There are so many things that become boring reoccurrences for us. We don’t wake up in the morning thinking about where or how everything that surrounds us came into being, but there are so many comical objects and substances that were so advanced and unthought of in their time that they weren’t even intentionally thought of! They were accidents. These are just a few of the many discoveries that have been concocted just by mixing the wrong ingredient.

1 –Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ruth Graves Wakefield, an owner of Toll House Inn in Whitman, Mass. had a special chocolate cookie recipe she would cook for her guests, but one day she did not have any baker’s chocolate to put into the mix, so she broke up a Nestlé chocolate bar and swirled it into the batter expecting it to melt and spread through the dough in the baking process. Of course this was not the case and when she served her concoction to her anxious guests, her creamy cookie was an accidental success. People came from all over to get it, and Nestlé offered her a lifetime supply of chocolate to print her recipe on the back of their chocolate bar.

2–Stainless Steel

Harry Brearly was a metallurgist from the English city of Sheffield and he was trying to come up with a gun that had metal in the barrel that would not rust or wear out as easily as the current ones did. One day he noticed that one of his failures was actually a success. Among all the other experiments that had rusted away, one had stayed looking new and unchanged. He had used 12 percent chromium, which had reacted with the oxygen in the air to form a thin, protective film, creating stainless steel.

3–X-rays

German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays while he was experimenting with cathode ray tubes. Something strange happened after he surrounded the tube with black cardboard. When he turned on the machine, a chemical a few feet away started to glow. He had no idea what it was at first so he gave it the name X-ray.

4–Potato Chips

Hotel chef George Crum worked at Moon’s Lake House near Saratoga Springs, N.Y. and was known for taking any ingredient someone gave him and turning it into a dish for a king. One day a customer came into the restaurant and was upset about the fried potatoes Crum had made and she complained that they were way too thick. In return, infuriated as he was, Crum sliced paper thin potatoes and fried them and gave them back to the lady. . . they were a hit. Now we call them potato chips

5–Play-dough

Joseph McVicker invented the dough as a cleaning object to remove soot from wallpaper in WWII, but when natural gas began to replace coal, his dough company almost went out of business! Fortunately McVicker’s sister, a school teacher, used it for modeling clay in class so McVicker started to sell the old cleaning dough as play dough and thus the new company of Play-dough was formed

6–Super Glue

Eastman Kodak and Harry Coover were trying to develop a plastic seeing glass for guns in WWII and they kept coming across a sticky substance that would stick to everything and it angered them. Later, after they realized what they discovered, they tried connecting it to certain objects and they were permanently connected. They later lifted a person from the floor on a gameshow by putting one drop between to cables and pulling it.

7–Cornflakes

John Kellogg and William Kellogg were in a search to find a substantial vegetarian diet for patients in Battle Creek Michigan sanitarium.  John was the chief medical officer there, and it was based on Seventh-day Adventist health principles of a vegetarian diet. They tried boiling wheat to turn it into dough, but when they rolled it out it broke into crunchy flakes instead of dough, and thus the cornflake was born.

8–Raisins

Dating back thousands of years, raisins have been found in many dishes and treats today, but there is an old story of a young man walking through a grape field and he saw a strange beetle on the ground, but this was no beetle. It had no legs and no eyes! So he took the strange thing back to his village and the tribe’s man had an idea. They would roast it. Obviously it was delicious, and we see raisins in many dishes we have today.

9–Matches

Matches were invented when a British pharmacist tried to clean some clumped up goop at the end of his mixing stick. He tried to drag it across a surface to scrape it off when it suddenly ignited! He sold them in local stores but did not patent the idea so another man, Samuel Jones, patented it and sold them in small compact boxes and gave them the title “lucifers.”

10–Popsicles

Frank Epperson in 1905 was 11 years old and had made a fruit flavored soda and forgot about it and left it outside overnight. When he woke up in the morning the stirring stick had been frozen inside the fruit drink. In 1932 he patented the idea and gave the frozen treat the name “eppsicle.” Later his kids liking the name Popsicle better changed the name to Popsicle as it remains today.

Source:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/2012/1005/The-20-most-fascinating-accidental-inventions/Matches