January 28 in History
1754 – Sir Horace Walpole coins the word serendipity in a letter to a friend
The first noted use of ‘serendipity’ (an unplanned fortunate discovery) was made by Horace Walpole on this day in 1754. In a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a lost painting of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.” The name comes from Serendip, an old Persian name for Sri Lanka (Ceylon), hence Sarandib by Arab traders. It is derived from the Sanskrit Siṃhaladvīpaḥ (Siṃhalaḥ, Sinhalese + dvīpaḥ, island).
The word has been exported into many other languages, with the general meaning of ‘unexpected discovery’ or ‘fortunate chance’.
The term ‘serendipity’” is often applied to inventions made by chance rather than intent. Andrew Smith, editor of The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, has speculated that most every day products had serendipitous roots, with many early ones related to animals. The origin of cheese, for example, possibly originated in the nomad practice of storing milk in the stomach of a dead camel that was attached to the saddle of a live one, thereby mixing rennet from the stomach with the milk stored within
-Wikipedia
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