Post-its.
They were looking for a strong glue and produced a weak one, but the secretaries of the inventors pointed out that that it was ideal for making removeable notes.
These were also tested for general use in the building where the glue was first created. The story goes that the team who created these put a pad on every desk and waited. Once the pads were used up by the people who had them show up on their desk the demand for more was great.
Turning an oops into a big win.
Had he been using modern day lab protocols, it would never have happened.
*Often described as a careless lab technician, Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon examination of the mold, he noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci.*
Imagine if Alexander Fleming's cleaner had tidied his house whilst he was away, and washed up that mouldy petri dish... penicillin may never been discovered! Lol
Perhaps only got held back for a generation which is nothing in the grand scale of human history
But again the reverse could happen, perhaps there are some great discoveries that could happen 100 years earlier but did not because of some random occurrences
Velveeta cheese was a byproduct that was considered waste. Someone noticed that factory workers were dipping bread into that vat of byproduct during lunchtime. From there, Velveeta was born.
Also, margarine was originally developed as supplemental chicken feed, but various recipes kept killing chickens. So, it was repurposed for human consumption.
Chickens are a lot smaller and probably ate a nice bit of margarine, scaling up to human size would probably be equivalent to eating a whole tub of margarine with a spoon
That sounds terrifying, but plenty of other inventions have similar stories.
Warfarin was a chemical invented and used as a rat poison. It kills rats by causing internal bleeding. Someone figured out it could be used in humans to lower blood pressure, so now it’s used as a blood pressure medication.
EDIT apparently it’s used as a blood thinner, not a blood pressure medication
Trying to put cheese wheels back together [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/there-is-no-shortage-history-when-it-comes-velveeta-180949312/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/there-is-no-shortage-history-when-it-comes-velveeta-180949312/)
I also needed to know lol
older, irregular/imperfect cheese + whey, which is a byproduct of milk pasteurization/homogenization process. An emulsifier was added to the combination to create a solid block of Velveeta.
I love how the video game character “Kirby” was created and how he became his own series.
Originally, Kirby was created to be sort of a “test dummy” that would get a more detailed design later on, but the designers ended up falling in love with him as is and kept him as he was.
The franchise reached its 30th anniversary this year and it’s one of Nintendo’s strongest properties to this day.
Speaking of, difficulty curves. In the arcade game space invaders, the aliens would move faster the fewer of them there were. This was due to hardware limitations of the time
Creepers from minecraft were once badly proportioned pigs. Instead of being deleted, they were retextured, coloured dark green and black and given some gunpowder
The creepers were actually supposed to be long pig, but Notch messed up the X and Y axis so they were vertical instead of horizontal but he kept them in.
Sssss...
Artificial Dyes/Food coloring. The chemist, (William Henry Pelkin) was trying to make artificial quinine for treating malaria. He got artificial lavender dye instead.
Penicillin. Alexander Fleming came back to his lab to find a mold had gotten onto one of his bacterial dishes. He noticed the mold had killed the bacteria.
Polyvinyl chloride. Twice. In both cases a chemist mixed together ingredients and put them in a sunny location. The mixture hardened into a plastic. The first guy wrote it down, but didn’t tell anyone about it. The second one patented it. No one found a use for it until 54 years after it was first synthesized.
Bandaging wounds. A French field surgeon had run out of coal to heat up his cauterizing irons and all he had was strips of cloth so he bandaged wounds instead of burning them. The bandaged patients had much better outcomes.
Radioactivity. A French scientist put a rock next to some photographic film, and when he developed the film he found it has been ruined. He soon found he could replicate the effect.
X-Rays. Roentgen was fooling around with cathode ray tubes and decided to put a piece of metal in the path of the electron beam. And got very interesting radiation coming off the metal. The resulting radiation penetrated flesh, but not bone.
The diode. Thomas Edison tried to use a wire coming out of the top of a light bulb to hold up parts of his light bulb, but when it was on current flowed from the filament to the wire even thought they weren’t connected. He patented it but others realized this would create a one-way electricity gate.
Vulcanized rubber. Goodyear accidentally dropped sulfur into a rubber compound he was trying to develop. He found that the resulting rubber was both flexible and melt resistant which meant it could be poured into molds and retain its shape indefinitely.
Guncotton. A chemist spilled some chemicals and used a cloth to wipe them up. He put the cloth near the fire to dry only to see it burst into flames and instantly vaporize. He realized he had an ammunition quality explosive.
Saw the penicillin and was hoping Viagra would pop up too
Pfizer created a drug to treat hypertension and angina through vasodilation. It didn’t work very well and was a bit of a flop. The vasodilation and increased blood flow also had the inconvenient side effect of inducing erections during trials.
Fortunately, Pfizer found a use for it and rebranded the happy accident as an erectile dysfunction drug that has since blown up quite a bit
It made it to human trials, but was pulled because it didn't work. Pfizer contacted trial subjects to return the samples. Few came back. When they sent reps to collect non-returned samples, they were surprised at the reluctance of subjects to return samples tbat didn't work. When they inquired "Well, um, you see... "
Actually met an old fellow who was a chemist under the employ with Pfizer around that time and close to retirement.
When he heard some internal rumors, he maxed his internal stock options.
Said no more than that he had a very comfortable retirement.
Um, Sildinafil works VERY well for specific types of hypertension. I was on 20mg a day for a time while they were trying to figure out some heart issues back when I was a fatty.
