5 Accidental Inventions That Changed The World
Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
Just ask the inventors of these products, each one having changed the way we live, and each one having come about either by serendipity or complete fuck-up. We're talking about...
#5.
The Microwave Oven
The microwave oven, aka the "Popcorn and Hot Pockets Warmer," was a happy accident that came from, of all things, a weapons program.
Percy LeBaron Spencer was a self-educated engineer working on radar technology in the years following WWII. The technology in question was the sci-fi sounding magnetron, a piece of machinery capable of firing high intensity beams of radiation.
Above: a scientist, with robot.
Apparently, P.L.S., as some have called him, had a bit of a sweet tooth. Or a strange fetish. Either way, he had a candy bar in his pants while he was in the lab one day. The self-proclaimed engineer noticed that the chocolate bar had melted when he was working with the magnetron.
Spencer disregarded the simple idea that his body heat had melted the chocolate in favor of the less logical and therefore more scientific conclusion that invisible rays of radiation had "cooked it" somehow.
A sane man would stop at this point and realize these magical heat rays were landing just inches from his tender scrotum. Indeed, most of the military experts on hand probably dreamed of the battlefield applications of their new Dick-Melting Ray. But like all men of science, Spencer was fascinated and treated his discovery like a novelty. He used it to make eggs explode and pop kernels of corn ("Imagine, a future where a building full of workers in cubicles eat this all day!")
I proclaim myself to be awesome.
Spencer continued to experiment with the magnetron until he boxed it in and marketed it as a new way to cook food. The initial version of the microwave was roughly six feet tall, weighed in around 750 pounds and had to be cooled with water. But they got it down to size, and today we use it mostly to destroy random objects on YouTube.
#4.
Krazy Glue and/or Super Glue
The story goes that in 1942, Dr. Harry Coover was working for Eastman Kodak, a company renowned for cameras and camera-related things. His job was to find a plastic that could be used as a clear gunsight, since this was smack in the middle of WWII and everybody knew where the money was.
Coover got frustrated because the material, called cyanoacrylate, was just too damned sticky. Rather than noticing he accidentally made one of the most versatile adhesives of all time, he threw it away in a huff and continued sweating over gunsights for a war that would be ended, ironically, by two bombs with blast radiuses so big that they didn't even require sights at all.
Aim optional.
Years later, Coover would re-discover his invention, we prefer to think due to him noticing that old container of cyanoacrylate was still stuck to the bottom of his trash can and couldn't be removed by any means.
In 1958, after finally convincing his bosses that at the very least, there was enormous comedic potential in the prospect of a man getting his hand permanently stuck to his junk; Kodak released the glue with the catchy name "Eastman 910."
Somebody then decided to actually pay the marketing guys to do something, and they decided the best way to convince people to buy this new product was to suspend a car over a public street with a crane, supposedly held up only with the ol' 910.
Reactions resulted in the product being coined "Krazy Glue"; a product so crazy that it requires intentional misspelling. The early slogan, "Remember, you can only use it once before it completely solidifies in the tube!" was quickly dropped and it remains a top-selling product to this day.
#3.
Vulcanized Rubber
You probably won't be shocked to find out that the inventor of tire rubber is Charles Goodyear, as he's the first guy on the list to actually get his name attached to the end product (since "Coover Glue" sounds like a gruesome form of birth control).
It wasn't easy coming up with a form of rubber tough enough to withstand the drag racing and car chases everyone envisioned the day the automobile was invented. In fact, if there was one man who should have given up his life dream, it was Goodyear. The man spent time in and out of prison, lost every friend he had and starved his children in his tireless pursuit of a stronger form of rubber.
"There's got to be a better way."
It was the 1830s, a period of time known for sucking. After his first two years of tinkering and failing with primitive rubber, Goodyear and his family were camping out in an abandoned factory and fishing for sustenance. This is when he made a huge breakthrough: He'd use acid to smooth out and toughen rubber! The government bought 150 mailbags made of the stuff and the rest is...
