Science by Accident

The word "serendipity" was coined and first used by Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford and English writer, connoisseur, and collector, who is best remembered today as perhaps the most prolific letter writer in the English language. In a letter dated Jan. 28, 1754, to Horace Mann (an Englishman residing in Florence, Italy, not the American educator) Walpole wrote: "This discovery indeed is almost of that kind which I call serendipity , a very expressive word, which as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip : as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the ...