Accidents are common in day to day life.
An accident is an unplanned event that sometimes has convenient or undesirable consequences, other times being inconsequential.
The term implies that such an event may not be preventable since its prior circumstances go unrecognized and unaddressed.
Some say that nothing happens without a reason, and this may be the case when we look at the forthcoming post where new things were discovered accidently but changed a lot of things.
Necessity is not always the mother of invention.
From the beginning of universe “The big bang” to the cold drink “coca cola” let’s take a look at some of awesome yet unintentional discoveries throughout history.
#1 Vulcanized Rubber
The word vulcanization originates from the Roman God of Fire, Vulcan.
Vulcanized rubber was first made when Charles Goodyear, accidentally dropped some rubber on a hot stove with some sulfur, accidentally hardening it, and making it much more durable then it was before in 1839.
It was in 1844 that it was patented by Charles Goodyear.
Its patent number was #3633.
Full story
In midsummer of 1834, a bankrupt hardware merchant from Philadelphia, Charles Goodyear, walked into the New York retail store of the Roxbury India Rubber Co., America's first rubber manufacturer.
He showed the store manager a new valve he had devised for rubber life preservers.
The company wasn’t in the market for valves now; it would be lucky to stay in business at all.
Returning to Philadelphia, Goodyear was clapped into jail for debt.
It was not his first sojourn there, nor his last.
He asked his wife to bring him a batch of raw rubber and her rolling pin.
Here, in his cell, Goodyear made his first rubber experiments, kneading and working the gum hour after hour.
If rubber was naturally adhesive, he reasoned, why couldn’t a dry powder be mixed in to absorb its stickiness — perhaps the talc-like magnesia powder sold in drugstores?
Out of jail again, he tried, with promising results.
Neighbors complained about Goodyear’s smelly gum, so he moved his experiments to New York.
Goodyear lavished all the arts of decoration on his dingy samples, painted them, gilded them, and embossed them.
Running short of material one morning, he decided to re-use an old decorated sample and applied nitric acid to remove its bronze paint.
The piece turned black, and Goodyear threw it away.
A few days later he remembered that somehow the blackened scrap had felt different. He retrieved it from his trash can and found he was right.
The nitric acid had done something to the rubber, made it almost as smooth and dry as cloth.
This was better rubber than anyone had ever made before.
The great discovery came in the winter of 1839. Goodyear was using sulfur in his experiments now.
Although Goodyear himself has left the details in doubt, the most persistent story is that one February day he wandered into Woburn’s general store to show off his latest gum-and-sulfur formula.
Snickers rose from the cracker-barrel forum, and the usually mild-mannered little inventor got excited, waved his sticky fistful of gum in the air.
It flew from his fingers and landed on the sizzling-hot potbellied stove.
When he bent to scrape it off, he found that instead of melting like molasses, it had charred like leather.
And around the charred area was a dry, springy brown rim — “gum elastic” still, but so remarkably altered that it was virtually a new substance.
He had made weatherproof rubber.
#2 Safety glass used in windshields
Laminated glass can be found in car windshields, bank teller protective barriers, and a variety of other places where shatterproof glass is a necessity.
This type of safety glass was invented by Frenchman Édouard Bénédictus.
Bénédictus is probably more popularly remembered for his art, but he also was a bookbinder, writer, composer, and a chemist.
Full story
One fateful day in 1903, when working in his lab, Bénédictus accidentally knocked a glass flask off of his desk.
Rather than the glass shattering, spreading tiny pieces of glass all over the floor, instead, it simply broke while more or less keeping its form.
Upon further investigation, Bénédictus found that the glass had at one time contained plastic cellulose nitrate, which had dried on the flask and created a type of adhesive film coating the inside, which kept the glass from shattering in the normal fashion.
There are conflicting reports on whether Bénédictus immediately realized the potential of his discovery or whether it took him reading about several automobile accidents where people were seriously injured due to their windshields shattering, sending shards of glass flying everywhere.
Whatever the case may be, eventually, Bénédictus was inspired by this experience with his flask to create a type of shatter proof glass.
The resulting safety glass was made shatter proof using much the same method as how his flask had accidentally become shatter-proof.
Specifically, he made his safety glass by bonding a layer of celluloid between two layers of glass.
Once the process was perfected, he filed for and received a patent for his laminated glass in 1909.
While his safety glass wasn’t immediately adopted by automobile manufacturers, it did become very popular during WWI, being used in eye pieces of gas masks.
#3 Viagra
Viagra (sildenafil) is one of the most widely-known prescription drug names on the U.S. market.
Often dubbed "the little blue pill", Viagra (sildenafil) was the first phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE5) inhibitor approved to treat erectile dysfunction (ED).
ED is a common sexual problem for men and its frequency increases with age.
It is estimated roughly 30 million men in the U.S. and over 100 million men worldwide suffer from ED.
A large U.S. survey determined about 50 percent of men 40 to 70 years of age experience some degree of ED.
Full story
The discovery that sildenafil could lead to an erection was an unplanned event.
