Without a sloppy scientist, a creative Navy officer's wife, and a hasty sanatorium chef, we might not have penicillin, the Slinky, or Wheaties today.
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Think necessity is the mother of invention? Not always. There is a very thin line between brilliant innovation and absolute failure, as some of these inventors famously found out.
Some of the most popular products we use today were accidents stumbled on by clumsy scientists, chefs who spilled things, and misguided inventors who--in the case of the glue used on Post-it Notes--were trying to create the opposite of what they ended up with. But we can all take comfort in knowing even some huge mistakes can come with silver linings, sometimes big enough to change entire industries. And sometimes, even forgetting to wash your hands has its advantages.
1. Penicillin
If Alexander Fleming's mother were around, we all might be a lot sicker.
Like anyone eager to go on vacation, Alexander Fleming left a pile of dirty petri dishes stacked up at his workstation before he left town. When he returned from holiday on September 3, 1928, he began sorting through them to see if any could be salvaged, discovering most had been contaminated--as you might expect would happen in a bacteria lab in a hospital.
As has been well-documented in history books and on the Nobel Prize website, Fleming dumped most of the dishes in a vat of Lysol. But when he got to a dish containing staphylococcus, something odd caught his eye. The dish was covered in colonies of bacteria, except in one area where a blob of mold was growing. Around the mold was an area free of bacteria, as if the mold had blocked the bacteria from spreading. He realized it could be used to kill a wide range of bacteria--and penicillin was identified.
From that minor act of scientific sloppiness, we got one of the most widely used antibiotics today.
2. The Slinky
Somehow if the song had gone: "A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing! Everyone knows it's Industrial Equipment Stabilizers," it wouldn't have been quite as catchy.
Yet that was the intended use of the springs naval engineer Richard James was developing in 1943. The sensitive springs were meant to keep fragile equipment steady on ships. Then James knocked one of his new springs from a shelf and, like a kid on Christmas morning, watched it do that famous Slinky walk down instead of just hitting the ground, as Time noted in its all-time greatest toys list last year.
He took the creation home to show his wife, Betty, who saw the potential for a new toy. After consulting the dictionary, a name sprung (sorry) to mind: Slinky, a Swedish term meaning "sleek and sinuous." By time the toy was demonstrated in front of Gimbels Department Store in Philadelphia, during the 1945 Christmas season, it was clear it would be the Tickle Me Elmo of its time. The industrial machine James had could coil 80 feet of wire into two inches, and hundreds of Slinkys were already being sold.
That's not all, either: The Slinky has found other uses, including as an antenna by soldiers in Vietnam and as a therapy tool. Whatever the use, everyone knows it's Slinky.
3. Wheaties
Mmmm, delicious bran gruel'the breakfast of champions? Just try for a second to picture Michael Jordan posing with a slopping spoonful of semiliquid grain dripping from his chin.
The legend behind this famous cereal's creation did actually begin with bran gruel, which was what a clumsy dietician at the Washburn Crosby Company was preparing in 1922 when he spilled some on a hot stove top. The gruel drops sizzled and crackled into flakes. Once he gave a flake a taste, the cook realized his accident had created something that tasted way better than that old gruel. He got the head honchos at Washburn on board, and they tried 36 different varieties of the creation before developing the perfect flake that wouldn't crumble in the box.
Even the name could have gone another way. The cereal was released as Washburn's Gold Medal Whole Wheat Flakes; soon after, an employee contest resulted in the name being changed to Wheaties, allegedly beating out Nukeys and Gold Medal Wheat Flakes, though who would have known 90 years ago that so many gold-medal winners would eventually don the box of that glorified gruel?
4. Post-it Notes
You know how when you're done with a Post-it note, you throw it in the wastebasket? Yeah, that was pretty much what Spencer Silver almost did when he was trying to develop a superstrong adhesive for 3M laboratories in 1968 and came up way short. Instead, he had invented the opposite: an adhesive that stuck to objects but could be easily lifted off.
Silver proselytized the potential uses of his new, sort-of-weak glue around 3M for years, all to deaf ears. Finally, a colleague named Art Fry attended one of Silver's seminars in 1974 (3M has long been known for encouraging employees to step outside of their own departments to see what people in other areas of the company are doing). Fry saw a use where no one else did: holding his page in his hymnbook, which his bookmarks kept falling out of. And when you added Silver's mild adhesive to paper bookmarks, a rudimentary Post-it Note was born. Lest you think this is just silly corporate legend, even the Web fact-checker Snopes.com gave this a "True" rating.
3M finally agreed to distribute the Post-it Notes nationwide in 1980, a decade after Silver had first stumbled upon the formula. Thirty years later, they'd be as iconic to the American office as the stapler and the fax machine, with the added bonus of being great for dorm-room pranks and stop-motion animation viral videos.
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