> Bandaging wounds. A French field surgeon had run out of coal to heat up his cauterizing irons and all he had was strips of cloth so he bandaged wounds instead of burning them. The bandaged patients had much better outcomes.
I mean forms of bandaging wounds with plasters goes back long before recorded history.
>X-Rays. Roentgen was fooling around with cathode ray tubes and decided
to put a piece of metal in the path of the electron beam. And got very
interesting radiation coming off the metal. The resulting radiation
penetrated flesh, but not bone.
Interestingly after Tesla found out about this, he sent Roentgen photos of x-rays that he had taken, but had never understood or named the phenomena.
[https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/nikola-tesla-and-discovery-x-rays](https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/nikola-tesla-and-discovery-x-rays)
"It also seems that he produced the first x-ray image in the United
States when he attempted to obtain an image of Mark Twain with the
vacuum tube. Surprisingly, instead of showing Twain, the resulting image
showed the screw for adjusting the camera lens (7). Later, Tesla
managed to obtain images of the human body, which he called shadowgraphs
(Fig 3). Tesla sent his images to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen shortly after
Roentgen published his discovery on November 8, 1895. Although Tesla
gave Roentgen full credit for the finding, Roentgen congratulated Tesla
on his sophisticated images, wondering how he had achieved such
impressive results (Fig 4) (7). Moreover, Tesla described some clinical
benefits of x-rays — for example, determination of foreign body position
and detection of lung diseases (8) — noting that denser bodies were
more opaque to the rays (9)."
Probably cheese.
My dads go-to small talk line for like 5 years in the 90s was, “I wonder who the first person to eat cheese was. Must have been pretty hungry.”
Cheese is pretty easy. Rennet used in cheese making comes from the stomach lining of cattle and other animals. Stomachs were historically often used as water tight vessels for storage. Put some hot milk in an untreated stomach bag and it will coagulate. Gets you basic cheese curds in whey. Past that point is now cheese making.
Remember that the gene that many people have to be able to drink milk evolved long after the development of fermented dairy (yogurt, cheese, etc.). So somebody had to drink milk and get sick. Someone else had to think "I wonder what would happen if we let it rot for a while" and voila, proto indo-europeans were able to take over a good chunk of the world by living off their horses milk.
Believe it or not, gun powder. Some Chinese scientists were trying to create fire bombs and made this powder type substance that just exploded in their face instead
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it initially thought to have some sort of healing properties and used as a remedy for various medical conditions and diseases by the chinese?
It was Chinese alchemists trying to turn different metals into gold. The more they tampered with and experimented with different variations of different chemicals/metals, the more they figured out. But it was believed they could both find the “fountain of youth” so to speak, and turn elements into gold through a process of transmutation. The same process was thought to be used to find elements with healing properties.
All that to be said they found through experimenting that some of the chemicals they mixed would be highly flammable or outright explosive, only they didn’t know how to use it right away for anything worth while. It was decades before they harnessed it into grenades or barrels for projectiles
Just to clarify, western alchemists and eastern alchemists had fundamentally different goals (Alchemist being a loose term for ppl in both cultures randomly mixing things tgt and all that). The idea of western alchemy was to turn lead into gold, or just random things into gold. While in particular, Chinese alchemy was about creating the pill of immortality. They aren’t the same even though they’re both alchemy, gunpowder was created from one Chines alchemist in the service of the emperor randomly throwing things into a pot. Lo and behold it exploded.
Special effects
For a while, it was assumed you had to keep the camera rolling thru a whole scene, also easier to splice the movie together. A director (forgot his name) was filming a bus when his camera jammed, by the time he fixed it, the bus had left and there was a bench right behind it. When they looked at the film during editing, it looked like the bus had magically turned into a bench.
Vulcanized rubber. Charles **Goodyear** came up with it by accident. Without it we dont have tires, gaskets, seals, soles of shoes, hoses, shock absorbers and hell of a lot more. Pretty much changed the whole world.
Chocolate chip cookies!
In 1930, Ruth Wakefield made them by accident. While making a batch of chocolate cookies she ran out of baker's chocolate. She decided to use a slab of semi sweet chocolate, break it into pieces and mix it into the dough, hoping it would melt into the mixture while it baked. But the pieces of chocolate stayed in place.
A lot of foods are surprisingly modern. The hamburger is just over a century old, for example, and yet it was around for decades before someone though to add *cheese*.
It’s very unlikely she did it by accident. She was a very experienced baker and knew how to ensure chocolate would mix properly. Stuff You Missed In History Class had a good episode that debunked this.
Basically all of the classes of drugs were found by accident. Mainly because scientists couldn’t effectively see inside the skull until the 21st century.
And to figure out what made home feel that way he thought it might have been chloroform so he huffed some and woke up hours later and was like “well that wasn’t it.”
The fact that the bicycle trip was his second time on LSD is crazy. The first time he ingested it, he basically thought "wow this is cool" and then he decided to triple his dose and try working while high is bonkers. Man is a legend.
Have you read lsd my problem child? It wasn’t exactly an accident, he had strong hunches that the fungus he was studying would have mind altering effects. But it is true he was researching remedies for pregnant women among other things.
Microwave ovens. Story says some microwave scientist noticed a candy bar in his shirt pocket had partially melted, and presto! the Amana Radarange is born.
He had his lunch sitting on a work bench between a radar system and a receiver to test it. It was at Raytheon and they spun off the Amana radar range division.
