Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 February 1915 — GOOD RESULTS OF ACCIDENTS [ARTICLE]

GOOD RESULTS OF ACCIDENTS

Some of tho Mott Valuable Discoveries Have Been Brought About by Chance. How to make starch from com .(maize) was discovered accidentally by Thomas Kingsford, a mechanic. One day he threw a mess of com meal mush into the garbage pail. His wife emptied some lye into the same pail and in the morning when he emptied the pail he was astonished to And a small quantity of starch at the bottom. Thomas Bolsover, a Sheffield mechanic, was mending the handle of a knife made of copper and silver. He saw these metals fuse together and the idea of silver plating was bom in his mind. He laid a thin plate of silver on a heavier one of copper and heated them till the edge of the silver began to melt. He took them from the fire, let them cool slightly, then rolled and hammered them to the desired thickness. This was the origin of “Sheffield plate,” all of which was made in this way until electroplating was invented. Cornelius Dubbel left a bottle of aqua regia (a mixture of nitric and muriatic acids) on a shelf. It felf over; the acid ran down over a win dow and dropped into a bottle containing an extract of cochineal. This turned to a vivid scarlet. Dubbel found that the acid had dissolved some of the tin of the window casing and the combination had produced a new color. A few experiments added the most brilliant color to the list of dyes.