Member-only story
My Story Came In 4th In A Global Competition
I was very surprised. Maybe I can write.
Some of the world’s greatest products and discoveries were stumbled upon by accident. A few inventions are the opposite of what the inventor first had in mind. Some discoveries, such as the law of gravity, came about through happenstance.
1. Dreaming Up a Big Idea
The 19th-century German scientist August Kekule is regarded to this day as one of the principal founders of modern organic chemistry and a leader in his day of innovation in the chemical industry.
No 19th-century discovery is more famous than Kekule’s dream-state vision of the makeup of the benzene atom. It came to him in a dream while dozing in front of a fire in his home during the winter of 1861–62 in Ghent, Belgium, where he worked as a professor of chemistry at the Ghent University.
He asserted the vision in the dream revealed the atomic structure of the benzene ring. The dream was in the form of a self-devouring snake Kekule said. In 1865 he reported his discovery as the basis for another major group of carbon molecules that allowed carbon to bond in many different ways and with many different elements.
Of all the cases referred to by psychiatrists, psychologists and historians of science to shed light on the role of symbolism in…
