Goodyear got there first but failed to patent his idea and Hancock beat him to the paperwork by just eight weeks. At the same time, Thomas Hancock was developing similar processes in the UK.
In the 1840s, the American inventor came up with the idea of vulcanising rubber (adding sulphur to rubber to make a more stable product). Take the tragic tale of Charles Goodyear and the elastic band. As many a hapless victim of the Dragons' Den knows, a head for business helps. It's about having a ready mind."Ī ready mind is not always enough. "It's not quite the anti-matter of thinking but it's flipping it on its head. "It's a classic case of turning adversity into an advantage, working out how can you use something differently," says Mossman. When an experiment yielded a super-weak adhesive by mistake, his colleague, Arthur Fry, sick of his markers falling out of his hymnbook during choir practice, spotted its potential and used the discarded batch to create a temporary page-marker. The Post-it Note came out of Spencer Silver's failed attempts to create a super-strong adhesive. And yet somebody had to think them up."Īs with bubblewrap, a false start is often the first step on the way to enduring genius. "We don't even think about these objects, because we use them every day. "It's a celebration of the really mundane," says Dr Susan Mossman, a specialist in material sciences at the Museum. Price and other details may vary based on product size and color. The packing material is one of 36 household objects about to go on show at the Science Museum in London in a new exhibition which gives star billing to the "hidden heroes" of daily life, from egg boxes to umbrellas, ring binders to rawl plugs. 1-48 of over 6,000 results for 'plaster adhesive' Results. The experience gave him the idea of using air sealed in plastic for packaging instead. Sitting on a flight one day, Chavannes noticed that the clouds seemed to be cushioning his plane as it descended for landing.
In the late 1950s, the pair were working on a new kind of textured wallpaper, fiddling around trapping air bubbles between shower curtains to little avail or commercial impact. At least, it helped Al Fielding and Marc Chavannes. A head in the clouds – that's what you need to be an inventor.
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