Louis Pasteur once said, "chance
favors the prepared mind." That's the genius behind all these accidental
inventions - the scientists were prepared. They did their science on
the brink and were able to see the magic in a mistake, set-back, or
coincidence.
No. 10 - Saccharin
Saccharin, the sweetener in the pink
packet, was discovered because chemist Constantin Fahlberg didn't wash
his hands after a day at the office. Prepare to get icked. The year was
1879 and Fahlberg was trying to come up with new and interesting uses
for coal tar. After a productive day at the office, he went home and
something strange happened. He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted
particularly sweet. He asked his wife if she had done anything
interesting to the rolls, but she hadn't. They tasted normal to her.
Fahlberg realized the taste must have been coming from his hands --
which he hadn't washed. The next day he went back to the lab and started
tasting his work until he found the sweet spot.
No. 9 - Smart Dust
Most people would be pretty upset if
their homework blew up in their faces and crumbled into a bunch of tiny
pieces. Not so student Jamie Link. When Link was doing her doctoral work
in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, one of the
silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward,
however, that the tiny pieces still functioned as sensors. The resulting
"smart dust" won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors
Competition in 2003. These teensy sensors can also be used to monitor
the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical or
biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumor cells
in the body.
No. 8 - Coke
There are many stories of
accidentally invented food: the potato chip was born when cook George
Crum (yes, really his name!) tried to silence a persnickety customer who
kept sending french fries back to the kitchen for being soggy;
Popsicles were invented when Frank Epperson left a drink outside in the
cold overnight; and ice cream cones were invented at the 1904 World's
Fair in St. Louis. But no food-vention has had as much success as Coke.
Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton was trying to make a cure for
headaches. He mixed together a bunch of ingredients -- and don't ask,
because we don't know; The recipe is still a closely guarded secret. It
only took eight years of being sold in a drug store before the drink was
popular enough to be sold in bottles.
No. 7- Teflon
After
all the damage they've done to the ozone layer, chlorofluorocarbons, or
CFCs, are persona non grata. Back in the 1930s, however, they were
(pardon the pun) the hot new thing in the science of refrigeration.
Young DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was working to make a new a new kind
of CFC. He had a theory that if he could get a compound called TFE to
react with hydrochloric acid, he could produce the refrigerant he
wanted. So, to start his experiment Plunkett got a whole bunch of TFE
gas, cooled it and pressured it in canisters so it could be stored until
he was ready to use it. When the time came to open the container and
put the TFE and hydrochloric acid together so they could react, nothing
came out of the canister. The gas had disappeared. Only it hadn't.
Frustrated and angry, Plunkett took off the top of the canister and
shook it. Out came some fine white flakes. Luckily for everyone who's
ever made an omelet, he was intrigued by the flakes and handed them off
to other scientists at DuPont.
No. 6 - Vulcanized Rubber
Charles Goodyear had been
waiting years for a happy accident when it finally occurred. Goodyear
spent a decade finding ways to make rubber easier to work with while
being resistant to heat and cold. Nothing was having the effect he
wanted. One day he spilled a mixture of rubber, sulfur and lead onto a
hot stove. The heat charred the mixture, but didn't ruin it. When
Goodyear picked up the accident, he noticed that the mixture had
hardened but was still quite usable. At last! The breakthrough he had
been waiting for! His vulcanized rubber is used in everything from
tires, to shoes, to hockey pucks.
No. 5 - Plastic
In
1907 shellac was used as insulation in electronics. It was costing the
industry a pretty penny to import shellac, which was made from Southeast
Asian beetles, and at home chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland thought he
might turn a profit if he could produce a shellac alternative. Instead
his experiments yielded a moldable material that could take high
temperatures without distorting. Baekeland thought his "Bakelite" might
be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear that the product
had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived from Bakelite,
is used for everything from telephones to iconic movie punch lines.
No. 4 - Radioactivity
Two words that you don't ever want to
hear said in the same sentence are "Whoops!" and "radioactive." But in
the case of physicist Henri Becquerel's surprise discovery, it was an
accident that brought radioactivity to light. Back in 1896 Becquerel was
fascinated by two things: natural fluorescence and the newfangled
X-ray. He ran a series of experiments to see if naturally fluorescent
minerals produced X-rays after they had been left out in the sun. One
problem - he was doing these experiments in the winter, and there was
one week with a long stretch of overcast skies. He left his equipment
wrapped up together in a drawer and waited for a sunny day. When he got
back to work, Becquerel realized that the uranium rock he had left in
the drawer had imprinted itself on a photographic plate without being
exposed to sunlight first. There was something very special about that
rock. Working with Marie and Pierre Curie, he discovered that that
something was radioactivity.
No. 3 - Mauve
Talk about strange
connections - 18-year-old chemist William Perkin wanted to cure malaria;
instead his scientific endeavors changed the face of fashion forever
and, oh yeah, helped fight cancer. Confused? Don't be. Here's how it
happened. In 1856 Perkin was trying to come up with an artificial
quinine. Instead of a malaria treatment, his experiments produced a
thick murky mess. But the more he looked at it, the more Perkin saw a
beautiful color in his mess. Turns out he had made the first-ever
synthetic dye. His dye was far better than any dyes that came from
nature; the color was brighter, more vibrant, and didn't fade or wash
out. His discovery also turned chemistry into a money-generating science
- making it attractive for a whole generation of curious-minded people.
But the story is not over yet. One of the people inspired by Perkin's
work was German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich, who used Perkin's dyes to
pioneer immunology and chemotherapy.
No. 2 - Pacemaker
This list wouldn't be
complete without at least one absent-minded professor. But it's not
flubber clocking in at No. 2, it's a life saving medical device. That
pacemaker sewn into a loved one's chest actually came about because
American engineer Wilson Greatbatch reached into a box and pulled out
the wrong thing. It's true. Greatbatch was working on making a circuit
to help record fast heart sounds. He reached into a box for a resistor
in order to finish the circuit and pulled out a 1-megaohm resistor
instead of a 10,000-ohm one. The circuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and
then stopped for one second. Then it repeated. The sound was as old as
man: a perfect heartbeat.
No. 1 - Penicillin
You
read this far into the list looking for penicillin, didn't you? That's
OK. As one of the most famous and fortunate accidents of the 20th
century, penicillin belongs at No. 1 on this list. If you've been living
under a rock for the past 80 years or so, here's how the popular story
goes: Alexander Fleming didn't clean up his workstation before going on
vacation one day in 1928. When he came back, Fleming noticed that there
was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. Even stranger was that
bacteria didn't seem to thrive near those cultures. Penicillin became
the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics.
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