A Lazy Hack Back in 1927
In 1927, my grandfather started his new job at Dupont on a Friday. His first assignment was to separate a chemical that was suspended in another chemical. He was handed a beaker of the stuff to work on.
Since it was late on a Friday afternoon, he did nothing with it, just stuck it on a shelf and went home. He came back Monday morning to discover that the chemical had precipitated out and was sitting on the bottom of the beaker.
He showed this to his new boss, who decided my grandfather was a genius. This process, doing nothing to the suspension, became the first of my grandfather’s 47 patents. Credit: Reddit/cormaline