Something to think about

The Nature of Science section for this sub-topic uses Reinitzer’s discovery of liquid crystals as an example of serendipity. In 1888 Reinitzer synthesised a new compound - cholesteryl benzoate.

cholesteryl benzoate (Image from Wikimedia commons)

In order to show that it was pure he needed to determine the melting point and was surprised to find that it appeared to have two different melting points. At 145.5 ^oC the white solid crystals melted into a cloudy liquid, which remained stable when heated further until178.5 ^oC. At this point the cloudiness disappeared to form a clear transparent liquid.

In fact it was one of his colleagues, Otto Lehmann, who realised that whilst the clear liquid had the isotopic properties and the disordered state of all liquids the cloudy liquid was a new state of matter intermediate between a solid and a liquid. He coined the label ‘liquid crystal’ to describe this new state of matter in which the properties depend upon direction even though the state is liquid.

As is sometimes the case with serendipitous discoveries it was initially seen as an interesting but not particularly useful fact and no real advances in the chemistry of liquid crystals was made until about 80 years later. The first commercial use of liquid crystal displays was not until the 1960s where they became incorporated into Swiss watches. Since then they have almost become ubiquitous and have made cathode rays tubes (which originally produced the pictures in televisions) virtually obsolete.