16 accidental inventions that changed the world

popsicle heartaftergod/flickr

Other stumble upon a brilliant innovation purely by luck.


Alyson Kreuger and Drake Baer contributed additional research to this article.

sean dreilinger/flickr


What he was trying to make: In the early 1950s, Kutol created a doughy clay to remove soot in coal-burning homes. But as the Christian Science Monitor reports, people soon switched from coal to gas to warm their homes, and company was headed toward bankruptcy.

How it was created: McVicker learned that his schoolteacher sister was using the "dough" as a modeling clay in her classes. Eureka! It was a toy, not a cleaning product. By 1957, colored Play-Doh was sold at Macy's and hawked on kids' TV shows — turning its creators into millionaires.


Inventor: Frank Epperson, an 11-year-old

What he was trying to make: In 1905, Epperson was chilling out on the back porch of his family home in San Francisco. In a very fortunate case of playing with food, Epperson was stirring powdered soda and water in a cup with a stick. He went inside for the night, but left the cup.

How it was created: The next morning, as Gizmodo writes, Epperson discovered a "sweet icicle on a stick." He named his invention after himself: the Eppsicle! He made them for his friends, and later his kids, who called it Pop's-icicle, or Popsicle. In 1923, he applied for a patent and the Popsicle was properly born — saving overheated Americans for many summers to come.

Inventor: Richard Jones, a naval engineer




Inventor: John Pemberton, a pharmacist

What he was trying to make: Living in Atlanta in the 1880s, Pemberton sold a syrup made of wine and coca extract he called "Pemberton's French Wine Coca," which was touted as a cure for headaches and nervous disorders.

How it was created: In 1885, Atlanta banned the sale of alcohol, so Pemberton created a purely coca-based version of the syrup that could be mixed with carbonated water and drank as a soda. The result was a perfect beverage for the temperance era — a "brain tonic" called Coca-Cola.

Inventor: Ruth Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn


How it was created: While mixing a batch of cookies in 1930, Wakefield discovered she was out of baker's chocolate. As a substitute, she broke sweetened chocolate into small pieces and added them to the cookie dough. She expected the chocolate to melt, making chocolate cookies, but the little bits remained intact.




Inventor: John Hopps, an electrical engineer



Inventor: James Wright, an engineer at General Electric

What he was trying to make: During World War II, the US government needed rubber for airplane tires, boots for soldiers, and the like. Wright was trying to make a rubber substitute out of silicon, since it was a widely available material.


Inventor: Percy Spencer, an engineer with the Raytheon Corporation



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

Wikimedia Commons

Inventor: Albert Hofmann, a chemist

What he was trying to make: He was researching lysergic acid derivatives in a laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, in 1938.

How it was created: Hofmann unintentionally swallowed a small amount of LSD while researching its properties. He subsequently had the first acid trip in history, marking the entry of a drug that would become a staple of undercurrent culture, most signified by the Beatles' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."


Flickr user qiaomeng

Inventor: Constantine Fahlberg, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University


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 turned out to be the chemical that would eventually be known as saccharine. It had been on Fahlberg's hands when he picked up a biscuit after the lab work. The researcher immediately requested a patent and mass produced his product.

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/21560098@N06/4277206849/">1Happysnapper (photography)</a> via Flickr

Inventor: Spencer Silver and Art Fry, researchers in 3M Laboratories




Inventor: Patsy Sherman, a chemist for 3M



Flickr / Mike Mozart

Inventor: John and Will Kellogg, brothers and breakfast entrepreneurs



Flickr user Marco Milani

Inventor: Sir Alexander Fleming, a scientist


How it was created: One day in 1928, Fleming noticed that a contaminated Petri dish he had discarded contained a mold that was dissolving all the bacteria around it. When he grew the mold by itself, he learned that it contained a powerful antibiotic — penicillin — that could be used to treat ailments ranging from syphilis to tonsillitis. Thanks to penicillin and other antibiotics, the rate of death due to infectious disease is now one-twentieth of what it was in 1900.

Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

Inventor: Wilhelm Röntgen, a physicist

What he was trying to make: Röntgen was experimenting with cathode-ray tubes when he realized that radiation was piercing through the black cardboard covering the tube, causing a chemical sitting a few feet away to glow.

How it was created: Follow-up tests revealed he had produced an unknown radiation, which he called "X-radiation" and later shortened to "X-ray," that could penetrate most materials, including skin.

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