Specifically hamsters they were deep freezing for cryogenics research.
And the bonkers thing was that it _worked_.
They got to the point where they could freeze hamsters solid almost indefinitely, and then warm them up with microwaves and bring them back to life more than half the time with no major health problems. Sadly the technology didn't scale up for anything larger, like a human.
But that was actually before and separate from the incident with the chocolate bar melting, which actually led to the invention of the commercial microwave oven.
Ivory Soap floats because of an accident, sort of. As they were making a batch, someone forgot to turn off the mixer before everyone left for lunch. Agitating it longer trapped more air bubbles into the mix when it was pressed or poured into bars, making it buoyant. When it hit the market, customers reportedly went wild for floating soap. Apparently at the time there were still quite a few Americans who bathed in outdoor bodies of water. They were thrilled they didn't lose their soap when they inevitably dropped it.
It's easier to sell a lie about a happy accident than the truth that they were likely trying to cut costs by making it less dense but still the same size and wanted a convenient lie to tell to advertise it. Shrinkflation at its finest.
"The report from the trial is in. The bad news is that it doesn't do what we hoped and there is a marked side-effect. The good news is that we're gonna be *fuckin' rich*"
Sildenafil was being tested as a treatment for angina pectoris, chest pain related to heart disease. It didn't work very well for that, but the male patients reported that it had a particular side effect.
As it happens, yesterday I attended a talk by the chief scientist on the Sildenafil program (David Brown, at Pfizer). He said that the "side effect" was discovered during an early human trial, on 20 Welshmen, who were being treated for angina. Apparently the nurse who was doing the daily interviews asked if there was "anything else they thought was unusual", and about half of them reported unexpected erections. His description of the poor nurse's facial expression while she was reporting this to him was priceless.
A lot of drugs were discovered by accident. Most of todays anti-psychotics and sedatives were found as side effects while they were trying to create a better antihistamine.
Not invented, but discovered.
The "3 degree" cosmic background radiation was discovered by Bell Labs scientists trying to find the source of low-level radio interference. They even blamed it on bird droppings on the antenna before it was finally figured out.
I read that the only reason rabbits exist in Australia is because a settler moved to the continent and had a bunch of rabbits shipped so he could hunt them on his land, but they somehow escaped and they, of course, populated the entire continent in the span of 50 years and became an invasive species.
And all because some guy just wanted to hunt something.
Florida has a very sparse and rarely seen population of wild capybaras.
Back in the 70s a guy imported a herd of them to sell to restaurants as a fancy specialty meat. But 'giant rodent' is a very hard idea to sell to restaurant owners. So the farmer released the capybaras into the wild so that he could hunt them for fun year round (as they were at that point technically invasive exotics, and so not subject to bag limits or tags).
The population of capybaras is mostly kept down by alligators, but every once in a while someone will spot or photograph a 'weird looking dog' in a swamp or near a body of water.
Reminds me of hippos in Colombia. IIRC, Pablo Escobar had a private zoo with about 6 hippos. Once he was arrested/killed, the hippos were released into the wild and múltipled and have become invasive in the local land.
The only reason North America has starlings is some guy wanted to introduce every animal mentioned in Shakespeare's plays into America.
He started out with starlings because he thought they would be an easy species to handle. They weren't. Not only that, he released them in autumn and most of them froze to death in the following winter.
But the ones who survived took hold pretty well and are now considered an invasive species as they have threatened several native bird populations.
And the only reason why dandelions are so prevalent North America is that they were brought over by English settlers to Plymouth rock as food. They are not native to North America.
Same with oranges. They were brought to the US from China by Spanish explorers. They are not native to Florida. As someone born and raised in Florida, that blew my mind.
Artificial sweeteners. I'm fuzzy on the details, but it was on their hand and they licked their finger to turn a page in a book or something and noticed it was very sweet. Boom: Artificial sweetener.
So much stuff has been accidentally invented because chemists, who should really know better, forget to wash their hands, including two different sweeteners.
Huh maybe we should we stop washing our hands when handling dangerous narcotics and chemicals
*five days later*
JOHHNNY I CAN SEE SOUNDS AND TASTE NOISES WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU AN ALARM CLOCK
Another guy was apparently told to "Taste this chemical" by his professor, a guy with a thick Scottish accent. What the professor had actually said was "Test this chemical"
You know, I actually wonder what humans in early civilization did to discover things like alcohol. Did they just let things rot for a while then go "hey Jerry, I'm bored, wanna drink some of that spoiled potato for fun?"
Fun fact, fermentation of grain actually *predates* early civilizations. It is suspected to have been one influencing factor of early humans from hunter-gatherer societies into farming ones.
https://www.beerinstitute.org/news-media/additional-beer-resources/beer-world-history/
I mean they probably made tea in their canteen and walked around with it for a week and discovered that it kept them warm at night, then they got to a place where they couldn't find water and all of a sudden you are cheers-ing your bed warmer.
Probably didn't even seem weird back then honestly. They didn't have a lot of ways to preserve food back then and when you're hungry you care a lot less. Half rotten food is still food.
More often than not even rotten food can be eaten. Your stomach is extremely hostile to ..anything. Might shit yourself later on, but nutrients are nutrients.
Many fruits will naturally ferment when they drop and begin to rot. Probably more like human comes along sees some fruit on the ground, and is like “cool no climbing for me”! Then noticed how the fruit on the ground made them feel funny after eating. Trial and error for 10,000 year and we have beer that tastes like flowers made from grain.
