Accidental Inventions

In 1905, 11-year old Frank Epperson tried making soda pop, then a popular drink, by mixing soda water powder and water. Accidentally, he left the soda out on his porch all night. Temperatures dropped so low that the next day, young Epperson found his soda pop had frozen with the stirring stick in it! He didn't know it then, but he had accidentally concocted the very first popsicle! It wasn't until 18 years later, in 1923, that Epperson remembered his invention, applied for a patent and started selling "Eppsicle" ice pops iin different fruit flavors. Later on, his kids started referring to it as the "Popsicle" and ever since, it's been hard to resist the refreshing allure of this tangy summer treat!

The Popsicle

In 1945 Percy Lebaron Spencer, an American engineer and inventor, was busy working on manufacturing magnetrons, the devices used to produce the microwave radio signals that were integral to early radar use. Radar was an incredibly important innovation during the time of war, but microwave cooking was a purely accidental discovery. While standing by a functioning magnetron, Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. His keen mind soon figured out that it was the microwaves that had caused it, and later experimented with popcorn kernels and eventually, an egg, which (as we all could have told him from mischievous childhood experiments), exploded. The first microwave oven weighed about 750lbs and was about the size of a fridge.

The Microwave

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The microwave oven, aka the "Popcorn and Hot Pockets Warmer," was a happy accident that came from, of all things, a weapons program. Percy LeBaron Spencer was a self-educated engineer working on radar technology in the years following WWII. The technology in question was the sci-fi sounding magnetron, a piece of machinery capable of firing high intensity beams of radiation. Apparently, P.L.S., as some have called him, had a bit of a sweet tooth. Or a strange fetish. Either way, he had a candy bar in his pants while he was in the lab one day. The selfproclaimed engineer noticed that the chocolate bar had melted when he was working with the magnetron. Spencer disregarded the simple idea that his body heat had melted the chocolate in favor of the less logical and therefore more scientific conclusion that invisible rays of radiation had "cooked it" somehow. A sane man would stop at this point and realize these magical heat rays were landing just inches from his tender scrotum. Indeed, most of the military experts on hand probably dreamed of the battlefield applications of their new Dick-Melting Ray. But like all men of science, Spencer was fascinated and treated his discovery like a novelty. He used it to make eggs explode and pop kernels of corn ("Imagine, a future where a building full of workers in cubicles eat this all day!") Spencer continued to experiment with the magnetron until he boxed it in and marketed it as a new way to cook food. The initial version of the microwave was roughly six feet tall, weighed in around 750 pounds and had to be cooled with water. But they got it down to size, and today we use it mostly to destroy random objects on YouTube.

Before 1904, ice cream was served on dishes. It wasnt until the Worlds Fair of that year, held in St Louis, Missouri, that two seemingly unrelated foodstuffs became inexorably linked together. y At this particularly 1904 World's Fair, a stall selling ice cream was doing such good business that they were quickly running out of dishes. The neighboring stall wasn't doing so well, selling Zalabia a kind of wafer thin waffle from Persia and the stall owner came up with the idea of rolling them into cone shapes and popping the ice cream on top. Thus the ice cream cone was born.
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Ice Cream Cone

While many know that Dom Pierre Prignon is credited for the invention of champagne, it was not the 17th century Benedictine monks intention to make a wine with bubbles in it in fact, he had spent years trying to prevent just that, as bubbly wine was considered a sure sign of poor winemaking. Prignons original wish was to cater for the French courts preference for white wine. Since black grapes were easier to grow in the Champagne region, he invented a way of pressing white juice from them. But since Champagnes climate was relatively cold, the wine had to be fermented over two seasons, spending the second year in the bottle. This produced a wine loaded with bubbles of carbon dioxide, which Prignon tried but failed to eradicate. Happily, the new winewas a big hit with the aristocratic crowds in both the French and English courts.

Champagne

Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H20 out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul probably a sailor decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born.

Brandy

The invention of the humble Post-It Note was an accidental collaboration between second-rate science and a frustrated church-goer. In 1970, Spencer Silver, a researcher for the large American corporation 3M, had been trying to formulate a strong adhesive, but ended up only managing to create a very weak glue that could be removed almost effortlessly. He promoted his invention within 3M, but nobody took any notice. 4 years later, Arthur Fry, a 3M colleague and member of his church choir, was irritated by the fact that the slips of paper he placed in his hymnal to mark the pages would usually fall out when the book was opened. One service, he recalled the work of Spencer Silver, and later applied some of Silvers weak yet nondamaging adhesive to his bookmarks. He found that the little sticky markers worked perfectly, and sold the idea to 3M. Trial marketing began in 1977, and today youd find it hard to imagine life without them.

