Unintentional Eureka Moments: History's Most Incredible Accidental Discoveries

There have been a lot of great scientific discoveries over the centuries that took a lot of hard work and dedication. However, sometimes they happen entirely by accident. Today we’ll be looking at some of those accidental inventions including penicillin, microwaves, implantable pacemakers, friction matches, synthetic plastics, and chocolate chip cookies.

Greatest Accidental Scientific Discoveries

By Kevin Jennings

Scientific advancement is a tireless and often fruitless endeavor. It can take decades or even centuries for difficult advancements to be achieved as researchers painstakingly analyze a problem from every possible angle trying to find a solution. It’s usually a slow and deliberate process, and major breakthroughs are rarely made overnight.

Rarely, but not never.

Sometimes these breakthroughs happen entirely by accident. A scientist could discover a new and practical application for their research that wasn’t the intended result, or their experiment may reveal something completely unrelated. Today we’ll be looking at some of the greatest scientific discoveries that were completely unintentional.

Penicillin

Penicillin was discovered entirely by accident by a man described as a careless lab technician. Fortunately for the rest of the world and for all of medical science, that lab technician, Sir Alexander Fleming, must not have been terribly fastidious about cleaning his equipment.

Fleming worked for the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. He had been conducting research into the flu virus, and part of his research involved growing a culture of staphylococcus bacteria. He left the culture to grow, then went on vacation for two weeks.

When he returned from his vacation, the results of Fleming’s carelessness were immediately visible. The culture plate where he was growing the staph bacteria was full of penicillium mold. However, he noticed that the presence of the mold was hindering the growth of the bacteria. Further examination showed that the mold was producing a chemical to protect itself, which he named penicillin.

In 1929, Fleming published his discovery in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology and presented it to the Medical Research Club. Surprisingly, no one really cared at first. Maybe his colleagues didn’t understand the gravity of this discovery, or perhaps they just thought it was a coincidence.

Fleming would continue his research with penicillin until 1931, and the project would be picked up again years later, but the first human trial wouldn’t begin until 1941. One of the big deterrents may have been how difficult it was to procure meaningful quantities of penicillin. Though a large farm of penicillium mold was created for research, only a couple milliliters of the chemical could be harvested each week. The result was that the subject of the first human trial died not because the penicillin wasn’t working, but because they didn’t have enough to give him a full course of antibiotics.

Fortunately, the process of growing mold to mass produce penicillin has greatly improved, and the world has never been the same since the discovery of antibiotics. All of this, because one lab technician wasn’t great about washing and sterilizing his equipment.

Microwaves

Microwave ovens are one of the greatest conveniences in the modern kitchen, and they were developed entirely by accident by one of America’s largest defense contractors: Raytheon. More specifically, they were discovered by the engineer Percy Spencer.

Despite being a self-taught engineer, Percy was already well known and highly regarded within Raytheon prior to this discovery, with several patents already under his belt. He was described as having a “knack for finding simple solutions to manufacturing problems.”

At the time of this invention, Percy was working on increasing the power of magnetron tubes that would be used in military radar equipment. One day, as lunchtime was approaching, he reached into his pocket to pull out a snack. It is most widely reported as a Mr. Goodbar, though there is some debate over exactly what delicious treat he was expecting to indulge in.

Whatever the snack originally had been, when Percy’s hand went into his pocket instead all he found was a warm, sticky mess of peanuts. It occurred to him that the microwaves may have resulted in heating up the food, but he needed to be sure. If it was indeed a chocolate bar in his pocket, those have a pretty low melting point so he would need more evidence to prove it was the microwaves produced by the magnetron that caused the effect.

The next day, Percy brought in something to deliberately heat up. It was something that required a much higher temperature than was needed to make chocolate melt, and it was among the most fitting choices possible. The first food intentionally cooked with microwaves was popcorn. He placed the kernels directly next to the magnetron tube, and once they popped he shared the popcorn with the entire lab. The second experiment was to heat up an egg, which exploded in the face of one of Percy’s coworkers.

