medicine which is always to be relied on as a means of cure for that particular form of disease. It is said that the discovery of the medical virtues of quinine originated thus: An ignorant native of South America, suffering from the fierce thirst which accompanies certain stages of ague, drank copiously of the only water which was within his reach, and which he got from a pond into which a tree of the kind since called cinchona had fallen. The tree had lain long in the pool, it being nobody’s especial business to pull it out; the water had become powerfully impregnated with the qualities contained in its bark; and, the sufferer who had drunk of this water recovering from his ague with unexampled rapidity, the pond got to be celebrated for its medicinal virtues ; and so, some person, more thoughtful than others, connecting the curative quality of the water with the fact of the timber having fallen into it, it began to be rumored that there was healing power in this particular tree, and in due time its bark came to be admitted among the materia medica of the schools, and to be regarded as one of the more important exports of the South American continent. The Jesuits, with the activity which always characterized that ambitious fraternity, got hold of this drug, which was, in consequence, called “ The Jesuits’ Bark,” and soon it became so celebrated that we find La Condamine in his travels telling how he carried some specimens of the young trees which furnished the bark from one part of South America to another, in order that the supply of so valuable a commodity as cinchona bark might not be confined to one particular locality.

The influence of accident is again to be traced as affecting another medical discovery apparently attributable only to prolonged reflection and deep study, — that of vaccination by Jenner. Dr. Baron, in his life of this illustrious person, says : “ It has been stated that his attention was drawn forcibly to the subject of cow-pox whilst he was yet a youth. This event was brought about in the following manner: he was pursuing his professional education in the house of his master at Sudbury; a young country-woman came to seek advice ; the subject of small-pox was mentioned in her presence ; she immediately observed, ' I cannot take that disease, for I have had cowpox.’ This incident riveted the attention of Jenner. It was the first time that the popular notion, which was not at all uncommon in the district, had been brought home to him with force and influence.” The “ popular notion ” above referred to was subsequently investigated by Jenner, when he found that there was a particular eruptive disease to which cows were liable, which the milkers of such cows sometimes caught from them, and an attack of which conferred immunity from smallpox. “ Upon this hint ” he began to speculate, with results which we all know of. What he thus heard accidentally gave a special bias to his thoughts. A very small boat will serve to carry a man to the ship in which he is to make a great voyage.

It will sometimes happen that a circumstance in itself disconcerting, or even alarming, will affect in a highly propitious manner the fortunes of him of whose career it forms a part. When Samuel Lee, who ultimately became Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, but who began life as a village carpenter, lost his chest of tools in a fire, he no doubt deplored the loss profoundly. Yet this accident was in reality the making of him. He had no money with which to get a fresh set of tools, or indeed to set himself up in any sort of business; the only occupation open to him, as requiring no capital, was that of a schoolmaster. This he at once adopted, and, learning himself while he taught others, gradually rose higher and higher, till he reached one of the most exalted positions which can be attained by human learning. Yet this man doubtless thought that he was ruined when his chest of tools was burnt, and took to the new business which was to lead him on to such great things, only as a pis-aller, and in sheer desperation.

When the wife of Louis Galvani fell ill, and in her sickness conceived a longing for frog soup, her husband little suspected that this circumstance would be instrumental in rendering his name immortal. The frogs were slain and skinned and made ready for the stewing-pot, when the invalid lady happened to touch the leg of one of them with a knife which had become impregnated with magnetic power from a neighboring electrical machine. To her surprise the leg of the frog, on being thus brought in contact with the electric force, began to move with a convulsive action as if the life were still in it, becoming passive again on the withdrawal of the instrument. Of course the good lady — herself a physician’s daughter, and probably possessed of some smattering at least of medical knowledge—-communicated what she had observed to her husband ; and he, after making a multiplicity of experiments, — the same in character as this which had been made unconsciously by his wife, but carried, of course, much farther, — contrived to wring from nature the secret of that strange phenomenon which we now call galvanism.

The first idea of the balloon, which in its perfected state we see leaping up from the ground into the sky and dragging after it a heavy cargo, is said to have presented itself to Stephen Montgolfier owing to an accidental occurrence, which his different biographers narrate in two ways. One version of the story is, that Montgolfier, a papermaker by profession, happening to fling a paper bag into the fire, it became full of smoke, and in that condition hung for a time suspended in the chimney. According to another version, Montgolfier is represented as boiling water in a coffee-pot over which there was a conical paper cover, which was observed gradually to swell and rise as it became filled with vapor. In either event, it was owing to accident that the idea of a bag rendered lighter than the surrounding atmosphere by inflation came into his head, and reached in due time full development in the balloon. Not every paper-maker is a man of a speculative and philosophic turn of mind ; yet had not this Stephen Montgolfier been both the one and the other, he certainly would never have got what he did out of this small hint.

