Serendipity

On 28 January 1754, Horace Walpole sat down to write to his old friend Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence, and — almost in passing, to describe a small fortunate discovery of his own — invented a word. He had been reading a silly fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” He named this serendipity, and called it “a very expressive word.”

Then he essentially never used it again. It lay nearly dormant for a century and a half. The word that now names the luckiest thing that can happen to a person was, for 150 years, one of the least lucky words in English — coined, admired by its own author, and abandoned in a private letter.

The Fleming story is usually told as one accident: a mould blew in, killed some bacteria, and modern medicine was born. It took at least three.

A Penicillium spore — rare, and probably drifted up the stairwell from a mycology lab on the floor below — landed on a single plate of staphylococcus at St Mary’s, London. Fleming then left the plate out and went on a summer holiday in 1928. The city’s weather supplied the last accident: a cool spell let the mould establish first, then a warm spell let the bacteria grow up to the mould’s chemical moat and die against it, leaving a visible clear ring. Change any one of the three — the spore, the holiday, the weather — and there is no halo to see. We remember it as one accident. It took three of them, stacked in the right order, to leave a mark a human could read.

Penzias and Wilson were trying to do careful radio astronomy, and an antenna that hissed at them from the entire sky was, to them, a defect to be eliminated. They checked the wiring, the joints, the city of New York. They found two pigeons roosting in the horn and a coating of what Penzias drily termed “a white dielectric material,” and they cleaned all of it out. The hiss did not move. Only when they spoke to the Princeton physicists who had been predicting exactly such a signal did the noise turn into the oldest light in existence — the cooled radiation left over from the universe’s first few hundred thousand years. They won the discovery because they would not accept that a sound they couldn’t explain was nothing.

You cannot order people to have a lucky encounter. You can only build the hallway where one might happen. Bell Labs ran absurdly long corridors so that walking anywhere meant passing a dozen other disciplines’ doors. When Steve Jobs designed Pixar’s headquarters, he put the mailboxes, the café, the screening rooms, and — over loud objections — the only bathrooms in a single central atrium, so that all thousand employees would be forced to cross paths every day. He had reasoned that when people physically run into one another, things happen. Serendipity, it turns out, is partly a plumbing decision: you cannot will the spark, but you can build the room where the collision occurs.

A word coined once in a private letter and left for dead a hundred and fifty years; the forgotten name of an island carrying the whole weight of luck; three accidents stacked just so to leave a ring on a Petri dish; a hiss that survived the scrubbing of the pigeon dung and turned out to be the first light in the universe; a heart drug saved by its own side effect; a glue that waited six years for the annoyance that would need it; a book about chance delayed by chance for forty-six; a third of a second of gamma in the right temporal lobe; a camel deduced from ant-trails that became, by other roads, the logic of paleontology and the method of Holmes; feathers that kept a dinosaur warm before they ever caught the air; an atrium designed so that strangers would have to meet at the bathroom door. None of it was luck alone. Each was an accident — common, cheap, discarded a thousand times by people who saw the same thing — met by the rarer event: a mind, or a selection pressure, or a metric straining to be one, that declined to call the anomaly nothing. Walpole’s word kept the accident and shed the sagacity. The discoveries kept the sagacity and forgot to mention the accident. They were always the same two events, and the second one was you.