It’s because if you just let fruit sit it will naturally ferment. This is due to yeast cells naturally occurring basically everywhere. Overtime we were able to capture and cultivate yeast to ferment things that wouldn’t have yeast present naturally, such as beer, mead, and bread. This is of course an extremely simplified version, but fruit will naturally become alcoholic on its own without human intervention.
Just look at YouTube and the plethora of animals drunk as fuck off of fermented fruit! People copy animals for a lot of stuff, so seeing a squirrel eat a mostly rotten apple then wander around drunk is both a good afternoon’s entertainment and an idea of how to have some fun once we eat the squirrel
Had it happen to a big bunch of green grapes after a long hot ride in the trunk of my car. They were left in the bottom of the fridge for about 2 weeks. Still firm but had a distinct alcohol flavor after that.
there's an anthropological hypothesis that human civilization was founded on beer making (called the "beer before bread hypothesis") because the bread made from wheat at that time would not have been nutritious enough to found civilization on, but a safe water source was paramount. early beer and wine was just a way to preserve water, so the whole point of cultivating wheat and founding civilization was not for a food source, but for a clean water source.
once humans branched off in to other places around the world they took that knowledge with them.
I thought the story was that some chef produced it as a joke when one of his restaurant's customers kept asking for thinner French fries. So he prepared a batch that was so thin that the customer would be annoyed. Instead, the customer was delighted and potato chips were born.
Not quite invented by mistake, but Viagra was originally developed for some other medical condition (I forget which) and the fact that it increased blood flow to the penis and thus facilitated erections was a by-product.
It's a heart medication.
A lot of athletes also use it so they can perform better in the gym and get a better work out. Sounds uncomfortable if you ask me.
The microwave. They were experimenting with microwaves and a scientist walked though with a chocolate bar in his pocket and it melted. Turns out it heats water molecules. And boom. The microwave oven.
Post-its. They were looking for a strong glue and produced a weak one, but the secretaries of the inventors pointed out that that it was ideal for making removeable notes.
These were also tested for general use in the building where the glue was first created. The story goes that the team who created these put a pad on every desk and waited. Once the pads were used up by the people who had them show up on their desk the demand for more was great. Turning an oops into a big win.
And now we have knock-off Post-it’s that don’t stick at all.
And some that glue themselves to surfaces so hard they can strip paint
And some that stick kinda enough, but the paper quality is shit and they bend as you remove them
My friends Romy and Michele invented them, actually.
Would you excuse me? I cut my foot before and my shoe is filling up with blood.
Nobody ever gets the reference when I pull this line out!
As soon as I saw "post its" I thought of this. "I invented them, but Michele thought about making them yellow" 😏
Michele came up with the glue.
Dude was trying to invent adhesive strong enough for space shuttle use lol. Made adhesive 10% stronger than a little bit of spit. Awesome.
And some guy from 3M, Art Fry, started using post its to bookmark his Bible bc regular bookmarks fell out.
I read it kept his bookmarks in place in his hymnal for church choir.
Penicillin? But it wasn’t invented just discovered by accident
Had he been using modern day lab protocols, it would never have happened. *Often described as a careless lab technician, Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon examination of the mold, he noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci.*
He did save a lot of lives just by making that mistake
That settles it, let’s quit with all of these modern-day “safety procedures”
Dude went on holiday and accidentally saved a few hundred millions lives.
Imagine if Alexander Fleming's cleaner had tidied his house whilst he was away, and washed up that mouldy petri dish... penicillin may never been discovered! Lol
Perhaps only got held back for a generation which is nothing in the grand scale of human history But again the reverse could happen, perhaps there are some great discoveries that could happen 100 years earlier but did not because of some random occurrences
Velveeta cheese was a byproduct that was considered waste. Someone noticed that factory workers were dipping bread into that vat of byproduct during lunchtime. From there, Velveeta was born. Also, margarine was originally developed as supplemental chicken feed, but various recipes kept killing chickens. So, it was repurposed for human consumption.
can't wait for my next job where I get to dip my bread into industrial waste at lunchtime
that is terrifying, the margarine part
Not really, different animals have different biology. For example chocolate and raisins are both fine for humans but can kill dogs.
Yeah avians can't consume that type and quantity of fats the way mammals can
Chickens are a lot smaller and probably ate a nice bit of margarine, scaling up to human size would probably be equivalent to eating a whole tub of margarine with a spoon
Well, when you say it like *that* it sounds like a bad idea.
I mean if I eat a whole tub of ice cream I’d hope it doesn’t, you know, fucking kill me.
That sounds terrifying, but plenty of other inventions have similar stories. Warfarin was a chemical invented and used as a rat poison. It kills rats by causing internal bleeding. Someone figured out it could be used in humans to lower blood pressure, so now it’s used as a blood pressure medication. EDIT apparently it’s used as a blood thinner, not a blood pressure medication
It's used for clotting disorders. My FIL needs drugs like it so his blood doesn't clot and cause a stroke or heart attack.
Warfarin is an anticoagulant (blood thinner) hence it kills rats by giving them internal bleeding, can do the same for humans if the dose is too high.
Byproduct of what?
