Hey YouTube, Jim here!
Welcome to Top10 Archive!
It’s said that we make our own luck, and that fortune favors the brave.
But, after hearing the stories we're about to tell you, I personally believe it’s all
a matter of chance.
Some people are just lucky enough to make a mistake that turns into a genius invention,
or to have stumbled upon an item that’s actually worth thousands or even millions
of dollars.
Prepare to get pretty jealous – here are my top ten luck discoveries that made people
rich!
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section, tell us what the coolest thing you've ever found was!
10.
Penicillin Pretty much everyone has heard of Penicillin,
the world’s first antibiotic, but do you know the story of how it came to be discovered?
Well, it was a combination of luck and poor cleaning skills.
Sir Alexander Fleming, a Scottish physician, microbiologist, and pharmacologist, discovered
the substance in 1923 when he came back to his laboratory after a vacation.
He’d left a dirty dish in his home and when he came back to it, it was full of bacteria
and mold.
It was then that he realized that the mold had killed the bacteria.
That dirty dish earned him the Nobel Prize in 1945, a knighthood, and a place in Time
magazine’s list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
9.
Coins in the Wall When you’re a kid there’s, nothing more
exciting than playing in an abandoned house.
But a group of youngsters in Pennsylvania got much more than they bargained for when
they found several old coins near one of the walls of a house that had been empty for more
than two decades.
When they told their parents, they arranged for the wall to be broken and out spilled
an unbelievable treasure trove of coins.
There was a brilliant stash of ordinary coins, and after the total was added up it became
apparent that they were worth $8,500.
Not bad, huh?
Well, it gets better.
Some of the older coins were issued between 1793 and 1857 and included some extremely
rare ones that were valued at an astounding $200,000.
Not bad for a day of innocent exploring, right?
8.
Coca-Cola In Atlanta, Georgia in 1886, an accident happened
that would give the world one of the biggest brands to ever exist.
Dr. John Pemberton was apparently working on a medicine to cure headaches and made a
syrup with its two main ingredients - coca leaves and kola nuts.
He then headed down the street to a local pharmacy where it was sampled and declared
to be excellent.
The medicinal syrup was paired with carbonated water and placed on sale for 5 cents a glass,
which laid the foundations for the drink as we all know it today, Coca-Cola.
In 1888, Dr. John sold his remaining portion of the flourishing business to Asa G. Chandler,
who used his business acumen to turn it into the world-dominating soft drink that we all
know and love.
7.
Gold Nugget Amateur explorers dream of making a big find,
but it doesn’t happen often and most metal-detector owners only ever find scrap metal and maybe
a few coins and pieces of lost jewelry.
But, a local farmer in the Australian town of Ballarat was out searching for treasure
when he found exactly that: a huge 5.5 KG piece of gold, worth an estimated $315,000.
Ballarat is known for its gold and it’s common to find small nuggets in the area,
but local gold dealers were blown away by the local man’s find, stating that they
couldn’t remember the last time anything so valuable was found in the ground.
Apparently, the local man was using the best metal detector in the world, and we bet he’s
glad he didn’t buy a budget version!
6.
Superglue Pretty much every household in the US will
own a tube of superglue.
It’s handy for an incredible array of uses and has saved my tail more than once.
But did you know that the super sticky substance was discovered by accident?
Well, two accidents to be exact.
Dr. Harry Coover was actually attempting to create clear plastic gun sights during World
War 2.
In one of his first attempts he discovered that although the plastic didn’t work well
for gun sights, it did bond things together rather nicely.
Dr. Harry didn’t give it a second thought, though, as it wasn’t what he’d set out
to create, so he swiftly moved on.
It would take another nine years, when during a project to create heat-resistant jet canopies,
that he showed his discovery to a colleague, who finally helped him to realize the potential
of his accidental invention.
Super glue entered the market in 1958 and quickly became a necessity around the world.
A quick bit of trivia for you: did you know that if you saturate a piece of cotton wool
with super glue it can create enough heat to catch fire?
Maybe take a tube with you on your next adventure just in case you find yourself in a survival
situation.
5.
Australian Opal When Bobby, an Australian miner, was searching
for stones in the opal mecca of Lightning Ridge in 1999, he came across one that sparkled
more than the rest.