The magnetron was creating a low density electromagnetic field, as it was simply emanating from the tube. Percy decided to create a high density field by building a metal box that the magnetron would feed energy into. Because there was no way for the microwaves to escape, food placed inside the box would increase in temperature at an extremely high rate.

Thanks to Percy’s sweet tooth, we now all have the ability to turn a tub of macaroni and cheese from something that is frozen solid into something that is far too hot to eat in about 6 minutes.

Implantable Pacemakers

External pacemakers were first created in 1950 and first used in 1952. The machines were large, painful, and most importantly they were external. A patient on a pacemaker could not leave the hospital, instead normally being hooked up to one for about a week until it was believed that their heart would continue to keep pace as normal.

In 1956, this would all begin to change. American engineer and inventor William Greatbatch was trying to create a device that would record a person’s heart rhythm. Greatbatch was an accomplished inventor who would hold over 325 patents in his lifetime. But sometimes, even the most skilled engineers can make mistakes.

The mistake in this instance was using the wrong size resistor for his device. Rather than just recording a heartbeat as intended, his device was releasing intermittent charges of electricity. The rhythm of these charges almost exactly mimicked that of a human heartbeat. This device was still just a malfunctioning recorder and couldn’t be used as an internal pacemaker, but it did make Greatbatch realize that an internal pacemaker could be possible.

All that was left to do was to build one. Seeing as he had almost created one by accident, designing a machine to serve this purpose would barely be a challenge for the skilled inventor. After fiddling with the design and some extensive animal testing, Greatbatch’s internal pacemaker was first put to use in humans in 1960.

However, he wasn’t the first to market with an internal pacemaker. The first pacemaker was implanted in Sweden in late 1958, but it failed after only three hours. It was replaced, but the new pacemaker lasted only two days. Greatbatch’s design was a vast improvement on the earlier Swedish model largely because it used primary cells rather than rechargeable batteries.

Friction Matches

The first self-starting matches were developed in 1805 by French chemist Jean Chancel. The heads of the matches consisted of chemicals like sulfur, and to ignite them they were dipped into a bottle made from asbestos that contained sulfuric acid. Though the matches worked, they were as dangerous as they were expensive so they never caught on.

Just over 20 years later in 1826, English chemist and pharmacist John Walker would invent a much more practical and cost effective solution. Walker was already interested in trying to create something like a matchstick. There were already plenty of mixtures that were known to easily ignite and explode, but these weren’t useful if you were just trying to light a small fire rather than blow something up.

Walker was trying to find a compound that could easily transmit a flame from the source of the ignition onto something that would burn slower, like a piece of wood. One day, he was mixing yet another compound that he hoped might do the trick. He noticed that a dried clump of his mixture containing mostly sulfur and sulfide of antimony was stuck on the end of his mixing stick. Walker scraped the end of his stick against the hearth to remove the clump, and it ignited.

By complete accident, Walker had just invented the very thing he had been trying to invent in the first place. He quickly identified that the key to ignition was to scrape the compound along a rough surface, and began making and manufacturing boxes of matches. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t get any credit for this invention for quite a while.

Though his matches worked, they weren’t perfect. One of the common problems was that the matches would sometimes burn so hot that the head of the match would burn off from the rest of the matchstick and fall onto the floor, the furniture, or the person holding the match. Because there were still improvements to be made, Walker wasn’t interested in patenting his invention.

Unfortunately for him, another London chemist, Samuel Jones, was very interested in patenting it. Jones patented and sold his own variation of Walker’s matches that he named “Lucifers.” These still had problems, most notably violent explosions upon striking the match that would sometimes send sparks flying considerable distances. Considering Jones patented someone else’s invention then billed himself as the inventor of the friction match, it seems safe to assume that he didn’t really care about such trivial safety concerns.

Synthetic Plastic

Leo Baekeland was a Belgian chemist working out of Yonkers, New York. Leo was already wealthy thanks to having invented Velox photographic paper, but that wasn’t enough to stop his research. He had turned his attentions to a new project, trying to find a synthetic replacement for shellac.