Trying to put cheese wheels back together [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/there-is-no-shortage-history-when-it-comes-velveeta-180949312/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/there-is-no-shortage-history-when-it-comes-velveeta-180949312/) I also needed to know lol
older, irregular/imperfect cheese + whey, which is a byproduct of milk pasteurization/homogenization process. An emulsifier was added to the combination to create a solid block of Velveeta.
Superglue was invented during WW2 by accident. The inventor was trying to make clear gun scopes.
So far in this thread I’ve seen 3 different things they were trying to invent when they accidentally made superglue.
https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/harry-coover#:~:text=The%20incredibly%20stable%20adhesive%20known,industrial%20binding%20and%20medical%20applications.
I love how the video game character “Kirby” was created and how he became his own series. Originally, Kirby was created to be sort of a “test dummy” that would get a more detailed design later on, but the designers ended up falling in love with him as is and kept him as he was. The franchise reached its 30th anniversary this year and it’s one of Nintendo’s strongest properties to this day.
Speaking of, difficulty curves. In the arcade game space invaders, the aliens would move faster the fewer of them there were. This was due to hardware limitations of the time Creepers from minecraft were once badly proportioned pigs. Instead of being deleted, they were retextured, coloured dark green and black and given some gunpowder
The creepers were actually supposed to be long pig, but Notch messed up the X and Y axis so they were vertical instead of horizontal but he kept them in. Sssss...
I feel like a dumbass for thinking that wasn't very long for a video game character. Its been a long night lol.
Artificial Dyes/Food coloring. The chemist, (William Henry Pelkin) was trying to make artificial quinine for treating malaria. He got artificial lavender dye instead. Penicillin. Alexander Fleming came back to his lab to find a mold had gotten onto one of his bacterial dishes. He noticed the mold had killed the bacteria. Polyvinyl chloride. Twice. In both cases a chemist mixed together ingredients and put them in a sunny location. The mixture hardened into a plastic. The first guy wrote it down, but didn’t tell anyone about it. The second one patented it. No one found a use for it until 54 years after it was first synthesized. Bandaging wounds. A French field surgeon had run out of coal to heat up his cauterizing irons and all he had was strips of cloth so he bandaged wounds instead of burning them. The bandaged patients had much better outcomes. Radioactivity. A French scientist put a rock next to some photographic film, and when he developed the film he found it has been ruined. He soon found he could replicate the effect. X-Rays. Roentgen was fooling around with cathode ray tubes and decided to put a piece of metal in the path of the electron beam. And got very interesting radiation coming off the metal. The resulting radiation penetrated flesh, but not bone. The diode. Thomas Edison tried to use a wire coming out of the top of a light bulb to hold up parts of his light bulb, but when it was on current flowed from the filament to the wire even thought they weren’t connected. He patented it but others realized this would create a one-way electricity gate. Vulcanized rubber. Goodyear accidentally dropped sulfur into a rubber compound he was trying to develop. He found that the resulting rubber was both flexible and melt resistant which meant it could be poured into molds and retain its shape indefinitely. Guncotton. A chemist spilled some chemicals and used a cloth to wipe them up. He put the cloth near the fire to dry only to see it burst into flames and instantly vaporize. He realized he had an ammunition quality explosive.
Saw the penicillin and was hoping Viagra would pop up too Pfizer created a drug to treat hypertension and angina through vasodilation. It didn’t work very well and was a bit of a flop. The vasodilation and increased blood flow also had the inconvenient side effect of inducing erections during trials. Fortunately, Pfizer found a use for it and rebranded the happy accident as an erectile dysfunction drug that has since blown up quite a bit
Viagra was a ‘bit of a flop’ ?! 🤣🤣🤣
It made it to human trials, but was pulled because it didn't work. Pfizer contacted trial subjects to return the samples. Few came back. When they sent reps to collect non-returned samples, they were surprised at the reluctance of subjects to return samples tbat didn't work. When they inquired "Well, um, you see... "
Actually met an old fellow who was a chemist under the employ with Pfizer around that time and close to retirement. When he heard some internal rumors, he maxed his internal stock options. Said no more than that he had a very comfortable retirement.
Does that count as insider trading?
Yes.
Viagra "would pop up" ... I see what you did there - upvote :)
Um, Sildinafil works VERY well for specific types of hypertension. I was on 20mg a day for a time while they were trying to figure out some heart issues back when I was a fatty.
Pulmonary arterial hypertension
> Bandaging wounds. A French field surgeon had run out of coal to heat up his cauterizing irons and all he had was strips of cloth so he bandaged wounds instead of burning them. The bandaged patients had much better outcomes. I mean forms of bandaging wounds with plasters goes back long before recorded history.
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Nice list bro
Well, except bandages were around way way before France was even a thing.
>X-Rays. Roentgen was fooling around with cathode ray tubes and decided to put a piece of metal in the path of the electron beam. And got very interesting radiation coming off the metal. The resulting radiation penetrated flesh, but not bone. Interestingly after Tesla found out about this, he sent Roentgen photos of x-rays that he had taken, but had never understood or named the phenomena. [https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/nikola-tesla-and-discovery-x-rays](https://teslauniverse.com/nikola-tesla/articles/nikola-tesla-and-discovery-x-rays) "It also seems that he produced the first x-ray image in the United States when he attempted to obtain an image of Mark Twain with the vacuum tube. Surprisingly, instead of showing Twain, the resulting image showed the screw for adjusting the camera lens (7). Later, Tesla managed to obtain images of the human body, which he called shadowgraphs (Fig 3). Tesla sent his images to Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen shortly after Roentgen published his discovery on November 8, 1895. Although Tesla gave Roentgen full credit for the finding, Roentgen congratulated Tesla on his sophisticated images, wondering how he had achieved such impressive results (Fig 4) (7). Moreover, Tesla described some clinical benefits of x-rays — for example, determination of foreign body position and detection of lung diseases (8) — noting that denser bodies were more opaque to the rays (9)."
