serendipity

Serendipity is one of the few English words whose birth can be dated to a single day. Horace Walpole, the writer and son of the British prime minister Robert Walpole, coined it in a letter to his friend Horace Mann on 28 January 1754. Walpole had just made a lucky discovery about a coat of arms linked to a portrait he owned, and he compared it to a ‘silly fairy tale’ called The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.’ Serendip, or Sarandib, was an old Persian and Arabic name for Sri Lanka.

The tale reached European readers through an Italian version published in Venice in 1557 by Michele Tramezzino, later translated into French and English. In its best-known episode the three princes describe a camel they have never seen. From tracks and grazed grass they deduce that the animal is lame, blind in one eye and missing a tooth. Voltaire adapted a similar scene, with a dog and a horse, in Zadig (1747), and the method of reasoning from small clues later became a staple of detective fiction.

For nearly two centuries the word stayed rare, used mostly by collectors and men of letters. It spread in the twentieth century, largely through science. The American sociologist Robert K. Merton used serendipity for the unexpected, anomalous finding that pushes a researcher toward a new theory. With Elinor Barber he wrote a detailed history of the word, finished in 1958 but published only in 2004 as The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.

Histories of science are full of examples. Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895 while experimenting with cathode-ray tubes. Alexander Fleming noticed in 1928 that a mold had killed bacteria on a culture plate, a clue that led to penicillin. The engineer Percy Spencer is credited with realizing in 1945 that microwaves from radar equipment had melted a candy bar in his pocket, an observation that led to the microwave oven. In each case the accident mattered only because someone understood what it meant. Louis Pasteur made the point in an 1854 lecture: in the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind. Walpole’s phrase ‘accidents and sagacity’ says the same thing. Serendipity is not pure luck.

Today the word is used well beyond the laboratory, for chance meetings, unplanned travel finds and happy coincidences of every kind. It gave its title to the 2001 romantic comedy Serendipity and regularly appears in lists of favorite English words. Librarians, urban planners and software designers also talk about creating serendipity: open shelves, busy public squares and recommendation feeds are all attempts to help people stumble on useful things they did not know to search for.