And the gas with which the balloon in its present complete form has to be filled, — how was that discovered ? Still in some sort accidentally. The Rev. John Clayton, a clergyman living about the latter part of the seventeenth century, and devoted in a great degree to scientific pursuits, was on a certain occasion making some experiments with coal, when he observed certain phenomena which he describes so lucidly that it will be best to let him tell his own story. After placing some coal in a retort, and heating it, he says, “there came first only phlegm, afterwards a black oil, and then likewise a spirit arose which I could in noways condense; but it forced my lute, or broke my glasses. Once when it had forced my lute, coming close thereto in order to try to repair it, I observed that the spirit which issued out caught fire at the flame of the candle, and continued burning with violence as it issued out in a stream, which I blew out and lighted again alternately, for several times. I then had a mind to try if I could save any of this spirit ; in order to which I took a turbinated receiver, and putting a candle to the pipe of the receiver whilst the spirit arose, I observed that it catched flame and continued burning at the end of the pipe, though you could not discern what fed the flame. I then blew it out and lighted it again several times, after which I fixed a bladder squeezed and void of air to the pipe of the receiver. The oil and phelgm descended into the receiver, but the spirit, still ascending, blew up the bladder. I then filled a good many bladders therewith.I kept this spirit in the bladders a considerable time, and endeavored several ways to condense it, but in vain ; and when I had a mind to divert strangers or friends, I have frequently taken one of these bladders, and, pricking a hole therein with a pin, and compressing gently the bladder near the flame of a candle till it once took fire, it would then continue flaming till all the spirit was compressed out of the bladder.”

Our budget of inventions attributable to accident is by no means exhausted. Vitruvius describes the origin of the Corinthian capital in this wise: “A Corinthian virgin of marriageable age fell a victim to a violent disorder. After her interment, her nurse, collecting in a basket those articles to which she had shown a partiality when alive, carried them to her tomb, and placed a tile on the basket for the longer preservation of its contents. The basket was accidentally placed on the root of an acanthus-plant, which, pressed by the weight, shot forth, towards spring, its stems and large foliage, and in the course of its growth reached the angles of the tile, and then formed volutes at the extremities. Callimachus happening at the time to pass by the tomb, observed the basket, and the delicacy of the foliage which surrounded it. Pleased with the form and novelty of the combination, he constructed from the hint thus afforded columns of this species in the country about Corinth, and arranged its proportions, determining their proper measures by perfect rules.” No doubt Vitruvius is an authority whose statements should generally be regarded with something of suspicion, but in this case there seems no particular reason why his account should be looked upon as untrustworthy. If the thing is not true, it is at least splendidly invented.

Returning to days more recent, we find, on the authority of historians of a less imaginative type than Vitruvius, that accident has had a share in bringing about many mechanical inventions by which mankind has since profited largely. The well-known story of the invention of the stocking-loom has, in its several versions, the element of accident. According to the first of these, William Lee, an Oxford student, was courting a young lady who paid more attention to her knitting than to her lover’s wooing; and so, as he watched her deftly moving fingers, the idea came to him of a mechanical invention which should supersede this knitting business altogether, and leave his mistress no excuse for bad listening. The other version of the story, and far the more probable, concerns still this same William Lee, but suggests the application of a more powerful stimulus to his inventive powers than even the desire to get full possession of his sweetheart’s attention. Here, the student and the young lady with the knitting propensities are married, and Lee is turned out of the university for contracting a matrimonial engagement, contrary to the statutes. They are entirely destitute of means, and the young wife turns her knitting to account, and makes stockings for the joint support of herself and her husband. Then it is that Lee, watching the movements by which the stockings are made, gets the idea of the machine which he subsequently brought to perfection. There is a very barren account, in Thornton’s “ Nottinghamshire,” of the origin of this invention, in which Lee is represented as belonging, not to Oxford, but to Cambridge. It runs thus : “ At Culonton was born William Lee, Master of Arts in Cambridge, and heir to a pretty freehold there, who, seeing a woman knit, invented a loom to knit.”

