Paul on Nostr: Many inventions are made through observation of something unexpected happening. ...
Many inventions are made through observation of something unexpected happening.
Example : bioelectricity
Galvani was an Italian doctor.
One day he noticed that some frogs' legs he'd hung in a row on his balustrade, pending his dinner, twitched whenever the breeze blew them against the ironwork. At about the same time his wife Lucia noticed in his laboratory that the muscles of a frog's leg contracted when an assistant happened to be touching the main nerve with a steel scalpel at the same instant that a spark leaped from one of the electrical machines being operated across the room. (The only type of electricity then known was the static type, in the form of sparks from various friction devices.) Today we know that an expanding and collapsing electric field generated by the spark induced a momentary current in the scalpel, which stimulated the muscle.
Example : bioelectricity
Galvani was an Italian doctor.
One day he noticed that some frogs' legs he'd hung in a row on his balustrade, pending his dinner, twitched whenever the breeze blew them against the ironwork. At about the same time his wife Lucia noticed in his laboratory that the muscles of a frog's leg contracted when an assistant happened to be touching the main nerve with a steel scalpel at the same instant that a spark leaped from one of the electrical machines being operated across the room. (The only type of electricity then known was the static type, in the form of sparks from various friction devices.) Today we know that an expanding and collapsing electric field generated by the spark induced a momentary current in the scalpel, which stimulated the muscle.