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These days it’s hard to imagine how we’d all stay healthy in a world without powerful drugs like antibiotics. But Alexander Fleming’s discovery of Penicillin happened by pure chance. One day in 1928 he left a Petri dish containing Staphylococcus bacteria open by mistake. When he returned he noticed it had been contaminated by a bluish-green mold — Penicillin — that had killed off all the bacteria around it. His discovery changed the course of medical history — and earned him a Nobel Prize.
Robert Chesebrough was the guy who invented petroleum jelly and named it Vaseline. The young chemist made his discovery in Pennsylvania on an early oil rig. Workers complained about the “rod wax” that clogged up their drills. Chesebrough took some back to his lab — and found that distilling it produced a light colored gel. He patented the process of making it in 1872, and the rest is history. Chesebrough claimed Vaseline as a miracle healing product — and even ate a spoonful of it every day!
Corn Flakes are still one of the world’s most popular cereals. But did you know how long they’ve been around for? This breakfast food was first invented in 1894! It came about when a team of Seventh-Day Adventists set out to develop new foods for the vegetarian diet that is part of their faith. Dr John Harvey Kellogg and his younger brother had left out some cooked wheat. By the time they came back, the wheat had staled — but they came up with idea of pressing it through rollers — hoping to get long sheets of dough. Instead they got flakes! So they toasted them up and served them to patients of the sanitarium they ran.
In 1878 Constantin Fahlberg was a chemist experimenting with coal tar derivatives at Johns Hopkins University. It was there that he accidentally invented the artificial sweetener now known as Saccharin. Poor hand hygiene may have been to blame! Fahlberg discovered a sweet taste lingering on his hands one evening after a day in the lab. The sweetness had transferred to the bread rolls he was eating with his dinner. Fahlberg put two and two together and published a paper about his findings, with colleague Ira Remsen as co-author. Although later, he ditched Remsen, obtained patents for the product — and began mass-producing it on his own!
X-rays play a huge role in modern medicine. But the technology for them was an accidental invention. In 1895 German physicist Wilhelm Rontgen was experimenting with cathode rays — using a fluorescent screen and a Crookes tube covered in cardboard. Suddenly he noticed a green glow coming from the screen. Rontgen figured out that invisible rays must be passing through the cardboard. His later X-ray of his wife’s hand is the first X-ray of a human body part. Her freaked out response — “I have seen my death.”
Velcro is yet another accidental invention. The idea for this handy hook and loop fastener came from Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral. He was inspired by the burrs that stuck to his clothes and his dog’s fur after coming back from a hunting trip to the Alps in 1941. Looking more closesly at these burrs under a microscope he discovered their hundreds of hooks that caught on anything with a loop. He spent the next decade figuring out how to make a commercial product out of his idea — then applied for a patent in 1951.
The beginnings of today’s huge plastics industry go back to the discovery of Bakelite in 1907. Bakelite was invented by Leo Baekeland, a Belgian-American chemist. He’d been trying to create a synthetic replacement for Shellac — which comes from the resin secreted by lac beetles. Instead — by mixing formaldehyde and phenol — he came up with the hard moldable material called Bakelite, which he naturally named after himself!
The Slinky is a spring toy that can do all kinds of tricks. It’s been around since the early 1940s, and was invented by naval engineer Richard James — by accident. He’d actually been trying to create springs that would provide support and stability to sensitive instruments on ships in rough seas. But when he knocked a spring from a shelf by mistake, James noticed all the cool recoiling and expanding tricks it could do. He and his wife were soon in the Slinky selling business!
William Greatbatch was an American engineer and inventor who ended up with over 350 patents and made it into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. But his great invention came about by accident. He’d being trying to create a device that would record a heart rhythm — but put in the wrong-sized resistor — and instead came up with a pacemaker that produced regular electrical pulses.
The microwave is now a standard and ubiquitous kitchen appliance. But its invention came about by accident. Percy Spencer invented it in 1945 while working for Raytheon developing radar for the Department of Defense. One day when he was working with magnetron radar tubes he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. He then went on to experiment with a variety of foods, including popcorn kernels — which popped, and an egg — which exploded in the face of a co-worker!
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