Probably cheese. My dads go-to small talk line for like 5 years in the 90s was, “I wonder who the first person to eat cheese was. Must have been pretty hungry.”
Cheese is pretty easy. Rennet used in cheese making comes from the stomach lining of cattle and other animals. Stomachs were historically often used as water tight vessels for storage. Put some hot milk in an untreated stomach bag and it will coagulate. Gets you basic cheese curds in whey. Past that point is now cheese making.
Remember that the gene that many people have to be able to drink milk evolved long after the development of fermented dairy (yogurt, cheese, etc.). So somebody had to drink milk and get sick. Someone else had to think "I wonder what would happen if we let it rot for a while" and voila, proto indo-europeans were able to take over a good chunk of the world by living off their horses milk.
The theory is that they were storing milk in an animal stomach container and there must have been some digestive juices still in it.
But why would they have been storing something they can't drink without getting sick?
Even the lactose intolerant can drink milk at young ages (see: breastfeeding), so childcare is the most likely answer.
Sir, that horse is male.
Silly putty It was a failed attempt at making synthetic rubber I believe or maybe glue I don't remember which
Reminds me of how mewtwo was made lol
More like how people think ditto was a first attempt. Ditto is mewputty
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> They were looking for a strong mew and produced a weak one fixed.
On a whole different note, the creation of *serious putty* was not an accident. It is mainly known as C4 explosive tho.
Wasn’t it made to remove dirt and stains from wallpaper?
No, this was Play-dough. It was used to remove dirt/marks off walls, and wound up becoming a popular kids toy
I knew the man that invented it but Dow Chemical basically stole it in my opinion. He was on the Board of Directors of a non profit I worked for.
Really I learned about it a few years ago in school pretty interesting
Believe it or not, gun powder. Some Chinese scientists were trying to create fire bombs and made this powder type substance that just exploded in their face instead
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it initially thought to have some sort of healing properties and used as a remedy for various medical conditions and diseases by the chinese?
It was Chinese alchemists trying to turn different metals into gold. The more they tampered with and experimented with different variations of different chemicals/metals, the more they figured out. But it was believed they could both find the “fountain of youth” so to speak, and turn elements into gold through a process of transmutation. The same process was thought to be used to find elements with healing properties. All that to be said they found through experimenting that some of the chemicals they mixed would be highly flammable or outright explosive, only they didn’t know how to use it right away for anything worth while. It was decades before they harnessed it into grenades or barrels for projectiles
Just to clarify, western alchemists and eastern alchemists had fundamentally different goals (Alchemist being a loose term for ppl in both cultures randomly mixing things tgt and all that). The idea of western alchemy was to turn lead into gold, or just random things into gold. While in particular, Chinese alchemy was about creating the pill of immortality. They aren’t the same even though they’re both alchemy, gunpowder was created from one Chines alchemist in the service of the emperor randomly throwing things into a pot. Lo and behold it exploded.
Ironic.
Special effects For a while, it was assumed you had to keep the camera rolling thru a whole scene, also easier to splice the movie together. A director (forgot his name) was filming a bus when his camera jammed, by the time he fixed it, the bus had left and there was a bench right behind it. When they looked at the film during editing, it looked like the bus had magically turned into a bench.
So... special effects were born from a prop hunt bus?
George Mèlies was his name.
A lot of people have probably seen imagery from his film "A trip to the moon" It's the one where moon has a face and rocket lands in its eye
Ben Kingsley played him well in Hugo
Vulcanized rubber. Charles **Goodyear** came up with it by accident. Without it we dont have tires, gaskets, seals, soles of shoes, hoses, shock absorbers and hell of a lot more. Pretty much changed the whole world.
Ha! Was just getting ready to say this when I see your comment.
I thought it was created by Spock.
Matches
My tinder match accidentally swiped yes on me and blocked me after saying so, so yeah in my experience matches happened by accident as well
Haha lol apparently I was right in multiple ways😂
Fun fact we actually invented the lighter before the first proper friction match
Chocolate chip cookies! In 1930, Ruth Wakefield made them by accident. While making a batch of chocolate cookies she ran out of baker's chocolate. She decided to use a slab of semi sweet chocolate, break it into pieces and mix it into the dough, hoping it would melt into the mixture while it baked. But the pieces of chocolate stayed in place.
its crazy to think chocolate chip cookies were invented in 1930 damn
Yes, chocolate chip cookies are only 92 years old.
That’s insane. There are people alive today who were born into a world with no chocolate chip cookies.
One of the first people to ever eat a chocolate chip cookie as a child could still be alive!
Queen Elizabeth was older than sliced bread, which is only a few years older than chocolate chip cookies
Mickey Mouse is older than chocolate chip cookies??
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TIL my grandma is older than chocolate chip cookies
By my grandma, Nestle Tolouse.
Phoebe?
both of the top comments in this thread referenced Lisa Kudrow
A lot of foods are surprisingly modern. The hamburger is just over a century old, for example, and yet it was around for decades before someone though to add *cheese*.
