Most days we cruise through
life not sparing a thought to where the many inventions in our life come from.
Many of these inventions are purposeful, but a select few are accidental. So
here are my top ten accidental discoveries and inventions that have helped
shape the world as we know it. I hope you learn something new and I hope you
enjoy.
Fireworks
Roughly 2,000 years in China a
cook was experimenting with charcoal, sulphur and saltpetre – three items
commonly found in kitchens back then – when he found that the mixture he’d
created burned. He played about a bit with his new-found fire-powder, as any
self-respecting kitchen-alchemist would, and found that when compressed into a
bamboo tube it exploded. After a few more combinations the cook found that he
could cause different coloured explosions and different effects to create what
we now know as fireworks.
Velcro
Out on a hunting trip in 1948
with his trusty canine companion, Swiss engineer George de Mestral noticed the
annoying tendency burrs had to stick to his socks, and his dog’s fur. Back at
home, giving the burrs an examination underneath his microscope, George noticed
the tiny ‘hooks’ that stuck burrs to both fabric and fur. Mestral experimented
for years with a variety of textiles before having a play with the newly
invented nylon, and Velcro was born. However it wasn’t until roughly two
decades later that Velcro’s popularity boomed after NASA took a particular liking to the stick-and-rip stuff.
Safety Glass
The year is 1903 and French
chemist Édouard Bénédictus is chilling out in his lab, mixing up some potions,
when he accidentally knocks a flask off his desk, sending it to fall to the
ground and shatter… or not. Bemused by the way the flask had not smashed into a
hundred pieces on impact, Édouard stooped down to take a closer look. Upon
inspection the chemist realised that it had recently contained plastic
cellulose nitrate, and that this had coated the inside of the flask, thus
keeping it from shattering upon impact. Inspired by this mere mishap, Édouard
Bénédictus went on to invent Safety Glass, something used on a mass-global
level even today.
Super Glue
In 1942, Dr. Harry Coover set
out to create a new precision rifle sight, but failed epicly. The substance he
created, cyanoacrylate, was an utter failure – it stuck to everything. Deflated
and dejected, Coover gave up and moved on, his invention forgotten. Fast
forward 6 years and Coover is overseeing an experimental new design for
airplane canopies. Once again he found himself sticking to things because of
that damned cyanoacrylate! This time, however, Coover had a light-bulb moment
and observed how this substance formed incredibly strong bonds between objects
with no heat applied. This set him and his team to thinking, and with a little
tinkering, sticking objects in the lab together, they realised they’d found a
use for this annoying gloop. Coover whacked a patent on the discovery and in
1958, 16 years after he’d first gotten stuck, Super Glue was being sold on
shelves all around the world.
Tea Bags
The tea bag was the accidental invention of
American tea merchant Thomas Sullivan. In 1908, Sullivan started sending
samples of tea to his customers in small silken bags. Many of his customers
assumed that these samples were to be used in the same manner as metal tea
infusers, by putting the entire bag into the tea pot. After sending out his
samples, Sullivan received comments from his customers that the mesh on the
silk was too fine, and he started to develop sachets made of gauze – the first
purposely made tea bags. During the 1920s these were commercialised and they
grew in popularity. Lo and behold, the tea bag was invented!
Penicillin
Life before antibiotics was
certainly grim. And short. Infections ran rampage, especially STDs, making
simple diseases that we wouldn’t bat an eyelid at nowadays a death sentence.
Luckily for us in 1929 a young Scottish bacteriologist called Alexander Fleming
went on holiday, and before he left he must’ve had his holiday-head on because
he forgot to cover a petri-dish of Staphylococcus he was cultivating in his
lab. When tidying up on his return, Fleming noticed that a mould in the dish
had killed off many of the other bacteria. He identified this mould as penicillium
notatum, and researched it further to find out that it could kill other
bacteria and could be given to small animals without them becoming ill. A
decade down the line, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up where Fleming
left off, isolating the bacteria-slaying substance and turning into a fully
administrable medicine. For their efforts to medicine and science, the trio
were awarded the Nobel Prize – and rightly so!
The
Microwave
Percy Spencer, a man orphaned
at 18 months old and taken out of school at 12 to work in a paper mill, was the
accidental inventor of the Microwave Oven. An engineer at Raytheon after his
WWI stint in the American Navy was known to all as an electronics genius.
Fiddling about with a microwave-emitting magnetron, a piece commonly found in
the innards of radar arrays, Percy suddenly felt a strange sizzling sensation
in his trousers. Startled, he took a pause and found that the chocolate bar in
his pocket had started to melt. Figuring to himself that the microwave
radiation of the magnetron was to blame, he immediately set out to reap the
potential. The end-game was the Microwave Oven, saviour of students and
single-men worldwide.
Dynamite
Humanity didn’t just figure out
how to blow things up with the invention of dynamite – nitroglycerin itself had
been around for years. But as Arzt from Lost will
tell you: “Nitroglycerin is the most dangerous and unstable explosive known to
man”. Alfred Nobel himself can testify to this. He worked with nitroglycerin in
a series of experiments, which tragically ended in a fatality that claimed the
lives of him, his younger brother and a few others. Knowing how unstable it
could be, Nobel continually tested methods for the safe transportation of
nitroglycerin. Whilst transporting some of the deadly explosive, a can fell
from a crate, spilling its contents all over the nitroglycerin. Nobel noticed
that the can’s contents, a sedimentary type of clay called Kieselguhr, absorbed
the nitroglycerin perfectly. Inspired by this simple coincidence, Nobel
ingeniously developed a formula where the explosive could be mixed with the
clay without hindering its explosive power. He patented his discovery, naming
it dynamite, and revolutionised both the world of construction and the world of
warfare.
Viagra
In 1998, pharmaceutical giant
Pfizer set out to cure to Angina Pectoris, or spasms of the heart’s coronary
arteries, in plain English. In order to do this they developed a pill named
UK92480. However, UK92480 failed at its desired effect rather terribly, but the
secondary effect of their little blue pill was certainly arousing, pun
intended. That pill went on to become one of the world’s biggest-selling drugs,
Viagra. In fact, it is estimated that seven Viagra tablets are sold worldwide
every second – that’s 604,800 a day!
Insulin
Although the discovery of
insulin was not directly an accident, the discovery that allowed researchers to
later on find insulin was an accident. In 1889, two doctors at the University
of Strasbourg were trying to understand how digestion was affected by the
pancreas. In order to do this they removed a healthy dog’s pancreas, a few days
later they noticed that flies were swarming around the dog’s urine. They decided to test the urine and found sugar in it. This lead them to the realization that by removing the pancreas they had given the dog diabetes. The two doctors
never realized that what the pancreas produced regulated blood sugar. It wasn’t
until a series of experiments at the University of Toronto between 1920 and
1922 that researchers were able to isolate a pancreatic secretion that they
called insulin, thus turning diabetes from a certain death into a treatable
condition.
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