Shellac had long been used as both a wood finish and food glaze, but it was always in short supply at the turn of the 20th century when Leo was working on his research. At the time, shellac was still produced naturally from the secretions of lac insects, so the supply would always be dependent on the supply and production of the insects. Though he would eventually succeed in this goal, that product would not go over well. That didn’t really matter though because he was already rich, and his accidental invention was only going to make him richer.

While experimenting with phenol and formaldehyde to try to produce a synthetic alternative to shellac, he instead created the world’s first synthetic resin known as Polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride. He called the product Bakelite, naturally naming it after himself, but today we know it better as plastic.

Though plastics existed beforehand, none were completely synthetic before this. They relied on organic compounds such as cellulose from plants, which meant that much like shellac, supplies would be limited by the amount of the organic component that could be produced. Bakelite posed no such problem, and after filing a number of patents Leo immediately got to work producing as much of the material as he could.

The importance of this discovery did not elude him at all, and he immediately speculated on the “thousand and one…articles” it could be used to make. Bakelite was an immediate success, and by 1910 he was already doing enough business to necessitate expansion of his production.

For better or worse, this accidental discovery of synthetic plastic has revolutionized the world. Students can now major in Plastics Engineering in college, and roughly 380 million metric tons of plastic are produced each year. That’s a huge number, so to give you some idea of scale it is roughly the combined weight of every person on Earth; we would never have been able to produce that amount of plastic each year if we had to rely solely on those that used organic components.

A massive industry, an entire branch of science, and a serious environmental concern that costs Americans billions of dollars every year are all the result of one man’s accidental discovery because he wanted to help people keep their furniture looking shiny.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

We end today with an amazing discovery from the field of culinary science, the chocolate chip cookie. Cookies have been around since the 7th century, but adding chocolate was a much later addition. Until the 16th centuries when conquistadors returned to Europe from the Americas, the continent was largely or even wholly unaware that the cacao tree even existed. Once they had it, it remained prohibitively expensive for centuries.

The introduction of chocolate into cookies seems to have first taken place in the late 1800s, with Cadbury filing a patent for chocolate coated cookies in 1891. Everyone’s favourite chocolate sandwich cookie, Hydrox, was then introduced in 1908 and was shortly followed by the cheap imitation brand Oreo in 1912. These seem to be among the earliest chocolate flavoured cookies, but chocolate chip cookies were still nearly 30 years away.

This major culinary breakthrough would not take place until the late 1930s at the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Ruth Graves Wakefield, one of the owners and operators of the inn, had decided to bake chocolate cookies for her guests. Upon discovering she was out of baker’s chocolate, she instead decided to chop up a bar of Nestle semi-sweet chocolate.

As we mentioned when discussing the invention of the microwave oven, chocolate has a low melting point so Ruth assumed that the chocolate would just melt and disperse among the rest of the batter. As we know now, her reasonable assumption was incorrect. Though the chocolate softened, it remained trapped within the batter where it had been placed. Guests loved the cookies, and by 1938 she had published her recipe.

In 1939, Nestle purchased the Toll House name and the rights to publish the recipe on their products. After trying to develop a bar that was easier to chop up, they instead released bags of morsels, also referred to as chocolate chips, so that the cookies could be easily made.

While this is the most commonly told version of the story, and Nestle’s purchase in 1939 is definitely accurate, there’s dispute as to whether the chocolate chip cookie was an accident or not. Ruth held a degree in household arts and had built the Toll House Inn’s reputation on the back of her extraordinary desserts, so there’s a good chance she knew exactly what would happen when she put the cut up chocolate into her cookies. Though people can’t agree whether the invention of the chocolate chip cookie was an accident or intentional, we can all agree that it was delicious.

Key Takeaways

• Penicillin was accidentally discovered by Sir Alexander Fleming due to mold growth on his bacteria culture.
• Percy Spencer’s melted chocolate bar led to the invention of microwave ovens.
• William Greatbatch’s resistor mistake resulted in the creation of implantable pacemakers.
• John Walker accidentally invented friction matches while trying to create a flame-transmitting compound.
• Leo Baekeland’s attempt to replace shellac led to the accidental discovery of synthetic plastic.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: Unintentional Eureka Moments: History’s Most Incredible Accidental Discoveries
• Hero image source by The wub / openverse, by-sa.

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