Andy Warhol and Stephen Bruce at Serendipity 3, circa 1962. Credit: John Ardoin
The first noted use of "serendipity" in the English language was by Horace Walpole on 28 January 1754. In a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a lost painting of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip.
The princes, he told his correspondent, were "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of." The name comes from Serendip, an old name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon), hence Sarandib by Arab traders.
The word has been exported into many other languages, with the general meaning of “unexpected discovery” or “fortunate chance”.
The term "serendipity" is often applied to inventions made by chance rather than intent. As Christian Busch describes serendipity in his Psyche article How to be lucky;
Most of us think that luck just happens (or doesn’t) but everyone can learn to look for the unexpected and find serendipity.
Human beings find comfort in certainty. We form governments, make calendars, and create organizations; and we structure our activities, strategies, and plans around these constructs. These routines give us the satisfaction of knowing that, by having a plan, there’s a means of it coming to fruition.
But there’s another force, constantly at play in life, that often makes the greatest difference to our futures: the ‘unexpected’ or the “unforeseen”. If you think about it, you already look out for the unexpected every day, but perhaps only as a defense mechanism. For example, whenever you use a pedestrian crossing on a busy road, you look out for the unexpected driver who might race through the red light. That “alertness” to, or awareness of, the unexpected is at the center of understanding the science of (smart) luck and exploiting it to your benefit.
Andrew Smith, editor of TheOxford Companion to American Food and Drink, has speculated that most every day products had serendipitous roots, with many early ones related to animals. The origin of cheese, for example, possibly originated in the Nomad practice of storing milk in the stomach of a dead camel that was attached to the saddle of a live one, thereby mixing rennet from the stomach with the milk stored within.
Other examples of serendipity in inventions include:
🗒 The Post-It Note, which emerged after 3M scientist Spencer Silver produced a weak adhesive, and a colleague used it to keep bookmarks in place on a church hymnal.
👨🔬 Silly Putty, which came from a failed attempt at synthetic rubber.
🎩 The use of sensors to prevent automobile airbags from killing children, which came from a chair developed by the MIT Media Lab for a Penn and Teller magic show.
♨️ The microwave oven. Raytheon scientist Percy Spencer first patented the idea behind it after noticing that emissions from radar equipment had melted the candy in his pocket.
🔬 The Velcro hook-and-loop fastener. George de Mestral came up with the idea after a bird hunting trip when he viewed cockleburs stuck to his pants under a microscope and saw that each burr was covered with tiny hooks.
🍭 The Popsicle, whose origins go back to San Francisco where Frank Epperson, age 11, accidentally left a mix of water and soda powder outside to freeze overnight.
💉 The antibiotic penicillin, which was discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming after returning from a vacation to find that a Petri dish containing staphylococcus culture had been infected by a Penicillium mold, and no bacteria grew near it.
