Accidental Inventions That Changed the World

Saccharin

Inventor: Constantine Fahlberg, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

What he was trying to make: Fahlberg was trying to find a new use for coal tar back in 1879.

How it was created: Home from a long day at the lab, Fahlberg noticed that his wife's biscuits were way sweeter than usual.

The secret ingredient: The chemical that would eventually be known as saccharine had been on his hands after the lab work. The researcher immediately requested a patent and mass produced his product.

Matches

For more than 100,000 years, humans have been playing with fire. But no one could create a really easy way to start a fire until a British pharmacist tried to clean his stirring utensil. In 1826, John Walker was stirring a pot of chemicals when he noticed a dried lump had formed on the end of the mixing stick. Without thinking, he tried to scrape off the dried gob and – all of a sudden – it ignited. Mr. Walker sold the first strikeable matches at a local bookstore. The “friction lights” were three inches long and came neatly in a box with a piece of sandpaper.

Walker wasn’t interested in patenting the idea, so Samuel Jones copied the matches and sold “Lucifers.” They were a little more practical than Walker’s friction lights. Lucifers were shorter and came in a smaller cardboard box for easy carrying. The earliest description of a match-like product appears in a Chinese book titled “Records of the Unworldly and the Strange,” by Tao Gu, circa 950 AD. They were called “fire-inch sticks” and used sulfur to start the flame. Still, they were not strikeable.

French chemist Jean Chancel invented the first self-igniting match in 1805. Mr. Chancel’s method involved a wooden splint tipped with sugar and potassium chlorate that was carefully dipped into a small bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid. Chancel’s method was highly unpleasant and dangerous. The mix of chemicals produced a yellow smelly gas called chlorine dioxide, which explodes when it comes into contact with pretty much anything. Today, matches are made with non-poisonous red phosphorus, discovered by Johan Edvard Lundstrom. The Diamond Match Company was the first to sell “safety matches” in the US, forfeiting their patent rights to allow all match companies to produce safe matches.

Microwave ovens

Inventor: Percy Spencer, an engineer with the Raytheon Corporation.

What he was trying to make: In 1946, Spencer was conducting a radar-related research project with a new vacuum tube.

How it was created: While experimenting with the tube, a candy bar in Spencer's pocket started to melt. Already a holder of 120 patents, Spencer grabbed some unpopped popcorn kernels and held them by the device.

Sure enough, they started to pop. Spencer knew he had a revolutionary device -- and an enabler to lazy cooks everywhere.

Vulcanized rubber

In the early 1830s, natural rubber was all the rage, but the excitement faded. People realized that their rubber would freeze and crack during the winter or melt into a sticky, smelly goo during the summer. Natural rubber could not stand extreme temperatures, so its popularity quickly died.

Charles Goodyear spent years trying to overcome rubber's problems, and he only succeeded by mistake.

Goodyear tried various powders to dry up the stickiness, but to no avail. Everything kept melting. These expensive experiments pushed his family into debt and resulted in jail time. Yet even in prison, Goodyear was undeterred from his goal. Some called him a mad man.

According to a biography of Goodyear in Reader’s Digest, he walked into a general store in Woburn, Mass., to show off his rubber products. This time the rubber had sulfur in it to act as a drying agent. Goodyear got so excited that the rubber flew out of his hands and landed on a hot stove. When he examined it, he noticed that it did not melt, but instead charred black. After poking and prodding, Goodyear also noticed that it still had the springy surface texture of rubber, the “gum-elastic” it was known for. Goodyear had made rubber weatherproof.

Another tale tells a different story: Goodyear absent-mindedly turned out the lights to his makeshift lab and spilled his vials and test tubes containing sulfur, lead, and rubber onto a still-hot stove. The result was the same, a charred rubber-like substance that didn’t melt in the extreme heat. After testing in freezing temperatures, Goodyear finally succeeded in reaching his goal, and it only happened because of a careless mistake. After many patent battles, Goodyear died still in debt. He didn’t start the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. – the American company was instead named in his honor. "Life," Goodyear wrote, "should not be estimated exclusively by the standard of dollars and cents. I am not disposed to complain that I have planted and others have gathered the fruits. A man has cause for regret only when he sows and no one reaps."

Corn Flakes

Inventor: John and Will Kellogg, brothers and breakfast entrepreneurs.

What they were trying to make: The brothers were trying to boil grain to make granola.

How it was created: In 1898,the brothers accidentally left a pot of boiled grain on the stove for several days. The mixture turned moldy but the product that emerged was dry and thick. After a few experiments, they got rid of the mold -- and created Corn Flakes.

Potato chips

Inventor: George Crum, a chef at the Carey Moon Lake House in Saratoga Springs, New York.

What he was trying to make: Crum was trying to serve a customer French fries in the summer of 1853.

How it was created: A diner kept sending his French fries back, asking them to be thinner and crispier. Crum lost his temper, sliced the potatoes insanely thin and fried them until they were hard as a rock. To the chef's surprise, the customer loved them.