Serendipity

Serendipity is when one finds something that one was not expecting to find. The word has been voted as one of the ten English words that were hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. However, the word has been exported into many other languages.

Stories of accidental discovery in exploration abound, of course, because the aim of exploration is to find new things and places. The principle of serendipity applies when the explorer had one aim in mind and found something else unexpectedly. Discoveries have been made by people simply attempting to reach a known destination but who departed from the customary or intended route for a variety of reasons. Some classical cases were discoveries of the Americas by explorers with other aims.

• The first European to see the coast of North America was reputedly Bjarni Herjólfsson, who was blown off course by a storm in 985 or 986 while trying to reach Greenland.
• Christopher Columbus was looking for a new way to India in 1492 and wound up landing in the Americas. Native Americans were therefore called Indians.
• Although the first European to see and step on South America was Christopher Columbus in Northeast Venezuela in 1498, Brazil was also discovered by accident, first by Spaniard Vicente Pinzon in 1499, who was only trying to explore the West Indies previously discovered by him and Columbus, and stumbled upon the Northeast of Brazil, in the region now known as Cabo de Santo Agostinho, in the state of Pernambuco. He also discovered the Amazon and Oiapoque rivers.
• Pedro Álvares Cabral, a Portuguese admiral, who was sailing with his fleet to India via the South African route discovered by Vasco da Gama, headed southwest to avoid the calms off the coast of the Gulf of Guinea, and so encountered the coast of Brazil in 1500.

Other serendipitous events -

• Corn flakes and wheat flakes (Wheaties) were accidentally discovered by the Kelloggs brothers in 1898, when they left cooked wheat unattended for a day and tried to roll the mass, obtaining a flaky material instead of a sheet.
• The microwave oven was invented by Percy Spencer while testing a magnetron for radar sets at Raytheon, he noticed that a peanut candy bar in his pocket had melted when exposed to radar waves.
• Chocolate chip cookies were invented by Ruth Wakefield when she attempted to make chocolate drop cookies. She did not have the required chocolate so she broke up a candy bar and placed the chunks into the cookie mix. These chunks later morphed into what is now known as chocolate chip cookies.