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Im surprised I haven’t seen this one yet, but LSD was discovered on accident. Or at least its psychedelic effects were. In 1938 a chemist named Albert Hoffman who worked for a pharmaceutical company was trying to synthesize a respiratory and circulatory stimulant from the fungus ergot. After syntonization, he set it aside for 5 years before he took another look at it and absorbed the LSD into his fingertips. He started feeling the effects as he rode his bike home that day. Essentially being the first person to trip balls on Acid.
Penicillin gotta be one of them. Guy had his to now be “the cure” left open while he went on a vacation and once he came back, he noticed that the mold was suppressing the growth of bacteria.We probs wouldn’t be alive if he didn’t go on that vacation and leave the dish open.
Bird migration. Was discovered when a large bird was found in the north with a projectile from the south stuck in it (neck i think). Before this, it was thought the birds hibernated at the bottom of water bodies or flew to the moon or other dumb s**t.
Considering that Chauvet Cave was only discovered in 1994 but the paintings inside of it date back about 32 000 years, it’s easy to believe that such remarkable evidence of early human history could have remain buried for a lot longer, or until the entrance collapsed ever further and it was lost forever.
It’s unlikely it would have remained undiscovered forever, but X-rays for medical imaging!The first x-ray image was an accidental exposure of a photographic plate the scientist’s wife was holding - they didn’t realise the rays would interact with it like visible light, and when they developed it her bones and wedding ring were visible.(This may have been the first clue they needed some safety precautions, too, but honestly all the early research into ionising radiation is terrifying. They didn’t know what they were dealing with. The Curie’s lab/offices are still tightly controlled due to all the radium and polonium contamination, for example.).
During World War II, a chemical engineer named James Wright was working for the U.S. War Production Board. Wright was attempting to create an inexpensive substitute for synthetic rubber at the General Electric Lab. In 1943, while working on an experiment, he accidentally dropped boric acid into silicone oil, and the result was a stretchy substance that was bouncier than rubber. Peter Hodgson, a businessman, saw the putty and instantly knew it could be a hit. He re-named the creation “Silly Putty” and marketed it as a toy in 1950.
Pyrex. Chemists and engineers at Corning Glass Works had developed the material, a strong and heat-resistant glass, for use in railroad lanterns and battery jars. Looking for additional uses for the material, one Corning R&D employee brought a sawed-off battery jar home. Presumably after cleaning it his wife used it to bake a cake, and noticed and shared that the cake baked much more evenly and quickly than traditional metal or ceramic pans, with the added bonus of being able to check on the progress of the bake through the clear glass, and here we are.
Rubber vulcanization. Charles Goodyear has searched for years how to make a use of rubber but the actual discovery of the vulcanization came out of luck after spilling a mixture on a hot stove.
The one I heard in chemistry class was that this chemist put some chemicals in a flask and placed a mechanical stirrer in it to stir overnight. The next morning the stirrer had stopped stirring and he found the chemicals in the flask was solid and thus ultrahard polycarbonate polymer was created.OK, since my post is rather popular I will also add that the guy who found that the stirrer was stuck in the solid polycarbonate polymer in the morning broke the glass off the flask off then went around the lab holding the stirrer handle with the polycarbonate polymer mass on it and banged on the tables around the lab saying look what I discovered.
There’s typically a lot of luck in artificial-sweetener discovery. Aspartame was part of anti-ulcer research, until someone licked his finger and found it was sweet. And sucralose was found to be sweet when a foreign student misread the instruction to “test” it.
The current use for Viagra. It was originally meant for high blood pressure, then the men in the study noted a side effect.Seconc-Creative:IIRC, while effective at lowering blood pressure, it was in a weird place where it was better than a placebo, but worse than actual blood pressure medication. However, its still sometimes prescribed to help control blood pressure.
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I’m not sure if this counts, but Tetsuhiro Shikiyama (founder of Nippura, the company that makes thick acrylic glass for aquariums) invented the tech that glues/fuses multiple layers of clear acrylic when he dropped a udon noodle he was eating on some acrylic and had a hard time picking it up because it stuck.
Czochralski process, the baseline of modern electronics as nearly all of the electronics nowadays are made on silicon grown with this process.Guy wanted to dip his pen in ink, he dipped it in a crucible with molten tin instead.
A brown dwarf called “The Accident”. A guy, Dan Caselden, in the citizen science group I’m I’m found it on accident while looking at another object that looked promising. It didn’t stand out in the larger context of the sample but was clearly a good candidate when looking at the other object more closely. To add on to the uniqueness of the discovery, it’s the fastest moving near earth brown dwarf found and possibly one of the oldest. It’s a major outlier for Y-class Dwarfs.
Maybe not undiscovered till today but probably good time later.Dry cleaning. The way i got told there was an french chemist who did regularly experiments in the kitchen and got into trouble regularly with his wife. One day he did his thing and spilled some stuff and used one of the towel to clean up to prevent more discussions. The wife then discovered the towel was much cleaner than usual and so dry cleaning.
Parakaryon Myojinensis. It’s not necessarily a very important discovery to most people, but it’s an extremely unusual microbe that isn’t quite a eukaryote or prokaryote. Biologists think that it could represent some sort of “stepping stone” between the two, or even an example of abiogenesis happening multiple times throughout the history of the earth. We’ve only found one of these, though, so we don’t know much about it.
Gunpowder? One day some Chinese alchemist just wanted to brew a concoction and he end up paving the way for the death of billions.
The microwave oven.
Champagne. At least according to Stanley Goodspeed in The Rock - “monks thought they were making white wine. Somehow the bottle carbonated. Voila**, champagne”.
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Stainless Steel. A batch of steel got contaminated so it was dumped. Someone noticed the dumped steel wasn’t rusting.
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