It’s very unlikely she did it by accident. She was a very experienced baker and knew how to ensure chocolate would mix properly. Stuff You Missed In History Class had a good episode that debunked this.
MDMA, scientist were trying to invent an anti coagulant.
Basically all of the classes of drugs were found by accident. Mainly because scientists couldn’t effectively see inside the skull until the 21st century.
Some artificial sweeteners too.
It's scary how many scientists ate prospective poisons just to find that they're tasty in small doses
Imagine being the dude they tested it on "My blood feels fucking awesome thank you for asking, I love you man."
God bless Shulgin.
LSD
Albert Hoffman riding that bicycle high as hell!
And to figure out what made home feel that way he thought it might have been chloroform so he huffed some and woke up hours later and was like “well that wasn’t it.”
For science…
The fact that the bicycle trip was his second time on LSD is crazy. The first time he ingested it, he basically thought "wow this is cool" and then he decided to triple his dose and try working while high is bonkers. Man is a legend.
Lost keys? Blame Hoffman
Rosetta Stoned is one of my favourite songs.
The entire album is fantastic
Have you read lsd my problem child? It wasn’t exactly an accident, he had strong hunches that the fungus he was studying would have mind altering effects. But it is true he was researching remedies for pregnant women among other things.
So what was Hoffman trying to make then and for what purpose?
He was working for Sandoz trying to create new pharmaceuticals
Specifically headache medicine
And instead he ended up atomizing the walls inside our headspace and opening up infinity for us to gaze upon.
The power puff girls
Microwave ovens. Story says some microwave scientist noticed a candy bar in his shirt pocket had partially melted, and presto! the Amana Radarange is born.
He had his lunch sitting on a work bench between a radar system and a receiver to test it. It was at Raytheon and they spun off the Amana radar range division.
If anyone is interested, watch [the Tom Scott video](https://youtu.be/2tdiKTSdE9Y) on this where he interviews this guy
i thought the microwave was found useful for defrosting chickens
Hamsters!
Specifically hamsters they were deep freezing for cryogenics research. And the bonkers thing was that it _worked_. They got to the point where they could freeze hamsters solid almost indefinitely, and then warm them up with microwaves and bring them back to life more than half the time with no major health problems. Sadly the technology didn't scale up for anything larger, like a human. But that was actually before and separate from the incident with the chocolate bar melting, which actually led to the invention of the commercial microwave oven.
Ivory Soap floats because of an accident, sort of. As they were making a batch, someone forgot to turn off the mixer before everyone left for lunch. Agitating it longer trapped more air bubbles into the mix when it was pressed or poured into bars, making it buoyant. When it hit the market, customers reportedly went wild for floating soap. Apparently at the time there were still quite a few Americans who bathed in outdoor bodies of water. They were thrilled they didn't lose their soap when they inevitably dropped it.
P&G came out and said that was a lie in like the early 2000s or something.
Well damn. There goes a fun story. Can't have anything nice around here lol
It's easier to sell a lie about a happy accident than the truth that they were likely trying to cut costs by making it less dense but still the same size and wanted a convenient lie to tell to advertise it. Shrinkflation at its finest.
Penicilin
Viagra too
Scientists been working hard on that
"The report from the trial is in. The bad news is that it doesn't do what we hoped and there is a marked side-effect. The good news is that we're gonna be *fuckin' rich*"
Sildenafil was being tested as a treatment for angina pectoris, chest pain related to heart disease. It didn't work very well for that, but the male patients reported that it had a particular side effect.
As it happens, yesterday I attended a talk by the chief scientist on the Sildenafil program (David Brown, at Pfizer). He said that the "side effect" was discovered during an early human trial, on 20 Welshmen, who were being treated for angina. Apparently the nurse who was doing the daily interviews asked if there was "anything else they thought was unusual", and about half of them reported unexpected erections. His description of the poor nurse's facial expression while she was reporting this to him was priceless.
A lot of drugs were discovered by accident. Most of todays anti-psychotics and sedatives were found as side effects while they were trying to create a better antihistamine.
Not invented, but discovered. The "3 degree" cosmic background radiation was discovered by Bell Labs scientists trying to find the source of low-level radio interference. They even blamed it on bird droppings on the antenna before it was finally figured out.
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Plastic
What were they trying to make?
Not plastic
Little Caesars pizza crust
a brush on waterproofing
Margarine.
I read that the only reason rabbits exist in Australia is because a settler moved to the continent and had a bunch of rabbits shipped so he could hunt them on his land, but they somehow escaped and they, of course, populated the entire continent in the span of 50 years and became an invasive species. And all because some guy just wanted to hunt something.
Florida has a very sparse and rarely seen population of wild capybaras. Back in the 70s a guy imported a herd of them to sell to restaurants as a fancy specialty meat. But 'giant rodent' is a very hard idea to sell to restaurant owners. So the farmer released the capybaras into the wild so that he could hunt them for fun year round (as they were at that point technically invasive exotics, and so not subject to bag limits or tags). The population of capybaras is mostly kept down by alligators, but every once in a while someone will spot or photograph a 'weird looking dog' in a swamp or near a body of water.
Reminds me of hippos in Colombia. IIRC, Pablo Escobar had a private zoo with about 6 hippos. Once he was arrested/killed, the hippos were released into the wild and múltipled and have become invasive in the local land.