The sildenafil compound was originally developed by Pfizer for the treatment of hypertension (high blood pressure) and angina pectoris (chest pain due to heart disease).
During the heart clinical trials, researchers discovered that the drug was more effective at inducing erections than treating angina.
Pfizer realized ED was an unmet medical need and a major opportunity for financial gain.
In 1998, the FDA approved Viagra, the first oral treatment for erectile dysfunction, under a priority review.
At the time of its approval, Viagra had the fastest initial sales growth following its launch of any prescription product, reaching 2008 sales of close to $2 billion.
Pfizer promoted Viagra and ED awareness via direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, which prompted men to seek medical advice and a prescription from their doctors.
For many men, the stigma and embarrassment of talking to their doctor about ED has declined since the introduction of Viagra and other PDE5 inhibitors.
#4 The big bang
In the mid-1960s, two astronomers named Arno Penzias (left image) and Robert Wilson (right image) decided that they wanted to map signals from the Milky Way, using an extremely large antenna to pick up the signals.
To their frustration, instead of receiving short, distinct radio signals, all that they could hear was a constant hum that blocked out any other noise.
Ruling out any kind of extra-terrestrial life, the researchers attempted to discover where else the noise could be coming from.
Tests ruled out noise from nearby New York City, or any kind of military testing taking place nearby.
Full story
Frustrated, the two could not figure out where else this white-noise could be coming from.
As a last-ditch effort, after discovering pigeon droppings on and nearby the antenna, Penzias and Wilson decided that the only other possible explanation for the disruption of the antenna signal was pigeons.
Obviously.
After attempting to scare away the birds, the researchers decided that their only other option was to commit a pigeon massacre.
According to Penzias, “To get rid of them, we finally found the most humane thing was to get a shot gun…and at very close range [we] just killed them instantly.
It’s not something I’m happy about, but that seemed like the only way out of our dilemma.”
Goodbye, pigeons.
Yet the serial pigeon homicide did nothing to remove the humming noise from the antenna.
So the only other option was that this long, constant signal was actually coming from outer space, and may possibly have a significant meaning.
Around this same time, physicist Robert Dicke of Princeton University had noted the likelihood that, if an event such as the Big Bang had occurred, low level radiation would be dispersed throughout the entire universe.
Hearing this, Penzias and Wilson made the connection between their incessant buzzing noise and Dicke’s prediction.
Thus, by accident, these two researchers discovered distinct proof of the Big Bang Theory.
While the idea had been around since the 1920s, this was one of the first events in which a concrete support of the theory had been discovered.
Penzias’ and Wilson’s accidental discovery advanced study of the Big Bang by a giant leap, allowing other scientists to continue more advanced work on the subject.
#5 Coca cola
Coca-Cola, or Coke, is a carbonated soft drink manufactured by The Coca-Cola Company.
Originally marketed as a temperance drink and intended as a patent medicine, it was invented in the late 19th century by John Stith Pemberton and was bought out by businessman Asa Griggs Candler, whose marketing tactics led Coca-Cola to its dominance of the world soft-drink market throughout the 20th century.
The drink's name refers to two of its original ingredients: coca leaves, and kola nuts (a source of caffeine).
The current formula of Coca-Cola remains a trade secret, although a variety of reported recipes and experimental recreations have been published.
Full story
A veteran of the American Civil War where he sustained a saber wound to his chest at the Battle of Columbus in April 1865 and soon became addicted to the morphine used to ease his pain.
As a chemical enthusiast, Pemberton tried several opium-free alternative painkillers and experimented with coca and cola wines until he stumbled on a recipe which contained extracts of cola nut and damiana with a never-known-before taste.
He marketed it as a medicine and called it “delicious, refreshing, pure joy, exhilarating and invigorating”.
He called his accidental product “Pemberton’s French Wine Coca”.
Pemberton’s product was an instant success but due to growing public concern about alcohol addiction, he was forced to make it non-alcoholic and made a recipe that included blending the base syrup with carbonated water and this, yet, was also an accident.
He called this new fabrication, “Coca-Cola”, a name formed from its major ingredients, “Coca” and “cola”.
Due to a protracted stomach cancer and imminent bankruptcy, Pemberton sold Coca-Cola to another Pharmacist, Asa Candler.
He transferred the production formula to him and listed the ingredients for Coca-Cola as: carbonated water, sugar, caramel, acidifier 338, caffeine, plant extracts and a major ingredient with the secret name “7x” that was not revealed to anyone.
Apart from the bottles which were made in the shape of a woman thereby giving it a general appeal, another factor for its global success was the 2nd World War when General Eisenhower ordered millions of Coca-Cola bottles for American soldiers fighting the Germans in North Africa.
There is empirical evidence from researchers and doctors that drinking it have some inherent health benefits.
For example, it is used by alimentary pharmacologists to break down stomach blockages and also as anti-nausea and lung-cleaning agents.
With this we end this post and hope that you learned something new, we thank everyone whom help made this post possible
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