It’s generally assumed that inventors make discoveries through a long series of experiments, slowly testing and finally reaching a breakthrough. Truth is, many inventions are just pure, dumb luck.
1. Matches:In 1826, an English pharmacist named John Walker was mixing concoctions in his lab; he was having a hard time cleaning up after one mixture in particular. The potion just wouldn’t scrub clean from the stick he was using to mix it.
Frustrated, he started scraping the stick on the ground hoping to clean it. All of a sudden, the tip that he’d been scraping on the floor burst into flame. And thus, the friction match was born.
2. PenicillinIn 1928, a Scot named Alexander Fleming closed his lab and left for a two-week vacation. In his haste, he left a petri dish smeared with Staphylococcus bacteria out on a lab bench. When he returned, he found the plate almost entirely covered in bacteria; almost entirely, that is, because a spore of penicillium mold from the lab downstairs had drifted onto his plate.
There was a distinct ring separating the mold from the bacteria, leading Fleming to conclude that the mold had bacteria-fighting properties. And thus was Penicillin discovered.
3. Artificial sweeteners:A Johns Hopkins lab researcher named Constantine Fahlberg discovered artificial sweeteners in 1879 because he forgot to wash his hands before dinner. When he picked up a piece of homemade bread and discovered that it tasted unnaturally sweet, he surmised that the taste must be due to some kind of chemical residue on his hands.
Against what is now good scientific common sense, he went to his lab the next day and tasted through his vials until he found a chemical called benzoyl o-sulfonamide. He renamed it saccharin.
4. VaselineRobert A. Cheesebrough, a 22-year-old Brooklyn man working in a Pennsylvania oil field, noticed a waxy goo that collected on the heavy machinery.
A coworker said this “rod wax” really messed up the mechanical works, but was soothing when workers burned or cut themselves. A light bulb went off in Cheesebrough’s head. He turned it into what is now Vaseline.
5. Tea Thousands of years before the British could claim it as their favorite hot beverage, a Chinese emperor named Shennong was outside boiling his drinking water as he always did. On this particularly windy day—or so legend would have it—leaves from a nearby tea bush blew into his cauldron, and steeped for a while, unbeknownst to him.
Shennong could have dumped the cauldron and started from scratch but because the emperor was also a respected herbalist, he curiously tasted the brew and tea time was discovered.
6. Potato chipsDuring the summer of 1853, a customer at the Moon Lake Lodge in Saratoga Springs, New York, thought chef George Crum’s French fries were too thick, and kept sending them back to the kitchen to be remade.
After making progressively thinner fries and having them unceremoniously rejected by his curmudgeonly client, the chef finally sent a batch of paper-thin, crisp potato wafers out to the customer, hoping to annoy him (it should have annoyed him because back in those days, fries were eaten primly, with a fork). Instead, the customer loved them—as did many of the resort’s other visitors.
7. Safety glassIn 1903, a French scientist named Edouard Benedictus was high on a ladder reaching for some beakers when a flask fell to the ground with a loud crash. When he climbed off the ladder he found, to his amazement, that some of the glass shards still clung together.
He and his assistant deduced that the liquid plastic that the flask had contained had inadvertently bound some of the shards together. And thus the idea of safety glass was born—and it came just in time, too. Automobile injuries at that turn of the 20th century had more to do with broken glass than they did with breakneck speeds; Benedictus’ glass also found great widespread commercial use in World War I’s gas masks.
So, a life-changing discovery could happen any moment
