Abstract
Stories of accidental or fortuitous invention have a powerful appeal. Roy Plunkett finds an unfamiliar substance inside a gas canister and turns it into Teflon. Samuel Colt sees a ship's wheel turn and uses the principle to invent his revolver. Alluring as such tales are, they obscure both the insight needed to take advantage of a chance observation and the hard work needed to develop it. In many cases, a simple origin myth like these can overshadow the extensive and detailed research that led to a world-changing invention. Consider the microwave oven. Many of us have heard how a Raytheon engineer walked past a microwave tube one day, noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted, and was struck with the idea of using microwaves to cook food. This incident, or something like it, may have occurred, but there is a lot more to the story than that. The idea of microwave heating was not founded on any single random discovery, and after the initial idea, it took years, even decades, of engineering and marketing to make it work.
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