Serendipity and A really good story

OK - nothing new to report, just a story I thought you'd enjoy.

I’ve just come across a word that I’ve always liked, but could never really, totally understand it’s meaning. I just liked the way it sounded, happy like. Well, the word is 'serendipity', which means the facility of making chance happy finds. Or to put it another way, accidental positive outcomes.

Martin Avis, of the Martin Avis Kick Start ezine, read about a great example of serendipity in New Scientist magazine …... and I thought I'd pass it along. Just good reading.

“During the second world war, government bureaucrats seconded dozens of mathematicians, code experts and engineers to work at the top secret Bletchley Park research establishment in England. Their job was to find a way to decipher the German Enigma codes - a task that was fantastically difficult.

“ One such scientist, a man called Geoffrey Tandy, was ordered to go to work among the high-powered coders and encrypters.

“Nothing strange there, except that Mr Tandy didn't know a code from a lump of coal. His scientific speciality was seaweed. The government functionary who had ordered him to Bletchley Park had confused the term 'cryptogram' - secret codes - with the term 'cryptogam' - an obscure term in the study of seaweed.

“Mr Tandy, no doubt, felt like a fish out of water.

“But our friend serendipity came to the rescue.

“One day some sodden notebooks arrived at Bletchley.
They were German code books that had been rescued from a sunken U-Boat. Reading the books was impossible because of their poor state of preservation, but Geoffrey Tandy had the answer. He knew exactly what to do - he treated the pages like fragile seaweed and knew exactly the right kinds of absorbent material to use to dry them out safely.

“A lot more work was needed to be done before the Enigma code could be deciphered, but without the happy accident that brought a seaweed expert into the company of code breakers, the process may never have even got started.”

Nutin' to sell this post - consider it serendipity ...................