The attention of Dr. Priestley, the discoverer of so many gases, was accidentally drawn to the subject of chemistry through his living in the neighborhood of a brewery. When visiting the place one day, he noted the peculiar appearances attending the extinction of lighted chips in the gas floating over the fermented liquor.

He was forty years old at the time, and knew nothing of chemistry. He consulted books to ascertain the cause, but they told him little, for as yet nothing was known on the subject. Then he began to experiment, with some rude apparatus of his own contrivance. The curious results of his first experiments led to others, which in his hands shortly became the science of pneumatic chemistry.

About the same time, Scheele was obscurely working in the same direction in a remote Swedish village; and he discovered several new gases, with no more effective apparatus at his command than a few apothecaries’ vials and pigs’ bladders.

Sir Humphry Davy, when an apothecary’s apprentice, performed his first experiments with instruments of the rudest description. He extemporized the greater part of them himself, out of the motley materials which chance threw in his way–to pots and pans of the kitchen, and the vials and vessels of his master’s surgery.

It happened that a French ship was wrecked off the Land’s End, and the surgeon escaped, bearing with him his case of instruments, amongst which was an old-fashioned clyster apparatus; this article he presented to Davy, with whom he had become acquainted.

The apothecary’s apprentice received it with great exultation, and forthwith employed it as a part of a pneumatic apparatus which he contrived, afterward using it to perform the duties of an air-pump in one of his experiments on the nature and sources of heat.

In like manner, professor Faraday, Sir Humphry Davy’s scientific successor, made his first experiments in electricity by means of an old bottle, while he was still a working bookbinder. And it is a curious fact, that Faraday was first attracted to the study of chemistry by hearing one of Sir Humphry Davy’s lectures on the subject at the Royal Institution.

A gentleman, who was a member, calling one day at the shop where Faraday was employed in binding books, found him pouring over the article “Electricity,” in an encyclopedia placed in his hands to bind. The gentleman, having made inquiries, found that the young bookbinder was curious about such subjects, and gave him an order of admission to the Royal Institution, where he attended a course of four lectures delivered by Sir Humphry. [Read more...]

A man may leap into sudden fortune at a bound, and without effort or foresight, but it is doubtful if any great permanent success ever was the outcome of blind chance.The old adage, “Trust to luck,” like many other adages that time has kept in unmerited circulation, is a bad one. The man who trusts to luck for his clothing is apt to wear rags, and he who depends on it for food is sure to go hungry.

We hear a great deal about the wonderful things that have been done by chance, but we seldom take the time to examine them. We read that sir Isaac Newton, sitting in his garden one day, “Chanced to see an apple fall to the ground,” and this set him to thinking, and he discovered the laws of gravitation. New, ever since the first apple fell from the first tree in Eden, men have been watching that very commonplace occurrence.

We might extend the field so as to embrace oranges, coconuts and all the fruits and nuts which, in every land and through all the long centuries of man’s existence, have been falling to the ground–not by chance, however, yet they set no men to thinking, simply because not one of the millions of men who “chanced” to see the incident, “chanced” to have the reasoning powers of the great English scientist.

If the apple, instead of falling to the ground, had shot up, without visible cause, to the sky, then the dullest observer would have wondered, even if he did not attempt to find an explanation. The falling of the apple in Newton’s garden was not a chance, but an ordinary incident, which was made much of in the mind of an extraordinary man.

Watt “chanced” to see the lid of the kettle in his mother’s kitchen lifted by the steam within, and this incident we are asked to believe was the origin of the engine invented by that great man. If no one else had ever witnessed a like phenomenon, then we might give some consideration to the element of chance. It was in the brain of Watt, and not in the lifting of the kettle lid, that the steam engine was born. There are no accidents in the progress of science.

In the same way, we are asked to believe that Galileo discovered the telescope, Whitney the cotton gin, and Howe the sewing machine. But there have been some curious cases of chance fortune. A man out hunting in California made a mis-step and was plunged into a deep gulch in the Sierra Nevada. His gun was broken and he was sorely bruised, but he was more that repaid for the accident by the discovery of a rich gold mine at the bottom.

What would you think of the man, who, because of this, should shoulder a gun and go into the mountains, hoping to be precipitated into a gulch full of gold. If he started out for this purpose, of course, the element of chance would be eliminated, and yet that man would show just as much good sense as do the thousands who go through life–trusting to luck, and hoping for a miracle that never comes. [Read more...]