10 accidental inventions
10 accidental inventions that changed the world and in fact, experts estimate that between 30 and 50 percent of of all scientific discoveries are in some way accidental. the following accidental inventions from the past two centuries have changed the world in one way or another. 1. Matches
Many of us wonder what life was like before electricity or the Internet (shudder), but imagine life before matches. We’re talking magnifying glasses and flint. For those of us who like to create controlled flame from time to time with the strike of a match, we can thank a British pharmacist and his dirty mixing stick. In 1826, John Walker noticed a dried lump on the end of a stick while he was stirring a mix of chemicals. When he tried to scrape it off, voila, sparks and flame. Jumping on the discovery, Walker marketed the first friction matches as “Friction Lights” and sold them at his pharmacy. The initial matches were made of cardboard but he soon replaced those with three-inch long hand-cut wooden splints;
2. Penicillin
Although antibiotics may get a bum rap for their prevalence and overuse, life before them was fraught with untamable infection and few defensive tools. Penicillin was the first antibiotic, a discovery that happened in 1929 when a young bacteriologist, Sir Alexander Fleming, was tidying up his lab. After having been on vacation, he returned to work to find that a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria had been left uncovered; and he noticed that mold on the culture had killed many of the bacteria. He identified the mold as penicillium notatum, and upon further research found that it could kill other bacteria and could be given to small animals without ill effect. A decade later, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up where Fleming left off and isolated the bacteria-killing substance found in the mold – penicillin. The three won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1945 "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious
Many of us wonder what life was like before electricity or the Internet (shudder), but imagine life before matches. We’re talking magnifying glasses and flint. For those of us who like to create controlled flame from time to time with the strike of a match, we can thank a British pharmacist and his dirty mixing stick. In 1826, John Walker noticed a dried lump on the end of a stick while he was stirring a mix of chemicals. When he tried to scrape it off, voila, sparks and flame. Jumping on the discovery, Walker marketed the first friction matches as “Friction Lights” and sold them at his pharmacy. The initial matches were made of cardboard but he soon replaced those with three-inch long hand-cut wooden splints;
2. Penicillin
Although antibiotics may get a bum rap for their prevalence and overuse, life before them was fraught with untamable infection and few defensive tools. Penicillin was the first antibiotic, a discovery that happened in 1929 when a young bacteriologist, Sir Alexander Fleming, was tidying up his lab. After having been on vacation, he returned to work to find that a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria had been left uncovered; and he noticed that mold on the culture had killed many of the bacteria. He identified the mold as penicillium notatum, and upon further research found that it could kill other bacteria and could be given to small animals without ill effect. A decade later, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain picked up where Fleming left off and isolated the bacteria-killing substance found in the mold – penicillin. The three won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1945 "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious