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Competition No 3725

Chance discoveries in history.

Report by Ms de Meaner

I was sorry to lose Will Bellenger (blue tack), but he can have an hon mensh to heal his wounds. The winners are awarded £20. The overall kingpin is R Ewing, who also gets the vouchers.

Splennick's career was highlighted by two instances of inventive serendipity. Two years after inventing the lava lamp, while working on a new kind of laminar flow chamber, he was involved in a project to design a semi-organic chemically self-unfurling life-raft. A block of polymerised camel dung, treated with polychlorinated biphenyls, would expand on immersion in water into a much larger, light, rigid structure. The prototype was only partially successful; it expanded, stayed rigid and floated, but with insufficient buoyancy to support any shipwrecked survivors, or even the couple of half-starved post-doctoral research assistants used in the experiment. It was at this point that a colleague from the Department of Food Technology walked in, wanting to borrow a packet of dried soup for lunch. Splennick's brilliant mind made a conceptual leap. A second expanding life-raft stood ready for testing. This was chopped into thousands of tiny pieces, using only an office document shredder, and history was made: instant soup with croutons.

Andrew Wilcox

Much is made of Jiang Zemin, president of China, but little is spoken nowadays of his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Jiang Exiang, discoverer of monosodium glutamate. We forget that, until the 1870s, much of what's now enjoyed as Chinese food was incredibly bland. Sociologists attribute the great Chinese exodus of the 19th century to a search for a palatable cuisine. Colonel Jiang, a socio-culinary chemist in the Imperial Army, applied his skills to remedy the problem. He met with repeated failure, developing the unsatisfactory tri-sodium glutamate and quadro-sodium glutamate. By 1869, he was ready to quit, having had some success with di-sodium glutamate. Colonel Jiang was frying breaded chicken in his laboratory one day, expecting another tasteless repast, when his elbow brushed a small vial of sodium into a bucket of waste glutamate. The bucket also spilled and some of the mixture sprinkled into his chicken batter. "Couldn't get worse," he thought, dipped in some chicken, and fried it. He nibbled the piece and was astounded by the flavour. Monosodium glutamate was born! Credit was denied Colonel Jiang when his commanding officer, one General Tsao, took credit for the discovery.The present-day President Jiang attributes to this slight the Jiang family's decision to join the Communist Party.

Bruce W Alter

The small porch of a run-down two-bit shack on the outskirts of Greenville, Mississippi, may seem an unlikely setting for a world-changing event, but that was the place, on 23 June 1894, where former plantation worker Clarence "Bucktooth" Hopkins quite literally stumbled upon the blues. Hopkins's momentous discovery came at the end of a disastrous week, which had begun with the loss of his job, the first in a series of many personal setbacks. Sent home with no pay in the pouring rain, he was distraught to find his woman doing him wrong with the Hoochie Coochie man from the other side of the tracks. And if Monday was stormy, Tuesday was just as bad. Hopkins's baby upped and left, claiming that his mojo didn't work on her. Wherever he went, bad luck followed. Finally, while searching for the shirt off his back, which he'd lost, Hopkins tripped over his no-good lazy dog and saw, to his great sorrow, that it was in fact dead. Consumed with anguish, he suddenly felt the urge to get his old guitar, Gertrude, and sing of his life's woes while playing a repeating chord progression in a 12-bar pattern. The rest is history.

R Ewing

The chance discovery of apple crumble

As Eve walked in the garden, an object fell from a tree. She found this vaguely interesting - why had it not hung in the air, or shot upwards? She shrugged, tossing it into a pond. She noted that, interestingly, the water level rose in direct proportion to the mass of the object. Again, Eve thought nothing of it, amused more by the parabola through which the object had passed. When two forces work on a body simultaneously, she mused, it will move in an elliptical trajectory - remarkably similar, she noted, to the paths of the nine planets she had so far spotted. She fished it out and, as Adam approached, quickly deleted her calculations on the improvised laptop. "Bloody hell, rib-face, what you got there? I've been looking everywhere for one of those." And with that, Adam snatched the near-spherical object, sliced and stirred it in with margarine, wholemeal flour, nuts, cloves and cinnamon, stuck it in the oven for 40 minutes, then handed the steaming dish to Eve, with a roller. "Voila!" he proclaimed, with undiluted antediluvian hubris. "Let's start with the ceiling, and don't drip any on that nice new fig leaf. Remember we're going out tonight."

David Silverman

No 3728 Set by Gavin Ross

A radio reporter referred to the Queen Mother's funeral arrangements as "The Long Goodbye" (although he failed to mention "The Big Sleep", or to say "Farewell My Lovely"). To mark the passing of this much-loved lady, we want to know how Chandler might have described the royal occasion.

Max 200 words by 4 May
(to appear in our issue dated 13 May)
E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk