#28 – On Serendipity

A fascinating book on the history of "serendipity"

What are the stories behind a single word?

That is a question I like to think of often, and I recently picked up a book with the intriguing title of “The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity.”

The jacket copy reads:

“From the names of cruise lines and bookstores to an Australian ranch and a nudist camp outside of Atlanta, the word serendipity—that happy blend of wisdom and luck by which something is discovered not quite by accident—is today ubiquitous. This book traces the word’s eventful history from its 1754 coinage into the twentieth century—chronicling along the way much of what we now call the natural and social sciences.”

The book maps where serendipity went, with whom it lived and how it fared.

Upon encountering this book, my desire to read it was immediate.

Right now, I am only a few dozen pages in, and I find it both illuminating and idiosyncratic. I learned that the word serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole, an English writer and politician who lived in the 18^th century. In his letter to his friend and distant cousin Horace Mann, Walpole wrote that he had nothing better to tell him except that he had read a ‘silly fairy tale’ called “The Three Princes of Serendip” and inspired by the adventures in it, he coined the word serendipity.

As the authors note, Walpole’s attitude towards it was “half-pleased, half-mocking and deprecatory.” But little did he know that he had set loose a word that would have such a life of its own! The word would go on to travel far and wide: from describing how penicillin was invented to being used in a job description in the US Navy (there is a person whose job is to “manage serendipity”).

While the adventures of serendipity are numerous, the book itself also has a compelling story of its own. Since being completed by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber in English in 1958, the manuscript proved recalcitrant to come into the public view. After more than four decades of being unpublished, the book finally made its first appearance in Italian in 2002. The edition of the book I am now holding was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, and it marks its first appearance in English. The publisher, Peter Dougherty, states in his note that the main text goes back untouched to its original form as written by the authors.

In this way, this book feels like a special time capsule, a capturing of the history of serendipity from the point of view of the 20^th century. By the time the book was finally published in English, both authors, Merton and Barber, had passed away (but Merton learned that it would be published prior to his death).

I am encountering this book more than six decades after it was completed, and it feels like a revelation and reassurance — that although the authors have passed on, the gift of their vast curiosity and scholarship keeps on giving. I am delighted that Merton and Barber not only learned this word’s tremendous history but that they also took the time to write a book about it. In the Afterword for the 2004 edition, which Merton penned before his death, he notes, “It is not what I would write now. But it is where the word was then and can never be again.”

Reference:

Merton, R. K., & Barber, E. (2004). The travels and adventures of serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science. Princeton University Press.

PS: I am loving this book cover, and I'm excited to read more. Let me know if you have any book recommendations for the fall!

“The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity” by Robert Merton and Elinor Barber.