Some scientific discoveries come about after painstaking, goal-oriented lab work finally yields the result that a researcher is trying to find.But frequently, some lucky accident leads to a transformative finding, provided the right person is there to realize the potential implications of that accident.
Then, in the part that isn't an accident, they turn that observation into something useful.
All of these discoveries began with an accident.
In some cases, a clumsy spill or drop led to the creation of some new substance. In others, unclean or unsafe lab practices revealed the hidden properties of something. And sometimes, a researcher (or even a schoolteacher) looked at something in the world around them and realized that it could be repurposed to great utility and frequently, great profit.
Here are 15 of those discoveries.
-The microwave-
In 1945 Percy Spencer, an engineer for the Raytheon Corporation, was working on a radar-related project. While testing a new vacuum tube that drives a radar set known as a magnetron, he discovered that a chocolate bar he had in his pocket melted.
He became intrigued and started experimenting by aiming the tube at other items, such as eggs and popcorn kernels. He concluded that the heat the objects experienced was from the microwave energy.
Soon after, on October 8, 1945, Raytheon filed a patent for the first microwave.
The first microwave weighed 750 pounds and stood 5' 6" tall. The first countertop microwave was introduced in 1965 and cost $500.-Quinine-
Quinine is an anti-malarial compound that originally comes from tree bark. Now we usually find it in tonic water, though it's still used in drugs that treat malaria as well.
Jesuit missionaries in South America used quinine to treat malaria as early as 1600, but legend has it that they heard that it could be used to treat the illness from the native Andean population.
The original story involved a feverish Indian, lost in the jungle and suffering from malaria. Parched, he drank from a pool of water at the base of a quina-quina tree. The water's bitter taste made him fear that he'd drank something that would make him sicker, but the opposite happened. His fever abated, and he was able to find his way home and share the story of the curative tree.
This story isn't as well documented as some others, and other accounts for the discovery of quinine's medicinal properties exist, but a life-saving tale of an accidental discovery like this is too cool to leave out.-X-rays-
In 1895, a German physicist named Wilhelm Roentgen was working with a cathode ray tube.
Despite the fact that the tube was covered, he saw that a nearby fluorescent screen would glow when the tube was on and the room was dark. The rays were somehow illuminating the screen.
Roentgen tried to block the rays, but most things that he placed in front of them didn't seem to make a difference. When he placed his hand in front of the tube, he noticed he could see his bones in the image that was projected on the screen.
He replaced the tube with a photographic plate to capture the images, creating the first x-rays. The technology was soon adopted by medical institutions and research departments.
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