There are more instances on record, besides this of Lee and his stockingloom, of mechanical inventions the first idea of which was suggested accidentally. Among the excellent “Stories of Inventors and Discoverers,” by Mr. Timbs, it is stated that Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinningjenny, “ divined the idea of the jenny from the following incident: Seeing a hand-wheel with a single spindle overturned, he remarked that the spindle which was before horizontal was then vertical, and, as it continued to revolve, he drew the roving of wool towards him into a thread. It then seemed to Hargreaves plausible that, if something could be applied to hold the rovings as the finger and thumb did, and that contrivance to travel backwards on wheels, six or eight or even twelve threads from as many spindles might be spun at once.” On the authority of Mr. Timbs, we learn also that the invention of “spinning by rollers ” was suggested originally by chance. “ Arkwright stated,”says Mr. Timbs, “that he accidentally derived the first hint of his invention from seeing a red-hot iron bar elongated by being made to pass through rollers.”

Nor is it only in pointing out the way which has led to so many remarkable discoveries and inventions that the effect of accident has been clearly demonstrated. The destiny of many individuals has more than once been, in like manner, influenced by its agency. We have seen how Samuel Lee became Regius Professor of Hebrew through the destruction of his carpenter’s-tools by fire, and how Jenner’s attention was drawn to the subject of vaccination by the chance remark of a patient who came to his master’s surgery for advice, and how his future career came to be marked out for him in consequence. These are not isolated instances. Granville Sharp, the great opponent of the slave-trade, who preceded Wilberforce and Clarkson, and who established the right of negroes to their freedom while in England, and instituted the society for the abolition of the slave-trade, — this man was sitting on a certain occasion in the surgery of his brother, when a wretched African, covered with wounds and scars, the consequence of brutal ill-treatment by his owner, came to ask advice as to the treatment of his maimed limbs and body. It was the indignation excited by witnessing the sufferings of this poor slave which awakened in the breast of Granville Sharp the desire to espouse the cause of the injured blacks, and led him to devote the principal part of his life to their service. A more recent instance of a career diverted from its original course by a mere chance is found in the life of Faraday the chemist. He was originally a bookbinder, and his perusal of an article on chemistry in an encyclopædia, which he read when he ought to have been binding it, ultimately led to his taking up these peculiar studies in which he subsequently so greatly distinguished himself.

It is not within the compass of an ordinary magazine article that all the cases in which accident has powerfully affected human destiny can be dealt with. Enough have been cited here to prove the fact that the influence of accident, when it has formed an element in the career of men who have known how to take advantage of it, has been very remarkable. There are many more such incidents, which, by reason of their being so well known, do not need to be enlarged on at length, but which are yet deserving of some sort of mention. The apple of Sir Isaac Newton has been cooked in so many literary forms that it is no longer possible to dish it up in such a fashion as to make it palatable ; yet the incident of which it forms an integral part must needs be mentioned in such a chapter of accidents as this. So should that story of James Watt as a boy pondering over the fact that the lid of the teakettle was forced up by the accumulated steam within the vessel, and so having his attention drawn to the possible uses that could be made of this great power. A story somewhat of the same kind is extant of the Marquis of Worcester, whose thoughts were similarly directed in consequence of his having seen the cover of a certain iron pot, in which water was boiling, blown off into the room in which he was sitting. This nobleman was fond of scientific pursuits, and wrote an account of his observations in a work which was afterwards consulted by the earlier members of the engineering profession. There are many more wellknown stories of the same sort; such as that of Galileo watching the hanging lamp in the Pisa cathedral, and so conceiving the idea of the pendulum; of Captain Brown getting the notion of the Suspension Bridge from a line of gossamer hung from one bough to another across his path ; of Liffersheim, the spectacle-maker, to whom the invention of the telescope is said to have occurred from his having seen two spectacle - glasses placed accidentally one before the other. This story is generally told of Galileo, but there is more reason to think that it concerns the spectacle-maker than the astronomer.

The daring fox-hunter, when he clothes himself in his “pink” on a fine December morning, is probably as little aware as the ensign, trying on his first regimental coat, that he is indebted to an accident for the gorgeous color of the garment in which he finds delight. “The Dutch chemist Drebbel,” says Brande in one of his lectures, “resident at Alkmaar, had prepared some decoctions of cochineal for filling a thermometer tube. The preparation was effected in a tin vessel; and into this some nitro-muriatic acid having been spilled by accident, a rich scarlet color was observed. Thus by mere chance was the discovery made that oxide of tin, in solution, yielded, by combination with the coloring matter of cochineal, a scarlet dye.” This anecdote is quoted in the “Curiosities of Science,” and in the same work we find it stated that the elementary body called phosphorus was two centuries ago discovered “accidentally” by Brandt, the alchemist of Hamburg, while he was engaged in the search for gold. And so it came to pass that the pursuit of one of the wildest chimeras that ever led mortals astray was actually made subservient to a discovery of considerable practical value and importance.

