• What famous treat was accidentally invented by an 11-year-old boy?
What major political event resulted from a botched press conference?
From recipes to inventions, here are 10 awesome things that resulted from accidents and mistakes.
10 –Chocolate Chip Cookies • The Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts
was a restaurant famous for its home cooking recipes.
• Chefs Ruth Graves Wakefield and Sue Brides were trying to make chocolate cookies, but
had run out of their normal baking chocolate.
• So they made the cookies with little broken chunks of chocolate inside, assuming they
would melt and turn the cookie dough chocolate.
• Instead, they stayed whole, and the chocolate chip cookie was born.
The chefs themselves later said that it wasn’t a mistake at all, and they ABSOLUTELY meant
to do that... but you know… of COURSE they would say that.
9 –Harrison Ford’s Career • Harrison Ford EVENTUALLY had an incredibly
successful career as an actor.
But first, he crashed and burned for nine years.
• Ford’s acting career had fizzled, offers dried up, and he ended up falling into work
as a carpenter.
• It wasn’t until he was called to work on the set of Star Wars that he got his big
break.
Of course, he was working on the set… as a carpenter.
• One day after he finished his work, George Lucas called him over and asked if he would
do some line reads with some of the other actors vying for the part of Han Solo.
• Ford assumed he was just doing Lucas a favor.
He didn’t realize his performance had actually put him in the running for the part… until
Lucas GAVE him the part.
8 –Corn Flakes • It sounds silly to even consider, but
Corn Flakes were originally invented as an “anti-sex” food.
• Doctor John Harvey Kellogg was the superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and he was
specifically trying to develop food that was bland and flavorless.
• Kellogg believed that any food that was too flavorful would stoke sexual desire and
lead to masturbation or excessive intercourse.
• So he boiling a pot of grain, but was called away until the boiled grain had cooled
and hardened into a “flake.”
• That flakebroke up and became corn flakes, which not only became a staple of the Kellogg’s
cereal empire, but also its rival Post, founded by C.W.
Post… one of the patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
7 –X-Rays • When German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen
discovered X-Rays, he wasn’t even looking for them.
He was studying whether cathode rays could pass through glass.
• But during his experiment, he noticed a mysterious glow coming off a nearby screen
with a certain chemical coating.
• He called them “X-rays,” because he had no idea what they were.
• Eventually, he studied the rays and discovered that they were electromagnetic waves that
would pass through certain substances.
For that mistake, he was awarded a Nobel Prize.
6 –Potato Chips • Potato chips are literally a chef’s
sarcastic attempt to appease a picky customer at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs,
New York in 1853.
• The customer had ordered french-fried potatoes, but kept sending them back, complaining
that they were too thick, too soggy, and not salty enough.
• This continued until eventually the chef, George Crum, personally went and sliced a
potato into paper-thin slices, fried them to a crisp, and loaded them down with salt.
• It was intended to be a slight, but the customer loved it, and the dish eventually
got added to the menu as “Saratoga Chips.” 5 –The Fall of the Berlin Wall
• The fall of the wall separating East and West Germany in 1989 is one of the most historically
significant events in modern history.
• Tearing down the wall reunified the countries, and effectively ended a totalitarian regime.
And it wasn’t actually supposed to happen when it did.
• East German regime spokesperson Günter Schabowski was holding a press conference
about temporarily easing travel regulations between East and West Germany.
• But Schabowski was not fully briefed on what the travel regulations meant…
so he ended up accidentally announcing that the regime was completely opening the border
and allowing free travel both ways – which was NOT the original intention.
• This caused a flood of people to appear at the wall, demanding passage.
The border guards were eventually overwhelmed, and opened the gates rather than use deadly
force.
4 –Matches • In 1826, John Walker found a strange lump
forming at the end of his chemical mixing stick.
• Irritated, Walker pulled his stick out and started scraping the gob of chemicals
off.
• As he was doing that, the stick ignited, and walker had accidentally discovered the
world’s first strikeable match.
• These matches were a major upgrade over French Chemist Jean Chancel’s self-igniting
match, which involved sulfuric acid, an awful smell, and lots of accidental fires.
3 -Popsicles • Popsicles were invented by an 11-year-old
boy in 1905.
• Frank Epperson mixed up some sugary soda powder with water, mixed it up, and then ended
up leaving it out overnight.
• It was a cold night, so the mixture ended up freezing.
When he pulled out the stick, the entire mixture came out with it.
• He licked the treat off the stick, then decided he liked it so much, he made more
and started selling them to other neighborhood kids.
• He sold the treat as an “Epsicle” for 20 years, but eventually his children
convinced him to change the name to what they called it.
They named the treat after their Pop.
So they called it a Pop’s Sicle. 2 –Nashville Hot Chicken
• Like potato chips, Nashville Hot Chicken was a recipe that was NOT intended to be enjoyed.
• Andre Prince Jeffries is the owner of Prince’s Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville,
Tennessee, the originator of the Nashville hot chicken recipe.
• She says that Thornton Prince the Third, her grandfather, was a known womanizer, and
after coming home particularly late one night, his girlfriend decided to get revenge with
a fried chicken breakfast with extra cayenne pepper.
• Thornton actually loved the dish, and not only came up with a recipe for it, but
also opened up a restaurant to serve it.
1 -Microwave Oven • Percy Spencer was working at Raytheon
on microwave radar transmitters, when he noticed something weird.
• He had brought a chocolate candy bar with him, and noticed that it had started to melt.
• After some experimentation, he figured out that it was the microwaves themselves
that were cooking the candy bar.
• He concentrated those waves in a small space, and started using them to cook food.
• His first target was popcorn, making popcorn the world’s first microwaved food.
• Or at least the first food microwaved on PURPOSE.