7 Accidental Discoveries

Introduction: Accidental Discoveries

One of the questions that I ask when I interview people for this blog is, tell me about your biggest failure and how did it translate into a great success? Like most people in life, I like it when things work out in the end. In life, things do not always work out, but that should not stop us from being hopeful. Though there are many times when what seemed like a sure failure, mistake or whatever you'd like to call it, turned out to be a major coup. Here are seven accidental discoveries:

1. Champagne: A popular story about how champagne was first created suggests that a monk named Dom Perignon was trying to make white wine and instead created a wine with lots of bubbles of carbon dioxide. Wikipedia disputes this popular belief and clarifies that it was the first sparkling champagne that was accidentally discovered by Dom Perignon.
2. Saccharin: This artificial sweetener was discovered in 1879 by Ira Remsen and Constantine Fahlberg. They were working with coal tar derivatives, and they discovered the sweetness of saccharin because they didn't wash their hands properly.
3. Viagra: Pharmaceutical juggernaut Pfizer originally developed sildenafil citrate as a heart medication to help men who were suffering from chest pains. The results were not promising so they stopped the studies. But when they looked at the published data, they realized it would be an appropriate treatment for erectile dysfunction. The medication was re-evaluated and the rest they say is history.
4. Band-aid: In 1921, Earle Dickson discovered band-aid at Johnson and Johnson. His wife was always cutting herself in the kitchen while cooking, and he was simply trying to find a solution to keeping the cut germ free while allowing her to continue to do what she was doing.
5. Penicillin: This antibiotic was accidentally discovered in 1928 when Alexander Fleming, a Scottish bacteriologist left bacteria cultures uncovered for several days.
6. Frisbee: Walter Fredrick Morrison and his wife used to toss a cake pan on the beach in California, and he wanted to find a way to make the pan “fly better”  and the modern day frisbee was born.
7. The sandwich: The creator of today's sandwich is unfairly credited to John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich. There are conflicting stories on the internet about the origin of the sandwich, but the most interesting one is that John was very fond of playing cards and would do so for an entire day. He did not want food to interfere with his game so he asked his cook to prepare him a meal that would be easy to eat. She presented him with today's version of a sandwich.

Final Thoughts: Accidental Discoveries

Think back to when you were a child, were there games you played that you invented? Are there projects that you abandoned because you didn't get the results that you sought? Can they be used in different ways?

 Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science Accidental Medical Discoveries: How Tenacity and Pure Dumb Luck Changed the World Perfect Symmetry: The Accidental Discovery of Buckminsterfullerene Lucky Science: Accidental Discoveries From Gravity to Velcro, with Experiments Accidental Discoveries: From Laughing Gas to Dynamite

Further Reading

The Accidental Innovator, Sarah Jane Gilbert, July 5, 2006, Harvard Business School

Photo Credit: Google via Apture