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Show Accidents That Have Made Big Industries "r A piece of cheese tossed by one workman at another during the luncheon hour missed Its mark and dropped Into the plating bath used in the production of copper disks from which wax phonograph records were stamped. Later the disks from that bath were found to be far superior to the others, and an Investigation revealed re-vealed that the casein In the cheese had done the trick. This disclosed a possible improvement worth thousands .of dollars to the manufacturer. Telephone Tele-phone engineers discovered that an alloy of nickel and Iron, when produced pro-duced in the form of a narrow ribbon and wound around the copper core of a submarine cable, would Increase the speed of the cable six times. The only trouble was that no one seemed able to find a flux that would weld the ends of the ribbon into a solid piece. One day a workman Jokingly said: "Let's try salt." Picking up the shaker from his luncheon ' pall, he started to sprinkle the salt over the flux, wheu the cover fell off the shaker and the C salt poured over the weld. This started start-ed a chemical action that united the edges, and the problem was solved. A scientist in France, while experimenting experiment-ing In his laboratory. Inadvertently opened the wrong valve. Before he could rectify bis nuistakc several drops of moisture settled In a glass tube that was part of the apparatus. His elation ela-tion knew no bounds, for here at last I was the end of the long search for liquid oxygen. Again an accident created cre-ated an Industry and gave us an explosive explo-sive far safer and mightier than dynamite. dyna-mite. Floyd W. Parsons In the Saturday Satur-day Evening Post. |