One day in 1903, French scientist Edouard Benedictus stood on a ladder in his lab. As he reached up to get something on a high shelf, his arm brushed an empty glass bottle and it dropped to the floor.
Benedictus climbed down, expecting a mess, but he found a surprise. The glass hadn't fragmented! It had broken into a spiderweb-like pattern, but it had held together. Benedictus wondered why.
Later he knew one of his students had used the bottle to hold liquid plastic during an experiment. Later the liquid plastic dried itself. The student thought the bottle had been washed, so he put it back on the shelf. Benedicts realized the coating of dried plastic had kept the broken glass from falling apart.
The same week, a Paris newspaper printed an article about car accidents: The car was a new and exciting invention then, and more and more people were driving on the roads. Unluckily, there were no traffic lights or stop signs yet. In accidents, people were often hurt by flying broken glass when car windows broke.
After reading the article, the image of the broken glass bottle suddenly appeared before Benedictus's eyes. ▲ He jumped up and ran to his lab.
Benedictus spent the whole day experimenting. Over and over again, he coated glass with liquid plastic and broke it, trying to figure out the best way to make glass that wouldn't fragment. Finally, Benedictus put the liquid plastic between two pieces of glass and made them stick together. When he hit it, the glass-and-plastic sandwich broke, but not into pieces.
Benedictus had done it! That's how an unexpected meeting between an unwashed glass bottle and a careless scientist led to an invention that made us all safer.
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