He thought it was beautiful and took it home as a souvenir and didn’t think much more
about it until 14 years later when he decided to show it to a specialist.
The specialist was blown away by the discovery and informed a very happy Bobby that his treasure
was actually a very rare black opal worth an astounding $3 million.
The rock, nicknamed the “Royal One” was said to be the most valuable stone of its
kind when it was valued in 2005.
And what makes Booby even luckier is that he was ending his 40-year career as a miner
and it was his very last bucket that contained the sparkling gem.
4.
Roman Treasure Another metal detector tale now, but this
time in Britain.
When Peter Whatling asked his friend Eric to help him find his lost hammer using a home-made
metal detector, they found much more than a rusty old tool.
Instead, they found a wooden box filled to the brim with jewelry and coins worth a mind-blowing
$15 million.
The finding was named the Hoxne Hoard and is the largest collection of late Roman silver
and gold ever to be discovered in Britain.
The hoard consisted of 14,865 Roman coins and around 200 items of silver tableware and
gold jewelry.
The findings were transported to the British Museum where they’re now on display, and
Eric was awarded a prize of $2.3 million, which he shared with Peter.
There’s no word on whether the missing hammer was ever found, but I doubt Peter cares about
that now that he’s loaded.
3.
Whale Puke We’re staying in England now, but heading
to the beaches of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire.
A British couple was strolling down the beach when they came across something that they
described as smelling “too bad”.
It apparently smelled like a cross between squid and farmyard manure, had the texture
of a rock hard rubber ball, and when you touch it, the substance got stuck to their fingers
like wax.
Eugh.
I would have given that smelly object a wide berth, but the couple knew they’d struck
gold, and that it was whale vomit.
Otherwise known as ambergris, a whale will produce this when it swallows a foreign object
like a squid beak.
To get the object out of its body it greases it up and then, despite being known as vomit,
it forces it out of its rear end.
As gross as it may be, ambergris is a very rare material that’s highly valuable for
its use by perfume makers to help scents last longer.
How much was the chunk of puke worth, you ask?
A whopping $70,000.
2.
Microwave When self-taught engineer Percy Spencer was
working in a lab in 1945, he assumed that his day would be like every other.
Instead, he accidentally invented one of the most popular household appliances in the world.
Percy was working on magnetrons, which are the high-powered vacuum tubes in radars, when
one day he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had begun to melt.
He realized that it was the microwaves produced by the magnetrons that had destroyed his snack,
and so he brought other food items into the lab to test his theory that those microwaves
could cook food.
First, he tried popcorn, which popped all over the lab, then he tried an egg, that would
blow up in his colleague’s face.
Soon after, the microwave as we know it today was born, and the company Percy worked for
made an estimated $25 billion.
I sincerely hope that Percy got a hefty cut of that, or at least a replacement candy bar.
1.
The Third Imperial Egg The Third Imperial egg is an Easter Faberge
egg, which was created in the workshop of Peter Carl Fabergé himself.
If you don’t know what a Fabergé egg is, it’s a jeweled egg created in St. Petersburg
that is extremely valuable.
The most valuable eggs were the 50 Imperial Eggs, of which 43 survived.
The Third imperial egg was made for the Russian Tsar Alexander III to give to his wife, and
is made of solid 18K gold, sapphires, and diamonds.
The egg was lost for many years, but then was found in an extremely lucky occurrence
in 2012.
One night, a scrap dealer in the US went online to see if he could find more information on
the golden egg that he’d bought around a decade before.
He’d paid $13,302, based on what he thought the gold and jewels were worth, and he had
planned to sell it to a buyer who would melt it down.
But the buyers he approached thought he had overestimated the worth of the egg and turned
him down.
When the scrap dealer Googled ‘egg’ and a name etched on his treasure, a news article
about the lost Third Imperial egg came up and he instantly knew that it was the same
egg that had languished in his kitchen for years.
The Mid Western man got his egg verified and it turned out to be the very item that had
last been seen in public 112 years before.
It’s not known exactly how much the Third Imperial egg sold for in the end, but estimates
at the time were around $33 million.
I bet the scrap dealer thanks his lucky stars every night that he didn’t manage to find
a buyer for his Russian treasure.