Life is a series of learning and discovery. Every day, we discover new places or new methods of doing things. Some discoveries are intentional; others are by accident. In today’s article, we take a look at 10 Famous Discoveries by Accident.
1. Potato Chips
If you can’t put down a bag of potato chip after you’ve opened it, you can blame George Crum, the chef at Moon Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York.
He reportedly created the salty snack in 1853 when a customer complained that his fried potato was too thick and too soft. Crum sliced the potatoes as thin as possible, fried them in hot grease, then doused them with salt.
The customer loved them, and “Saratoga Chips” was born. Eventually, the chips were mass-produced for home consumption, but since they were stored in barrels or tins, they quickly went stale.
In the 1920s, Laura Scudder invented the airtight bag by ironing together two pieces of waxed paper, thus keeping the chips fresh longer.
2. Artificial Sweetener
Saccharin, the oldest artificial sweetener, was accidentally discovered in 1879 by Constantine Fahlberg, who was working at Johns Hopkins University in the laboratory of professor Ira Remsen.
Fahlberg’s discovery came after he forgot to wash his hands before lunch. He had spilled a chemical on his hands and it caused the bread that his wife had served to taste unusually sweet.
In 1880, the two scientists jointly published the discovery, but in 1884, Fahlberg obtained a patent and began mass-producing saccharin without Remsen. The use of saccharin did not become widespread until sugar was rationed during World War I.
3. Coca-Cola
The inventor of the Coca-Cola wasn’t a shrewd businessman, a seller of sweets, or a dreamer looking to strike it rich in the beverage business. John Pemberton just wanted to cure headaches.
A pharmacist by profession, Pemberton used two main ingredients in his hopeful headache cure: coca leaves and cola nuts. When his lab assistant accidentally mixed the two with carbonated water, the world’s first Coke was the result.
Over the years, Coke would tinker with the now-secret recipe. But sadly, Pemberton died two years later and never saw his simple mixture give birth to a soft drink empire.
4. X-Ray
In 1895, a German physicist named Wilhelm Roentgen was working with a cathode ray tube. Despite the fact that the tube was covered, he saw that a nearby fluorescent screen would glow when the tube was on and the room was dark.
The rays were somehow illuminating the screen. Roentgen tried to block the rays, but most things that he placed in front of them didn’t seem to make a difference.
When he placed his hand in front of the tube, he noticed he could see his bones in the image that was projected on the screen. He replaced the tube with a photographic plate to capture the images, creating the first X-rays.
5. Heart Pacemaker
In 1956, Wilson Greatbatch was working on building a heart rhythm recording device at the University of Buffalo. He reached into a box and pulled out a resistor of the wrong size and plugged it into the circuit.
When he installed it, he recognized the rhythmic sound of the human heart. The beat reminded him of chats he had had with other scientists about whether an electrical stimulation could make up for a breakdown in the heart’s natural beats.
Before his discovery, pacemakers were huge machines, the size of TVs. Greatbatch’s implantable device of just 2 cubic inches forever changed life expectancy in the world. Today, more than half a million of the devices are implanted every year.
6. Viagra
The discovery that sildenafil could lead to an erection wasn’t exactly a planned event. Originally, the compound was developed by Pfizer for the treatment of hypertension and angina pectoris or chest pain due to heart disease.
During the clinical trials, researchers discovered that the drug was more effective at inducing erections than treating angina. Pfizer realized ED was an unmet medical need and a major opportunity for financial gain.
In 1998, the FDA approved Viagra, the first oral treatment for ED, and millions of the blue pill has been sold since then.
7. Microwave oven
In 1945, Percy Spencer was experimenting with a new vacuum tube called a magnetron while doing research for the Raytheon Corporation. He was intrigued when the candy bar in his pocket began to melt, so he tried another experiment with popcorn.
When it began to pop, Spencer immediately saw the potential in this revolutionary process. In 1947, Raytheon built the first microwave oven, which he called Radarange.
It weighed 750 pounds, 5 1/2 feet tall, and cost about $5,000. When the Radarange first became available for home use in the early 1950s, its bulky size and expensive price tag made it unpopular with consumers.
But in 1967, a much more popular 100-volt countertop version was introduced at a price of $495.
8. Velcro
On one particular hiking trip in 1941, Swiss engineer, Georges de Mestral, found burrs clinging to his pants, and also to his dog’s fur. On closer inspection, he found that the burr’s hooks would cling to anything loop-shaped.
If he could only artificially re-create the loops, he might be on to something. The result was Velcro, a combination of the words “velvet” and “crochet.”
Although the product was not popular in the fashion industry, NASA became one of its most notable clients in the 1960s. The agency used the material in flight suits and to help secure items in zero gravity.
9. Insulin
In 1889, two doctors at the University of Strasbourg, Oscar Minkowski and Josef von Mering, were trying to understand how the pancreas affected digestion, so they removed the organ from a healthy dog.
A few days later, they noticed that flies were swarming around the dog’s urine – something abnormal, and unexpected. They tested the urine, and found sugar in it.
They realized that by removing the pancreas, they had given the dog diabetes. Those two never figured out what the pancreas produced that regulated blood sugar.
But during a series of experiments that occurred between 1920 and 1922, researchers at the University of Toronto were able to isolate a pancreatic secretion that they called insulin. Their team was awarded the Nobel prize.
10. Penicillin
One day in 1928, Alexander Fleming returned to his lab in London after a two-week vacation to find that mold had developed on a contaminated staphylococcus culture plate.
A moldy Petri dish was not a part of the plan, but Fleming noticed the culture had prevented the growth of staphylococci. Further examination revealed penicillin, a powerful antibiotic that could be used to treat everything from tonsillitis to syphilis.
Alexander Fleming’s careless mistake became one of the most important medical discoveries in history. Thanks to penicillin, the rate of death due to infectious disease is now 5% of what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. And these are the 10 Famous Discoveries by Accident.
