Accidental inventions that changed the world.

1. Matches

We all wonder what life was like before electricity or the Internet, but imagine life before matches. For those of us who like to create controlled flame from time to time with the strike of a match, we can thank a British pharmacist and his dirty mixing stick. In 1826, John Walker noticed a dried lump on the end of a stick while he was stirring a mix of chemicals.
When he tried to scrape it off, voila, sparks and flame. Jumping on the discovery, Walker marketed the first friction matches as “Friction Lights” and sold them at his pharmacy. The initial matches were made of cardboard but he soon replaced those with three-inch long hand-cut wooden splints; the matches came in a box equipped with a piece of sandpaper for striking. Although advised to patent his invention, he chose not to because he considered the product a benefit to mankind — which didn’t stop others from ripping off the idea and taking over the market share, leading Walker to stop producing his version.









2. Plastic

Although earlier plastics had relied on organic material, the first fully synthetic plastic was invented in 1907 when Leo Hendrik Baekeland accidentally created Bakelite. His initial quest was to invent a ready replacement for shellac, an expensive product derived from lac beetles. Baekeland combined formaldehyde with phenol, a waste product of coal, and subjected the mixture to heat. Rather than a shellac-like material, he inadvertently created a polymer that was unique in that it didn’t melt under heat and stress. The new thermosetting plastic was used for everything from phones to jewelry to clocks. It was also the first synthetic material to really stand on its own; it wasn’t used to mimic a natural material like ivory or tortoise shell, ushering in an era of new synthetic materials that has yet to subside.

 

3. Chocolate  chip cookies 

  Not all chance discoveries came at the hands of scientists fiddling in labs. Sometime they happened to cooks twiddling in kitchens. Ruth Wakefield and her husband owned and operated the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts where Ruth cooked for the guests. According to legend, one day in 1937 while making cookie dough, she realized she was out of melting baker’s chocolate and instead used a chocolate bar that she chopped into bits, hoping it would melt as well. It didn’t, and thus was born America's favorite cookie. 

 

 

4. Safety glass

 

Back in the early days of automobiles, before airbags and seat belts were invented, one of the gravest dangers was injury from shards of shattered windshield glass. Thanks to French artist and chemist Édouard Bénédictus for chancing upon the invention of laminated glass, also known as safety glass. While in his lab, a glass flask dropped and broke but didn’t shatter, Bénédictus realized that the interior was coated with plastic cellulose nitrate that held the now-harmless broken pieces together. He applied for a patent in 1909 with a vision of increasing the safety of cars, but manufacturers rejected the idea to keep costs down. However, the glass became standard for gas mask lenses in World War I. With its success on the battle field, the automobile industry finally ceded and by the 1930s most cars were equipped with glass that didn’t splinter into jagged pieces upon impact. 

5. Penicilin

Although antibiotics may get a bum rap for their overuse and prevalence, life before them was fraught with untamable infection and few defensive tools. Penicillin was the first antibiotic, a discovery that happened in 1929 when a young bacteriologist, Sir Alexander Fleming, was tidying up his lab. After having been on vacation, he returned to work to find that a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria had been left uncovered; and he noticed that mold on the culture had killed many of the bacteria. He identified the mold as penicillium notatum, and upon further research found that it could kill other bacteria and could be given to small animals without ill effect. A decade later, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up where Fleming left off and isolated the bacteria-killing substance found in the mold – penicillin. The three won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1945 "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.” 

6. Microwave oven

Of all the newfangled, ultra-mod, sci-fi kitchen appliances of the future, a few are as notable as the microwave oven. Baking a potato in eight minutes must have seemed beyond imagination before this. The technology that promised to revolutionize housewives everywhere, not to mention bachelors, was discovered in the 1940s when the U.S. company Raytheon was working on wartime magnetron tubes used in radar defense. Percy Spencer, an engineer at the company, was working on a magnetron when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had started to melt due to the microwaves. Eureka! Spencer developed a box for cooking and found that indeed, when food was placed in the box with the microwave energy, it cooked quickly. Raytheon filed a U.S. patent for the process and the first microwave oven was placed in a New England restaurant for testing. 

7. Potato chips

Behold the potato chip: the salty, greasy, crispy wisp of tuber. The life of the potato chip didn’t start out as an accident, more of a prank, but its imminent success took its inventor by surprise. As legend has it, in 1853 Saratoga Springs restaurant cook George "Speck" Crum was annoyed with the complaints of a wealthy patron who repeatedly returned his thickly cut French style potatoes, a common preparation at the time. After the third return, the exasperated Crum sliced the potatoes as thinly as he could, fried the daylights out of them, and covered them in what he assumed to be a prohibitive amount of salt. Much to his surprise, and perhaps initial chagrin, the patron adored them and ordered another round. They quickly became the house specialty, and the history of snacking was changed forever. 

8. X-rays    

In 1895, German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was tinkering with a tube of cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs, when he noticed that a piece of paper covered in barium platinocyanide began to glow across the room. He knew that the flickering he saw was not being created by the cathode rays because they would not travel that far. Not knowing what the rays were, he named it X-radiation signifying the unknown nature. Upon further research he discovered a host of materials transparent to the radiation and that the rays could affect photographic plates. He took an X-ray photograph of his wife's hand that showed her bones and a ring; the image aroused great interest and ensured his place in the history of medicine and science. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in 1901.