I believe many of the sweeteners were discovered accidentally as was the first aniline dyes.
IIRC Prozac started life as a weight loss drug. People started out overweight and took prozac, lost weight for a month or two. After a couple months the weight loss stopped but the users were really happy.
Slee
This is slightly off topic, but the laser was originally invented in the 50s as a tool to study molecular properties. No one forsaw its widespread use in computing and information technology at the time.
And this statement sort of sums it up.
- Begin experimenting to acheive goal X.
- In the process discover event Y
- Figure out if there’s any use for event Y while continuing to achieve goal X.
Gee, I wonder why that is… :rolleyes:
What, all this time and no one’s mentioned penicillin yet? That was fortuitous. Or Henri Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity? Or the discovery of X-ray astronomy?
Some of the ones proposed here I’d take issue with. The uses of the Laser may not have been the original intentions, but the laser itself was definitely not an accident – its discovery was the resdult of calculations and design (by several camps, no less). You don’t just stumble across the circumstances that make a laser.
Similarly, although not as imprerssive, I ccan hardly believe Ivory Soap was an accident. I have to read the link, but I know thagt Ivory soap is made using the same basic process that’s been used for soap for millenia, except that they defined the process (“salt of a fatty acid”) and used that definition to claim the “99 44/100% pure” business. That’s extensive labwork, not seredipity.
Ferdinand Braun invents the rectifier while trying for something else:
“Hey! you got your peanut butter in my chocolate!..”
< d & r >
Hmm… so the Ivory Soap thing is only about how they got it to float, not about the soap. (There’s no relationship between purity and floating, by the way. Even though the ads used to say “So Pure it Floats!” As an adman, who wasn’t an expert on science, remarked on this ad – “Things float because they’re lighter than water. The easy way to do that is to fill it with air. Ivory is showing that their product is full of air.”
I’ve heard in several places that the process for making Corn Flakes was discovered by accident – the Kelloggs left a vat of corn mush sitting overnight before milling, and when they ran it the next day they found that the mush came out as individual flakes.
Something similar is believed to have happened with bread – some ancient Egyptian or Sumerian left the dough sitting out overnight and came back to find it leavened with natural yeast, which made it rise. They baked it anyway and discovere leavened bread.
There’s the story that cheese was discovered ion a similar way – some ancient person was carrying milk in a bag made from a stomach (yechh, but you do what yopu can with what you got.) Some rennet remained in the bag, and it curdled the milk, leaving cottage-cheese-like cheese and whey.
Popcorn?
I can’t find as cite, but it just screams ‘accidental discovery’.
a…not as…sheesh.
While the OP was specifically about “inventions” some of the posts have been about accidental “discoveries” too. In continuation of that trend, from URL=http://www.tapaltea.com/discovery.htm]here
Tea was an accidental discovery.
I swear I previewed. :smack:
The link is this
Safety glass (and 9 more).
Archimedes discovered the bathtub by accident, and simultaneously invented the word Eureka, which is what he said by mistake when he meant to say “Oops. I forgot I was naked.”
Nitrated Guncotton Explosives were created in the effort to create synthetic Ivory for billard balls.
http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/phys/bang.htm
Scroll down to high explosives.
I don’t agree with Velcro being an accidental invention. It was a deliberate attempt to recreate something that occurs in nature.
Great book, I’ll second its nomination. I particularly like the story about cyclamates, discovered when a scientist was smoking at his bench, and got some of the sweet chemical on his cigarette.
Although the program was directed at smooth muscle in the heart, the side effects weren’t unanticipated. People knew that it would have the properties it’s best known for having. I wouldn’t call this an “accidental” discovery.
I don’t know what constitutes “discovery” – discovery of the substance, or realization of its potential. The chemical polytetrafluoroethylene was discovered “accidentally,” but its utility wasn’t realized accidentally. DuPont had a very developed polymer division which quickly realized that a polymer with PTFE’s properties would be very valuable.
If PTFE is to be included, then certainly Kevlar should be included as well. The polybenzamide that was formed was accidental in the sense that it was a poorly formulated experiment – but the researcher’s (her name eludes me) insistence that it be spun into a fiber was not accidental, and led to the important part of the discovery: that polybenzamides had incredible strength.
That’s why I said it was off topic.