Word: perkin
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...PURPLE PROSE William Perkin, who "Invented a Color that Changed the World" with his accidental creation of synthetic dye, revolutionized organic chemistry--and fashion. Queen Victoria wore mauve to her daughter's wedding in 1858; London erupted soon after with "mauve measles...
There should be no such surprise, given the way innovation emerges--the way it has always emerged. In the history of scientific and technological endeavor, there are few if any cases in which the end was exactly what was intended at the beginning. In the mid-19th century, William Perkin sought a way to make artificial quinine out of coal tar and ended up with the first aniline dye. Alexander Graham Bell thought the telephone would be used only to inform people of the arrival of telegrams. Alessandro Volta designed a eudiometer for exploding bad-smelling gases with electricity...
...serious funding requests each month. And that doesn't count the perpetual-motion machines and colonic-cleansing devices with which promoters could save the world if only Bill and Melinda would throw a few million dollars their way. Worthy projects are filtered up by Stonesifer, Dr. Gordon Perkin and Bill's dad for review by Bill and Melinda...
Even though TIGR was spewing out gene sequences at unprecedented rates, Venter was still restless. Then Hunkapiller called from his office at Perkin-Elmer to say that he had a new, faster machine he wanted Venter to see. What Venter saw was the future: a gene-mapping computer 50 times as fast as anything running at TIGR. With one of these machines, the 1,000 scientists who had spent 10 years decoding a yeast genome could have completed their work in one day. Emboldened by the new technology, Venter announced his plans to sequence the human genome rapidly. He founded...
...calculate the apparent distortion of Hubble's mirror. Their work was confirmed by the "fossil record" team, which went back to the source of the flawed mirror, a Connecticut plant now owned by Hughes Danbury Optical Systems. (At the time of the manufacturing mistake, the facility was part of Perkin-Elmer Corp.) Like archaeologists looking for the missing link, the optical sleuths pored over the blueprints and tools used to make the mirror. Eventually, they zeroed in on a complex device called an interferometer, which was used to measure the curve of the mirror's surface. They found that...