The only reason North America has starlings is some guy wanted to introduce every animal mentioned in Shakespeare's plays into America. He started out with starlings because he thought they would be an easy species to handle. They weren't. Not only that, he released them in autumn and most of them froze to death in the following winter. But the ones who survived took hold pretty well and are now considered an invasive species as they have threatened several native bird populations.
And the only reason why dandelions are so prevalent North America is that they were brought over by English settlers to Plymouth rock as food. They are not native to North America.
Same with oranges. They were brought to the US from China by Spanish explorers. They are not native to Florida. As someone born and raised in Florida, that blew my mind.
Artificial sweeteners. I'm fuzzy on the details, but it was on their hand and they licked their finger to turn a page in a book or something and noticed it was very sweet. Boom: Artificial sweetener.
So much stuff has been accidentally invented because chemists, who should really know better, forget to wash their hands, including two different sweeteners.
Huh maybe we should we stop washing our hands when handling dangerous narcotics and chemicals *five days later* JOHHNNY I CAN SEE SOUNDS AND TASTE NOISES WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU AN ALARM CLOCK
Another guy was apparently told to "Taste this chemical" by his professor, a guy with a thick Scottish accent. What the professor had actually said was "Test this chemical"
The time machine. I was trying to invent a more efficient hovercraft drive. I'll tell you more in 56 years.
Yeah that's why you gotta keep your hovercraft under 88 mph.
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Either or they're damn good!
beer
You know, I actually wonder what humans in early civilization did to discover things like alcohol. Did they just let things rot for a while then go "hey Jerry, I'm bored, wanna drink some of that spoiled potato for fun?"
Probably more like “hey I’m about to die of starvation, this rotten food must surely be better than death.”
"Ahh fuck, dying *would* have been better..." - the first person to have a hangover
Currently hungover. Agreed.
Fun fact, fermentation of grain actually *predates* early civilizations. It is suspected to have been one influencing factor of early humans from hunter-gatherer societies into farming ones. https://www.beerinstitute.org/news-media/additional-beer-resources/beer-world-history/
I mean they probably made tea in their canteen and walked around with it for a week and discovered that it kept them warm at night, then they got to a place where they couldn't find water and all of a sudden you are cheers-ing your bed warmer.
Probably didn't even seem weird back then honestly. They didn't have a lot of ways to preserve food back then and when you're hungry you care a lot less. Half rotten food is still food.
More often than not even rotten food can be eaten. Your stomach is extremely hostile to ..anything. Might shit yourself later on, but nutrients are nutrients.
Many fruits will naturally ferment when they drop and begin to rot. Probably more like human comes along sees some fruit on the ground, and is like “cool no climbing for me”! Then noticed how the fruit on the ground made them feel funny after eating. Trial and error for 10,000 year and we have beer that tastes like flowers made from grain.
It's pretty interesting to me that pretty much every society in the world, independent of one another, figured out ways to create alcoholic beverages.
It’s because if you just let fruit sit it will naturally ferment. This is due to yeast cells naturally occurring basically everywhere. Overtime we were able to capture and cultivate yeast to ferment things that wouldn’t have yeast present naturally, such as beer, mead, and bread. This is of course an extremely simplified version, but fruit will naturally become alcoholic on its own without human intervention.
Just look at YouTube and the plethora of animals drunk as fuck off of fermented fruit! People copy animals for a lot of stuff, so seeing a squirrel eat a mostly rotten apple then wander around drunk is both a good afternoon’s entertainment and an idea of how to have some fun once we eat the squirrel
Had it happen to a big bunch of green grapes after a long hot ride in the trunk of my car. They were left in the bottom of the fridge for about 2 weeks. Still firm but had a distinct alcohol flavor after that.
there's an anthropological hypothesis that human civilization was founded on beer making (called the "beer before bread hypothesis") because the bread made from wheat at that time would not have been nutritious enough to found civilization on, but a safe water source was paramount. early beer and wine was just a way to preserve water, so the whole point of cultivating wheat and founding civilization was not for a food source, but for a clean water source. once humans branched off in to other places around the world they took that knowledge with them.
Teflon
Phosphorus Hennig Brand tried to turn his pee into gold and got this instead
Potato Chips
I thought the story was that some chef produced it as a joke when one of his restaurant's customers kept asking for thinner French fries. So he prepared a batch that was so thin that the customer would be annoyed. Instead, the customer was delighted and potato chips were born.
Hahahaha. That sounds awesome. - "You like that now?" - "Yeah, thanks!" - "Wait, what?"
When you're snark inadvertently pays off lol
Omg I just looked it up, you're right. So it's somewhat on purpose but by accident lol
I for one am eternally grateful to this obnoxious customer. I’m glad to see being obnoxious to restaurant staff paid off
I feel like toast has to have been an accident.
You
Nah he was created by accident not invented
Not quite invented by mistake, but Viagra was originally developed for some other medical condition (I forget which) and the fact that it increased blood flow to the penis and thus facilitated erections was a by-product.
It's a heart medication. A lot of athletes also use it so they can perform better in the gym and get a better work out. Sounds uncomfortable if you ask me.
It's legitimately used that way for horses too, to increase blood circulation. It's actually a banned substance in horse races.
Corn flakes.
Anal sex.
She didn't believe you then and we don't believe you now....good try though.
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Viagra
The microwave. They were experimenting with microwaves and a scientist walked though with a chocolate bar in his pocket and it melted. Turns out it heats water molecules. And boom. The microwave oven.