He couldn’t have. Even though he made 4 trips, he still died believing that he had visited some lesser known parts of Asia because he was a crackpot but a very lucky one. He thought the Earth was much smaller than most other knowledgeable people believed at the time. He found land right where he thought Asia was supposed to be only he never realized it was a whole new land. I think this is a good example for the OP as well.
The Chinese invented gunpowder, but it was centuries before anyone figued how to use it to buiild effective weapons.
They didn’t set out with the goal of finding the background radiation, or that the had when they were done. Someone had to tell them. I guess you are interpreting the OP to mean never realized in their lifetime, I just didn’t read it that way.
Forty years ago, it was very easy to find a 19-year-old girl willing to sleep with me. I now realize that in general, it’s pretty difficult.
Something like this happened to me in my CS prof days.
I had a small solution to a problem which handled sort of a worst case scenario. A grad student was testing out a proof system and wanted to use my solution. But it was “too complicated” (hah!) and asked if I could simplify it. So I took out stuff and cut it down. Didn’t solve as complex a problem, but did solve the minimal version.
I stood back and realized it was far simpler than the textbook version. So I wrote it up in a short paper and sent it off to a minor journal. Really didn’t think much of it at the time.
And that made be sort of famous in the field. Tens of thousands of citations, a Wikipedia page devoted to it, now it’s the standard textbook version, etc.
Could you give a link please? Just to satisfy my curiosity.
Steam engines date back nearly 2000 years. The first ones were basically just “toys” for the rich/nobles.
Put water in sphere, light fire underneath, watch it spin, clap.
A kind of opposite - as it turned out, the ancients may have discovered electricity.
However, the knowledge did not spread … allegedly, because they used it for, of all things, counterfiting (via electroplating); or perhaps by electrifying idols.
Naturally, they kept this secret.
The Bagdad Battery:
Much of this is speculative. The artifacts exist but not everyone believes they were really “batteries”.
Gregor Mendel
Yeah, I’m not convinced they were actually used as batteries. Sure, they’ve got all of the right materials to make a (weak) battery, but the right materials in this case are just two different types of metal and a container. It’s way too easy to end up with exactly the same combination of stuff by accident.
It doesn’t quite fit, but in SWIMMING TO ANTARCTICA Lynne Cox writes about being surprised at how well she was tolerating the cold during her historic swim – and how she only learned later that it was because of nerve damage she’d sustained during her testing-the-icy-waters swim two days earlier. “I wasn’t aware that my first line of defense was gone,” she writes, adding that she also didn’t know she was risking permanent muscle damage. “It was a good thing I didn’t know any of this.”
Sulfanilamide was considered to be a waste product of the German dye industry until someone decided to see if it had antibacterial properties, because its precursor, Prontosil, dyed natural fibers without a mordant.
The discoverers of Viagra didn’t get a Nobel prize because they figured out how to make old men have boners. 
It’s because they discovered, or at least expanded upon knowledge of, the nitric oxide cycle, which is still poorly understood but is believed to play a huge role in the overall aging process.
I have that book. Guess I should actually read it.
I had never heard of this. I do not think Ive ever had a ‘hero’ but I think this guy is my hero now.
Yep, it’s a bit of a quirk of history that Fleming came to be associated with this discovery at all.
He wasn’t involved in the development of penicillin (which as you note was incredibly difficult), and he wasn’t even the first scientist to observe, or publish, the antibiotic activity of penicillium.
Missed edit window: I meant credited rather than associated. Of course Fleming should be associated with the discovery/development of penicillin.
I’ll take this opportunity to plug The Mould in Dr Florey’s Coat - fascinating book about the development of penicillin during WWII. The title comes from ways the researchers dreamed up to smuggle out their work if the Nazis had invaded while they were still going…
He was accomplished by God (just a guess) without Him realizing its importance?
She died without realizing the cancer that killed her produced the cell line used (50 years later) for a large portion of our disease research.
Partial quote from the article about her:
She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.
Certainly. I have doubts myself. One point in favour of the battery explaination is that several similar artifacts have been found.