PostPost-It Notes

In 1853, in a restaurant in Saratoga, New York, a particularly fussy diner (railway magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt) repeatedly refused to eat the fries he had been served with his meal, complaining that they were too thick and too soggy. After he had sent back several plates of increasingly thinly-cut fries, the chef George Crum decided to get his own back by frying wafer-thin slices of potato in grease and sending them out. Vanderbilt initially protested that the chefs latest efforts were too thin to be picked up with a fork, but upon trying a few, the chips were an instant hit, and soon everybody in the restaurant wanted a serving. This led to the new recipe appearing on the menu as Saratoga Chips before later being sold all over the world.

Potato chips/crisps

Sir Alexander Fleming was researching a strain of bacteria called staphylococci. Upon returning from holiday one time in 1928, he noticed that one of the glass culture dishes he had accidentally left out had become contaminated with a fungus, and so threw it away. It wasnt until later that he noticed that the staphylococcus bacteria seemed unable to grow in the area surrounding the fungal mould. Fleming didnt even hold out much hope for his discovery: it wasnt given much attention when he published his findings the following year, it was difficult to cultivate, and it was slow-acting it wasnt until 1945 after further research by several other scientists that penicillin was able to be produced on an industrial scale, changing the way doctors treated bacterial infections forever.

Penicillin

As researchers go, Sir Alexander Fleming is one of the greats. But the man was a slob. Years before he became famous for discovering Penicillin, he accidentally conducted a study based around some snot of his that fell into a Petri dish. Six years later, the good Mr. Phlegm-ing, as he was affectionately known, was once again working in the lab with a plastic dish filled with disease. The Doc (another nickname) left the lab for a weekend without cleaning the filthy dishes that were scattered around. If the scientific community is represented by the cast from Revenge of the Nerds (we know, huge stretch), then Fleming is "Booger"? Fleming returned to his abandoned experiment after his holiday to find that the dishes had sprouted mold. Fleming tossed the dish into a nearby trashcan. As per his custom, he continued to inspect his experiment after throwing it into a container filled with lab waste. Maybe he had decided to eat that sausage he had thrown away earlier. While there he noticed that the mold had killed off the bacteria around it. This mold turned out to be the basic form of Penicillin, arguably the most important discovery in the field of medicine ever. All science needed was for a man to come along who was so filthy that he actually would discover a form of filth that could kill other filth. Millions of lives were saved.

Like penicillin, here is another accidental invention that continues to save lives to this day. American engineer Wilson Greatbatchwas working on a gadget that recorded irregular heartbeats, when he inserted the wrong type of resistor into his invention. The circuit pulsed, then was quiet, then pulsed again, prompting Greatbatch to compare this reaction with the human heart and work on the worlds first implantable cardiac pacemaker. Before the implantable version was used on humans from 1960 onwards, pacemakers had been based on the external model invented by Paul Zoll in 1952. These were about the size of a television and dealt out considerable jolts of electricity into the patients body, which often caused the skin to burn. Greatbatch also went on to devise a lithium-iodide battery cell to power his pacemaker.

The Pacemaker

More sticky stuff, though this one was famous for its high adhesive value, unlike Silvers Post-It Notes. Superglue came into being in 1942 when Dr Harry Coover was trying to isolate a clear plastic to make precision gun sights for handheld weaponry. For a while he was working with chemicals known as cyanoacrylates, which they soon realized polymerized on contact with moisture, causing all the test materials to bond together. It was obvious that these wouldnt work, so research moved on. y 6 years later, Coover was working in a Tennessee chemical plant and realized the potential of the substance when they were testing the heat resistance of cyanoacrylates, recognizing that the adhesives required neither heat nor pressure to form a strong bond. Thus, after a certain amount of commercial refinement, Superglue (or Alcohol-Catalyzed Cyanoacrylate Adhesive Composition, to give it its full name) was born. y It was later used for treating injured soldiers in Vietnam the adhesive could be sprayed on open wounds, stemming bleeding and allowing easier transportation of soldiers; adding a delicious layer of irony to the story in that a discovery made during an effort to improve the killing potential of guns ended up saving countless lives.
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Superglue

