These are the top ten accidental scientific discoveries, ranked by their overall importance.
Wilson Greatbatch had learned from some friends who were surgeons about an ailment called
heart block that occurs when natural electrical impulses from the heart’s upper chambers
don’t make it to the lower chambers.
As an expert in electrical radio signals, Greatbatch thought he could figure out how
to solve the problem.
At the time, other pacemaker devices existed, but the best ones were worn outside of the
body.
Not exactly the ideal set up.
So, one day, while working for a doctor at the Chronic Disease Research Institute where
he was designing a circuit to help record fast heart sounds, Greatbatch mistakenly grabbed
the wrong resistor and plugged it into the circuit he was making.
The circuit pulsed for 1.8 milliseconds and then stopped for 1 second and then repeated.
Greatbatch recognized the lub-dub, lub-dub rhythm.
"I stared at the thing in disbelief," he said.
“This was exactly what was needed to drive a sick human heart!”
For the next five years - just because of Greatbatch's accident - most of the world's
pacemakers used that simple blocking oscillator design.
He would go on to invent a special, long-lasting lithium ion battery that increased the time
needed between pacemaker battery swaps from 2 to 10 years.
The calorie free sweetener we know as Saccharin that we consume today in so many of our products
was discovered when Constantin Fahlberg, a chemist working on coal tar derivatives at
Baltimore’s John Hopkins University, noticed a sweet taste on his hand one evening and,
putting two and two together, realized it was from the benzoic sulfimide compound he
was working on earlier in the day.
Fahlberg began producing the substance in a factory in Germany and would soon grow wealthy,
although it wasn’t until sugar shortages during World War I that Saccharin became widely
used.
French chemist Edouard Benedictus invented safety glass, also known as laminated glass,
in a laboratory accident.
When a flask that had become coated with the plastic cellulose nitrate was accidentally
dropped, it shattered, but didn’t break into pieces.
Benedictus thought his invention would be used to reduce injuries in car accidents,
but it took more than 35 years of fine-tuning before the Ford Motor Company began to use
it in all of their production cars.
The eyepieces of WWI gas masks were one of the first practical uses of the glass.
After failing at several business ventures, in 1831, Charles Goodyear heard about a substance
called natural rubber - or gum elastic - which came from trees and was used by some companies
to manufacture goods like rubber inflatable tubes for life preservers.
But Goodyear also learned that many of these products were being returned to the manufacturer
because the gum was rotting, so he set out to see if he could overcome these problems.
He spent nearly a decade sacrificing wealth and even his own health in pursuit of perfecting
rubber.
Charles even almost accidentally suffocated himself working with harsh chemicals in his
lab.
One day, legend has it, a mixture of rubber and sulfur was inadvertently put to flame,
allowing Goodyear to witness the effects that heat had on making the mixture much more durable
and less sticky--this process is called vulcanization.
Today, our three major sources of transportation: our cars, our bicycles and our feet, all touch
the ground with vulcanized rubber.
An American self-taught engineer from Maine named Percy Spencer accidentally discovered
the revolutionary effect of high-power microwave beams when the candy bar in his pocket began
to melt from the effects of an active radar set he was working on.
To verify his discovery, Raytheon, the company Spencer was working for, built a metal box
which held the microwave power generated from a magnetron.
The first food they cooked was popcorn and then an egg, which exploded in the face of
one of the experimenters.
Raytheon quickly filed a patent for the microwave cooking process and just over a year later,
unveiled the first publicly viewable microwave called the Speedy Weeny hot dog vending machine
in New York City’s busy Grand Central Terminal.
The first commercially available microwave oven was Raytheon’s “Radarange,” which
stood almost six feet tall, weighed 750 lb., and cost a ridiculous 52,000 in today’s
dollars.
Today, nearly every American restaurant and household owns a microwave to quickly and
conveniently cook and reheat food.
Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel knew the danger of nitroglycerine all too well because his
brother was tragically killed in an accidental nitroglycerine explosion at the Nobel family’s
military equipment factory.
This deeply affected him, but one day, while working in his lab to make it safer, a vial
of the liquid accidentally slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor, but there
was no explosion.
After shaking off the initial shock of the event, Nobel realized he didn’t get blown
to bits because the vial had fallen onto a pile of sawdust, which absorbed the liquid.
Nobel learned from this “aha!”
moment and eventually mixed the substance with silica, another inert material that allowed
the explosive to be more easily manipulated and packed into small sticks, which Nobel
named “dynamite.”
The invention made him incredibly wealthy, but it also made him deeply guilty.
You see, Nobel was a pacifist and created dynamite to help people do things like blast
through rock to drill tunnels and build railroads, not use as a weapon.
But when dynamite became widely used for violence, Nobel decided that he needed to offset his
contribution to war with the creation of a fund that would promote the peaceful application
of science.
Upon his death, this became the Nobel Prize.
For centuries, people were getting high on ether.
But it wasn’t until American physician Crawford Long noticed that his friends felt no pain
when they would injure themselves staggering around, that the lightbulb went off and someone
finally thought to use it for medicinal purposes.
One of Long’s friends had two small tumors, but kept delaying getting them cut out because
he knew the surgery would hurt.
So Dr. Long convinced his friend to go under the influence of ether, while he extracted
the tumors.
This first, successful surgical use of ether as an anesthetic was in 1842.
Unfortunately for Long, and everyone else who underwent painful surgery in the meantime,
he waited seven years to publish his discovery and was scooped by a Boston dentist named
William Thomas Green, who had separately come to the same conclusion.
Dr. Green performed the first public demonstration of ether as an inhalable anesthetic at the
surgical theatre in Massachusetts General Hospital, which is now named the Ether Dome
in remembrance of that pivotal moment in the history of modern medicine.
German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen was investigating cathode rays using an early
electrical discharge tube when he realized that a new kind of ray was being emitted that
passed through a black cardboard tube and made a fluorescent screen glow, even though
the screen was 3 meters away from the tube.
Röntgen discovered its medical use when he made a picture of his wife’s hand on a photographic
plate.
To give you an idea of how important his discovery was, less than a month after Röntgen published
his paper on the subject, someone was already using X-rays for medical use.
Through 2010, more than 5 billion medical X-rays have been taken.
We use X-rays in radiation therapy to treat cancer, in astronomy, in industrial radiography,
and of course, in airport security to see through people’s luggage and even, recently,
each other.
Two years after the discovery of the neutron, Enrico Fermi and his research team in Rome
were trying to bombard uranium with neutrons.
Their results led Fermi to believe they had created new elements with 93 and 94 protons.
But a team of German scientists suspected Fermi was wrong, and began running their own
experiments.
In 1938 they discovered that Fermi’s team had, in fact, performed the first splitting
of the nucleus of a heavy element, inadvertently creating the element Barium.
This process was known as nuclear fission, and its discovery led directly to nuclear
energy reactors - which power much of the world - and the nuclear bomb - which forever
changed warfare and geopolitics.
Alexander Fleming got lucky when he left a bacteria-filled Petri dish uncovered on the
counter of his London lab and went on vacation.
When he came back, he found a mysterious mould growing that broke down the bacteria.
He grew a pure culture and determined that it was a mould known as Penicillium notatum.
Many others soon began testing the effects of Penicillin and just two years after it
was used to successfully treat eye infections in babies and has become the most widely used
antibiotic to date, saving millions of lives around the world.
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