• How did someone revolutionize kitchen cutlery by trying to create a better gun?
What common household chemical was discovered by dropping a vial on a pair of shoes?
Here are 15 examples of people making mistakes that worked out better than if they'd been
successful.
15 – Saccharin • The discovery of the sugar substitute
saccharin was a lucky accident that could just as easily have killed the scientist who
discovered it.
• Ira Remsen wasn't working on a sugar substitute in his lab.
He was working on a number of things, including a coal tar derivative.
• One day, Remsen forgot to wash his hands, after, you know, handling dangerous chemicals.
And then he ate lunch, and noticed the bread roll he was eating was unusually sweet.
• He traced that flavor back to the chemical he was working with, and that became saccharin.
14 – Synthetic Mauve Dye • As a student at London's Royal College
of Chemistry in 1856, William Henry Perkin was given a simple task as homework.
• He was to synthesize quinine – a drug used to treat malaria.
Quinine was could only be made with extracts from exotic trees, so Perkin was trying to
find a cheap way to synthesize it.
• Like the guy who invented saccharin, he turned to coal tar, the byproduct of Victorian-era
gas lighting.
After a few experiments... he failed.
• What he made was definitely not medicine... but he did revolutionize the artificial dye
industry, and create the color mauve, a vivid purple not cheaply available anywhere else.
13 – Teflon • This discovery came as a result of a failed
attempt to discover new chemicals to use for food refrigeration.
• In trying to create this new refrigeration agent, he used dry ice and accidentally converted
the gas he was working with to a strange white powder.
• No, not THAT kind of white powder.
• He tested the powder and found that it was heat-resistant and that other substances
would not stick to it.
• After some refinement, that powder became Teflon.
12 – Olestra • The goal was a simple one – create a
substitute that could be used in snack foods to make them still taste great, but not cause
any weight gain.
• That's the dream.
The discovery was Olestra: a fat substitute that would pass through the intestines without
ever being absorbed into the body.
• Like many fat substitutes, the result was uncontrollable diarrhea, which wasn't
an acceptable tradeoff for most people.
• Luckily, the core ingredient of Olestra – sucrose polyester – has found a second
life as an effective machine lubricant.
11 – Post-it Notes • This is the result of basically trying
to do the exact opposite thing at 3M.
An engineer at 3M was trying to create a super-strong, aerospace-quality adhesive.
• Instead, he created an incredibly weak adhesive that left no residue when peeled
off.
• At the time, the adhesive was seen as useless and shelved.
It wasn't until 5 years later that another 3M engineer applied the adhesive to small
strips of paper as page markers, and the idea took off.
10 – Fireworks • Here's the story of what must have been
either a hilarious or a terrifying kitchen accident in 10th-century China.
Maybe both.
• The cook took saltpetre, sulfur, and charcoal – three common cooking ingredients at the
time – and accidentally lit fire to them.
The result was a burst of colorful sparks.
• He experimented further and discovered that if he lit those ingredients in the hollow
of a bamboo shoot, it created a powerful explosion out the end.
9 – Inkjet Printer • This is one of the messier accidental
discoveries you'll find.
• It came about when a Canon employee set a hot soldering iron down next to his ink
pen.
• Soon, the ink pen heated up and started squirting ink out the end.
• Once the employee realized the ink explosion happened because of the heat, he got to work
putting that principle into action for inkjet printers.
8 – Slinky • This is one of the most famous "oops"
inventions of all time.
• James Wright was trying to invent springs that would stabilize instruments on naval
ships while sailing.
• He knocked one off a shelf, and it started doing the now-famous "Slinky walk."
• Wright saw that, played with it a bit, and decided to run with it as his new business.
7 – Pacemaker • The man who created the pacemaker was
the owner of over 150 patents by the time of his death.
• But by far the most important is the pacemaker – an invention used to save and improve
the lives of 600,000 people every year.
• Of course, what he was TRYING to invent was a device that would RECORD heart rhythms.
But he made a mistake in adding an extra electronic component, and the result was a device that
CREATED a heart rhythm instead.
6 – Stainless Steel • In 1912, Harry Brearly was trying to create
a new type of steel for use in guns.
The rifling marks in guns would wear down over time, making the barrel eventually too
big for the bullets.
• Brearly was trying to create a type of steel that wouldn't wear down.
And he failed.
Badly.
Repeatedly.
• And his failures would rust and corrode over time, because steel, being primarily
made of iron, would rust just like iron.
• But one of his failures didn't rust.
It stayed shiny and pristine, even months after creating it.
Brearly had discovered rustless steel, which he immediately set to using in cutlery.
5 – Coca-Cola • The famous story is that the namesake
of Coca-Cola comes from two of its original core ingredients: Cocaine, and the Kola nut.
• That's true, and as a result, the drink was originally sold as a medicinal tonic – a
drink to give people energy.
And it probably worked to some extent, since the Kola nut is rich in caffeine, and cocaine
is... well... cocaine.
• However, in 1898, Congress passed a tax on the sale of all medicines.
So after that, Coca-Cola was no longer marketed as a medicine, and was simply sold as a drink.
4 – Scotchgard • Usually, dropping a vial of chemicals
onto a pair of shoes in the lab means you get rid of the shoes.
And maybe your feet.
• But that's exactly what happened in 3M's lab in 1952, when Patsy Sherman was trying
to develop a new type of rubber to use in fueling lines for jet aircraft.
• An assistant dropped one of the components, spilling it on his white canvas shoes.
Water, oil, and all known solvents washed right off of the shoes when they tried to
clean them up.
• That discovery led to the development of Scotchgard, the versatile fabric protector.
3 – Safety Glass • Another example of a dropped vial resulting
in something amazing.
• In 1903, Edouard Benedictus accidentally knocked a glass flask off his shelf.
It hit the floor and broke, but did not shatter, and mostly maintained its shape.
• He found out that the glass had previously held cellulose nitrate, a clear liquid that
had evaporated and left a transparent film.
• Because the flask looked clean, the assistant returned it to the shelf.
And that transparent film that held the glass together was the key ingredient in the discovery
of safety glass.
2 – SMS Texting • Technically speaking, the technology originally
used for text messaging has existed since 1984.
• SMS was initially used as a method of communicating network statuses between administrators,
and while the technology existed for 8 years prior, the first actual text message was sent
in 1992 – from a PC.
• In 1993, Nokia created the first commercial handset capable of sending text messages,
and in 1997, they developed the first phone with a full keyboard.
1 – LSD • Sandoz was the same Swiss chemical company
that accidentally discovered saccharin.
• But this discovery was a bit... different.
• In 1917, Sandoz created a pharmaceutical department, setting out to work on ergot – a
fungus found in tainted rye.
• Ergot, in small doses, had medicinal properties.
In large doses, it caused convulsions and death.
Symptoms of ergot poisoning were so severe, they are presumed to be behind the accusations
of witchcraft driving the Salem Witch Trials.
• The research on ergot eventually led to the development of LSD, which had no discernable
medical use.
• The lab discontinued testing, but the researcher himself, Albert Hoffman, continued
experimenting on it – using himself as the test subject.
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