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Source: The Unexpected 43

years there were no results at all. Then, in 1928, an assistant left a
burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H.
Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had
congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found
out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, how-
ever, that the same accident had occurred several times in the labora-
tories of the big German chemical companies with the same results,
and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a poly-
merized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leader-
ship in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon. But
because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its
results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all
over again.
The history of IBM equally shows what paying attention to the
unexpected success can do. For IBM is largely the result of the will-
ingness to exploit the unexpected success not once, but twice. In the
early 1930s, IBM almost went under. It had spent its available money
on designing the first electro-mechanical bookkeeping machine,
meant for banks. But American banks did not buy new equipment in
the Depression days of the early thirties. IBM even then had a policy
of not laying off people, so it continued to manufacture the machines,
which it had to put in storage.
When IBM was at its lowest point—so the story goes—Thomas
Watson, Sr., the founder, found himself at a dinner party sitting next
to a lady. When she heard his name, she said: “Are you the Mr.
Watson of IBM? Why does your sales manager refuse to demonstrate
your machine to me?” What a lady would want with an accounting
machine Thomas Watson could not possibly figure out, nor did it help
him much when she told him she was the director of the New York
Public Library; it turned out he had never been in a public library. But
next morning, he appeared there as soon as its doors opened.
In those days, libraries had fair amounts of government money.
Watson walked out two hours later with enough of an order to cover
next month’s payroll. And, as he added with a chuckle whenever he
told the story, “I invented a new policy on the spot: we get cash in
advance before we deliver.”
Fifteen years later, IBM had one of the early computers. Like the
other early American computers, the IBM computer was designed for
scientific purposes only. Indeed, IBM got into computer work large-
ly because of Watson’s interest in astronomy. And when first demon-