Nobody Ordered This

A ruined batch usually gets thrown away. An unexpected reading gets recorded as an error. This book follows the people who stopped to ask why an experiment had gone wrong, and found something useful in the result.

The stories focus on the people behind the inventions. One man was left with gray rock nobody would buy; a furnace ran three hundred degrees too hot. A chemist had not washed his hands, and an engineer pulled the wrong part from a box. None set out to make a discovery, but each paid attention to what had happened.

Their discoveries are now familiar objects in kitchens, medicine cabinets and pockets. The chapters draw on laboratory notebooks and patents, court filings, company archives and newspapers from the time. Where the familiar story is a legend, the book explains what the records show instead.