There can be little doubt that in addition to these instances of the known influence of accident in leading to certain inventions and discoveries, there must have been many others which we do not know of, but which we can conceive readily enough as having had an accidental origin. We can fancy the idea of the speakingtrumpet, for instance, having occurred to the first man who in calling to another instinctively made a tube of his hand, and found that the volume of his voice was increased owing to its being thus enclosed ; a discovery acted upon to this day by every costermonger who hawks his “ sparrer-grass ” in the public streets. The invention of the speaking-trumpet would follow logically. Another similar gathering together of sound, by the hand enclosing the orifice of the ear, is practised always instinctively by the deaf, and may in a precisely similar manner have been the origin of the ear-trumpet. This increase of the fulness of sound got by enclosure once an ascertained fact, and another great invention, that of the stethoscope, follows almost as a matter of course. Many other discoveries are equally suggestive of an accidental origin.

Grafting is another invention which we may well imagine to have had a chance origin of this sort. In the Cyclopædia of Agriculture we read that “ it could scarcely happen otherwise than that the attention of mankind should be arrested by the frequent occurrence of natural grafts produced accidentally ; and an attempt to imitate them would naturally follow.” The invention of glass is certainly suggestive of an accidental origin. “ It is almost impossible,” says the writer on this subject in the Encyclopædia Britannica, “ to excite a very violent fire such as is necessary in metallurgic operations, without vitrifying part of the bricks or stone wherewith the furnace is built. This, indeed, might furnish the first hints of glass-making.”

But besides these public examples of the powerful influence which the element of chance has from time to time exercised on human destiny, it must have been noted by every one who is, even in a moderate degree, observant of what goes on within and around him, that even in the uneventful private career of the most ordinary and obscure individual a multiplicity of circumstances affecting that career in all sorts of ways have been brought about entirely by accident, and not uncommonly by accident of the most trifling description. You are sitting in your study or your office, attending to your ordinary concerns, when a friend comes in and persuades you to go with him to see an exhibition of pictures, to hear a scientific discourse, or what not; and straightway you meet with some one, or you hear some tidings, and by such meeting or such hearing you are led to do something, or maybe to abstain from doing something, of importance, by doing or not doing which all the rest of your life is affected. Surely there is no one but can remember, if he will take the trouble to try, important issues connected with his own career or that of his friends, which have been brought about directly or indirectly by circumstances so exceedingly trivial in themselves as to appear unworthy of notice. A man intends to join a certain party of friends on some occasion of social festivity, but, going to his drawer, finds that he has no gloves, and so spends the evening at his club instead, where he has a quarrel about the odd trick at whist, which causes him ultimately to abandon that particular club, and to join another, where he becomes acquainted with a man by whom a couple of years afterwards he is led into some commercial enterprise which is his ultimate ruin. Yet all, in this case, would come of a mere chance.

Since the above was written, an instance quite as remarkable as any of those already quoted, of the influence of accident on the history of invention, has been made public. In a review contained in the "Times” of August 28, 1869, in which a recent work, descriptive of a new invention called the graphotype, is brought under notice, the discovery of the new process is thus described : “ A year or two since, Mr. Clinton Hitchcock, an American draughtsman, was making a drawing upon a boxwood block, and, having made an error, was painting it out, as is customary, with a white pigment. The material he used for the purpose was the white enamel taken off by a moistened brush from the surface of an ordinary glazed visiting-card printed from a copperplate. By degrees, he removed all the composition forming the enamel, and then he found that the letters were undisturbed, and were standing up in bold relief from the surface of the card, the ink forming the letters having protected the enamel beneath them from the action of the brush, while all the surrounding parts were washed or rubbed away. With a keen eye to application, Mr. Hitchcock saw in the abraded address-card the basis of a mode of producing a relief printing-plate without the skill of the engraver, and he set about experimenting to reduce the method to practice. He took a plate of common chalk, and drew a picture with a silicious ink upon it. When the ink was dry, he brushed the chalk all over with a tooth-brush: the interstices between the lines were brushed away, and there stood the drawing in relief, ready to be petrified by the means of a chemical solution, and printed from direct, or to be handed over to the stereotypist to have ‘stereo’ made of it after the usual manner.”