The story goes that in 1942, Dr. Harry Coover was working for Eastman Kodak, a company renowned for cameras and camera-related things. His job was to find a plastic that could be used as a clear gunsight, since this was smack in the middle of WWII and everybody knew where the money was. Coover got frustrated because the material, called cyanoacrylate, was just too damned sticky. Rather than noticing he accidentally made one of the most versatile adhesives of all time, he threw it away in a huff and continued sweating over gunsights for a war that would be ended, ironically, by two bombs with blast radiuses so big that they didn't even require sights at all. Years later, Coover would re-discover his invention, we prefer to think due to him noticing that old container of cyanoacrylate was still stuck to the bottom of his trash can and couldn't be removed by any means. In 1958, after finally convincing his bosses that at the very least, there was enormous comedic potential in the prospect of a man getting his hand permanently stuck to his junk; Kodak released the glue with the catchy name "Eastman 910." Somebody then decided to actually pay the marketing guys to do something, and they decided the best way to convince people to buy this new product was to suspend a car over a public street with a crane, supposedly held up only with the ol' 910. Reactions resulted in the product being coined "Krazy Glue"; a product so crazy that it requires intentional misspelling. The early slogan, "Remember, you can only use it once before it completely solidifies in the tube!" was quickly dropped and it remains a topselling product to this day.

Safety glass is the glass that's used in cars and buildings and almost everywhere you look. The idea is that when it shatters, like when a bad guy goes through it back-first because you blasted him with a shotgun, it doesn't break into shards that can cut his skin on the way through. Frenchman, Edward Benedictus, was a jack-of-all-trades, er, Jaques-of-all-trades. Before stumbling across an incredible invention, Benedictus was already a classical quadruple threat. That is to say he was a painter, composer, writer and chemist. One day, in a potentially Clouseau-like manner, Edward knocked a scientific flask off of a shelf and heard it crash to the ground (we like to imagine that he shouted "sacre bleu!" upon hearing the impact). When Benedictus climbed down from his ladder, he noticed that the flask was broken, but had not actually shattered.

Safety Glass

After asking one of his aides about the incident, he found that the flask had recently contained cellulose nitrate, which acted as an adhesive and held the shattered pieces of glass together. Though he knew he had something, Benedictus didn't really know what he had. Then inspiration struck in the form of a rash of horrifyingly gruesome car accidents. Benedictus noticed that the more horrific injuries from these crashes were due to flying shards of windshield. Then he set to work until he eventually developed Triplex (not pronounced triple x). When we say eventually, we mean 24 hours later. After taking notice of the durability of his new invention in the gas masks of WWI, the automotive industry began making the Triplex windshield the standard, as angry, sledgehammer-wielding ex-girlfriends the world over can attest to.

You probably won't be shocked to find out that the inventor of tire rubber is Charles Goodyear, as he's the first guy on the list to actually get his name attached to the end product (since "Coover Glue" sounds like a gruesome form of birth control). It wasn't easy coming up with a form of rubber tough enough to withstand the drag racing and car chases everyone envisioned the day the automobile was invented. In fact, if there was one man who should have given up his life dream, it was Goodyear. The man spent time in and out of prison, lost every friend he had and starved his children in his tireless pursuit of a stronger form of rubber. It was the 1830s, a period of time known for sucking. After his first two years of tinkering and failing with primitive rubber, Goodyear and his family were camping out in an abandoned factory and fishing for sustenance. This is when he made a huge breakthrough: He'd use acid to smooth out and toughen rubber! The government bought 150 mailbags made of the stuff and the rest is... Oh, wait. They were all defective. The process didn't work and Goodyear was ruined. Again. Finally in 1839, probably after being struck by lightning and/or being pissed on by a pack of stray dogs, Goodyear wandered into a general store with another failure of a formula. The crowd watched. Then they laughed at him. In a rage, he began to shake his fist, flinging a piece of his rubber onto the hot stove top. After inspecting the charred remains, he realized that he had just found a way to make durable, weatherproof rubber. Despite what we're sure were numerous failed "now let's try setting this on fire to see if it improves it!" experiments, an empire was born

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Vulcanized Rubber

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