Source of bright ideas

Many great inventions happened more by chance than by science, writes Brian Boyd

If you asked most people when they thought the first fax was sent, you would think the answers would range from the 1970s onward. Remarkably though, the first fax was sent in 1843 by a Scottish inventor called Alexander Bain. His unwieldy fax machine consisted of two pens connected to two pendulums that were joined by a wire. A scanning detector sent out electrical signals of differing strengths, depending on whether it was passing over the black areas of an image or the white ones.

The story behind the discovery of the fax machine and more than 400 other well-known items are contained in a new book, The Origin of Everyday Things. What the book shows is that the history of invention is governed as much by chance as by scientific inquiry. The catalyst for the microwave, for example, was a chocolate bar melting in a scientist's pocket. Also here are the stories behind all form of modern phenomena, sayings, stories and superstitions. For instance, you may believe that Sudoku was devised in Japan, but it was fact invented by an American architect.

The book's author, Johnny Acton, explains in the introduction that "the best tales are told by the things that we take most for granted". Included in the book are the background histories to the inventions of:

The fire alarm The most important component in the first fire alarm, patented in 1902, was butter. The inventor, George Darby, sandwiched a block of butter between two metal plates so that in the event of the temperature rising to a dangerous level, the butter would melt, causing the top plate to fall onto the lower one. This would complete an electrical circuit triggering a siren.

The shopping mall The first shopping mall was the Stoa of Attalos - a two-storey colonnaded building built in the Athens marketplace in the second century BC which contained 42 shops and businesses.

The microwave While working on a piece of radar equipment called a magnetron in the 1940s, scientist Percy LeBaron Spencer noticed how the chocolate bar in his pocket had started to melt. He deduced this was because of the microwave radiation from the magnetron. Intrigued, he put a bag of corn kernels in front of the magnetron and found that they started to pop. The company he worked for, Raytheon, patented the process and manufactured the first commercial microwave oven in 1947. It was over six feet tall, weighed 750lb (340kg) and cost $5,000.

Bubble wrap The inventors of bubble wrap in the 1950s originally intended it to be an innovative type of textured wallpaper that would be easy to clean. It was soon found to be totally useless as wallpaper, but worked a treat as protective wrapping.

Spelling Bee Nothing to do with bees, unfortunately. The spelling contest is so known because the word "bee" is derived from "been", a variation of the old English word "boon", meaning the help given to farmers by their neighbours at harvest time. The word "bee" has since become known to refer to any communal gathering. The first winner of the American National Spelling Bee in 1925, Frank Neuhauser, triumphed by correctly spelling "gladiolus".

Velcro When the Swiss engineer George de Mestral was on a local hunting trip in 1948, he noticed how his trousers had become covered by loose seeds enclosed in furry husks. When he examined the husks under a microscope he found that they were covered in tiny hooks. The engineer spent years working on a synthetic version of the furry husks and eventually discovered that when nylon is sewn under infrared light, it develops into tough, hard-wearing hooks that can link up with hooks in a corresponding surface. Taking the "vel" from velvet and "cro" form crochet, de Mestral had a name for his new invention.

The Origin of Everyday Things by Johnny Acton is published by Think Books, £14.99 in UK