Despite being the title of a frankly terrible film starring Kate Beckinsale (sorry Kate, I love you and your Instagram feed), serendipity is a lovely word. It’s a noun (i.e. a person, place or thing) used to describe unexpectedly finding something nice (or John Cusack) when you weren’t looking for it. Serendipity as a word hasn’t actually been around all that long – it was coined in the middle of the 18th century by English writer and politician Horace Walpole (1717–1797) – his most famous work is probably The Castle of Otranto, the OG Gothic novel. Walpole used ‘serendipity’ in a letter to another Horace (Mann) to describe an unexpected discovery he’d made of a lost painting. He took the word from a Persian fairy tale called ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ (Serendip is an ancient name for Sri Lanka). In the story, our three princes are sent on a journey by their father to get some wisdom and experience before they inherit his throne. Along the way they encounter various challenges, lots of which they overcome with a knack for making fortunate discoveries through chance occurrences – AKA serendipity.
There are lots of famous examples of serendipity throughout history, many of which have had a pretty major effect on us humans. Here are a few of them:
in 1928, Scottish biologist and pharmacologist Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin after noticing that a particular mould stopped the growth of bacteria in a petri dish – without that we wouldn’t have one of the world’s most widely used antibiotics
3M employee Spencer Silver tried to create a strong adhesive in 1968 but failed, ending up with a barely sticky one instead. A few years later, his colleague Arthur Fry used it to create Post-it Notes, now the bane of many an office worker’s life
in the 1930s, a chef called Ruth Wakefield was making chocolate cookies and ran out of baker’s chocolate. She added broken pieces of Nestle chocolate instead, thinking it would melt and spread. Instead, she created the world’s first chocolate chip cookies. Well done, Ruth
in 1945 an engineer called Percy Spencer was working on radar equipment when he noticed that the emissions from it melted a chocolate bar in his pocket. This discovery eventually led to the invention of the microwave oven
in the 90s, Pfizer developed a new medication for angina. But researchers noticed it had an unexpected side effect… erections! Men (and women) all over the world rejoiced as this serendipitous event led to Viagra.
There have been a couple of attempts to come up with an antonym (i.e. an opposite) for serendipity. A Scottish novelist called William Boyd coined the term ‘zemblanity’ in the late 20th century to mean ‘making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries occurring by design’. No one’s entirely sure what the etymology was, but it’s possibly from Nova Zembla, a corruption of ‘Novaya Zemlya’, a barren archipelago that was once the site of Russian nuclear testing. So that’s cheery. I should’ve stopped at Viagra.