In today's fast world involving constant innovations and discoveries, we may not realize the hard work that goes behind and that most inventions take years to develop.
But sometimes, all it takes is an accident and it turns out many of society's most well-known inventions were simply mistakes made by scientists on alternative quests.
Penicillin
Alexander Fleming didn't clean
up his workstation before going on vacation one day in 1928. When he came back,
Fleming noticed that there was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. Even
stranger was that bacteria didn't seem to thrive near that cultures.Penicillin
became the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics.
Pacemaker
William Greatbatch, an
American engineer, was working on making a circuit to help record fast heart
sounds. He reached into a box for a resistor in order to finish the circuit and
pulled out a 1-megaohm resistor instead of a 10,000-ohm one.The circuit pulsed
for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for one second. Then it repeated. The
sound was as old as man: a perfect heartbeat.
Radioactivity
Back in 1896 Becquerel was
fascinated by two things: natural fluorescence and the newfangled X-ray. He ran
a series of experiments to see if naturally fluorescent minerals produced
X-rays after they had been left out in the sun. One problem - he was doing
these experiments in the winter, and there was one week with a long stretch of
overcast skies. He left his equipment wrapped up together in a drawer and
waited for a sunny day. When he got back to work, Becquerel realized that the
uranium rock he had left in the drawer had imprinted itself on a photographic plate
without being exposed to sunlight first. There was something very special about
that rock. Working with Marie and Pierre Curie, he discovered that that
something was radioactivity.
Plastic
In 1907 shellac was used as
insulation in electronics. It was costing the industry a pretty penny to import
shellac, which was made from Southeast Asian beetles, and at home chemist Leo
Hendrik Baekeland thought he might turn a profit if he could produce a shellac
alternative. Instead his experiments yielded a moldable material that could
take high temperatures without distorting.
Baekeland thought his "Bakelite" might be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear that the product had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived from Bakelite, is used for everything.
Baekeland thought his "Bakelite" might be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear that the product had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived from Bakelite, is used for everything.
Teflon
Young DuPont chemist Roy
Plunkett was working to make a new a new kind of CFC. He had a theory that if
he could get a compound called TFE to react with hydrochloric acid, he could
produce the refrigerant he wanted. So, to start his experiment Plunkett got a
whole bunch of TFE gas, cooled it and pressured it in canisters so it could be
stored until he was ready to use it. When the time came to open the container
and put the TFE and hydrochloric acid together so they could react, nothing
came out of the canister. The gas had disappeared. Only it hadn't. Frustrated
and angry, Plunkett took off the top of the canister and shook it. Out came
some fine white flakes. He was intrigued by the flakes and
handed them off to other scientists at DuPont.
Dynamite
In efforts to stabilize nitroglycerin, an explosive liquid, Alfred
Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer, and laboratory workers experienced
several accidents -- one of which ultimately proved fatal. An explosion in
Stockholm, Sweden, left Nobel's younger brother and a few others dead in 1864.
While transporting nitroglycerin, Nobel noticed that one of the cans
accidentally broke open and leaked. He discovered that the material in which
the cans were packed -- a sedimentary rock mixture called kieselguhr --
absorbed the liquid perfectly. Since nitroglycerin is most
dangerous to handle in its liquid form, the incident led Nobel to explore
kieselguhr as a stabilizer for explosives.
Ingeniously, Nobel developed a formula that allowed the explosive to be
mixed with kieselguhr without hindering its power. He patented his product in
1867, naming it dynamite, which revolutionized construction practices and the
creation of explosives.
Microwave oven
The idea of using microwave
energy to cook food was accidentally discovered by Percy LeBaron Spencer of the
Raytheon Company when he found that radar waves had melted a candy bar in his
pocket. Experiments showed that microwave heating could raise the internal
temperature of many foods far more rapidly than a conventional oven. The first
Raytheon commercial microwave oven was the 1161 Radarange, which was marketed
in 1954. Rated at 1600 watts, it was so large and expensive that it was
practical only for restaurant and institutional use.
X rays
In 1895, Wilhem Roentgen, an eccentric physicist was investigating the properties
of cathode ray tubes. During the experiment he noticed fluorescent
papers in his lab were illuminated even though his machine had an opaque cover.
Roentgen threw himself into investigating these unknown rays
systematically. Two months after his initial discovery, he published his paper.
Saccharin
In year 1879 chemist Constantin Fahlberg was
trying to come up with new and interesting uses for coal tar. After a
productive day at the office, he went home and something strange happened. He
noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularly sweet. He asked his wife if
she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but she hadn't. They tasted
normal to her. Fahlberg realized the taste must have been coming from his hands
-- which he hadn't washed. The next day he went back to the lab and started
tasting his work until he found the sweet spot!
Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation
In 1964, Bell Laboratory scientists Arno Penzias and Robert
Wilson were trying to detect sources of radiation that might potentially harm
satellites. Their data, however, showed background noise from a microwave
signal corresponding to a temperature of approximately 2.7 K that appeared to
be emitted from every direction. This apparent aberration was recognized by
scientists at Princeton as remnant radiation from the earliest observable
moment in the evolution of the universe, now called the Cosmic Microwave
Background. Their discovery was a tremendous one for astrophysics, providing a
glimpse of the earliest observable moment in the evolution of the Universe.
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