Oh, wait. They were all defective. The process didn't work and Goodyear was ruined. Again.
Finally in 1839, probably after being struck by lightning and/or being pissed on by a pack of stray dogs, Goodyear wandered into a general store with another failure of a formula. The crowd watched. Then they laughed at him. In a rage, he began to shake his fist, flinging a piece of his rubber onto the hot stove top.
After inspecting the charred remains, he realized that he had just found a way to make durable, weatherproof rubber. Despite what we're sure were numerous failed "now let's try setting this on fire to see if it improves it!" experiments, an empire was born.
solaceinrage is completely correct in saying that Ernest Duchesne first noticed the effects of the bacteria that Fleming also noticed, but Fleming studied the bacteria and saw that it had some healing potential.
ReplyIn saying this, though, a number of ancient cultures had been using variants of the same moldfor its healing effects, but never fully realised the connection in terms of chemicals and infection.
Fleming, though, was never able to find the right combination in terms of chemistry to show just how important penicillin was to become.
It took Sir Howard Florey, an Australian doctor, and Ernst B. Chain, a German bio-chemist, and the work of numerous other doctors, to isolate the chemical compound and produce it in a large enough quantity for human treatment, which birthed one of the greatest medical discoveries of all time. Funded by a U.S. company, they were able to mass-produce penicillin, which was sent to the heal the wounded in WWII. Fleming, Florey and Chain all won the Nobel Prize for their work, and rightly so, as their work has undoubtedly saved more lives in the history of humankind than any other medical discovery.
It took Florey and Chain only 4 years from beginning their research to full-scale mass-production. The profound impact of penicillin and the speed at which they were able to realise the full potential of Fleming's bacteria, saw them receive the Nobel Prize only two years after penicillin's implementation.
"Sacré bleu" and "so filthy that he actually would discover a form of filth that could kill other filth" are why I read Cracked.
ReplyI'm not sure any of this beats the Jewish guy who invented Zyclon B.
ReplyVulcanized rubber: the injuns in South America had that quite a few years ago, and played a version of basketball.
ReplyFleming didn't really discover penicillin, they'd been using it in parts of Africa for thousands of years.
ReplyWhat about radar? We in the US were trying to make a death ray when we discovered that
ReplyNo. The radar was invented by the British, on purpose, to detect airplanes.
Um... no. Radar was invented by the British, very much on purpose.
Sad that we are squandering away antibiotics by misusing them. There is now a strain of gonorrhea out there that is resistant to all antibiotics. Keep your dick in your pants.
ReplyI'll keep my dick in YOUR pants.
'It was the 1830s, a period of time known for sucking.'
ReplyI laughed. Out loud.
When my friend was a kid, put his cat in the microwave because he thought it was cold.
Replyum...boom?
I have a Magnetron in my f**king kitchen?
ReplyHe really isn't that cool of a transformer. Infact his threats to sterilize you are less cool and more, holy s**t run/sweet no more condoms.
@ aersix
ReplyWTF are you talking about?
two lines, pigs, a new drug and new programming for the site? With terrible spelling and grammar? If you know so much about programming (or ANYTHING) take the time to type out everything. It looks like you're just stringing buzzwords together
I think you just enjoy filling the comment bar with useless horses**t! (in my opinion, that's at least 50x more annoying than spam ads)
:P
lol almost looks like it's rhetoric + .01% so far, much better than b4 with tldr or lol wut? those short back & forth with nopthing, soimetimes some pig talkin to himself 15 times to flood out something or something else until they vanish too
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesHoly s**t aersix! Is your life really so sad that you have to sit and write a 2 paragraph long comment critiquing the scientific merit of an article on a COMEDY site? Really? Go find some friends you sad troll.
bereted
1234 Welcome to the flame war
is it because english is not my first language or this aersix guy is actually writing silly stuff that i really dont understand.
Wait, what?
buffer it at least with an option to insert or merge, or let ppl scroll past all 5 of my unique info containing ones to get to 5 of random others that say
Replyiscovered the chemical the mold produced which is named penicillin after the mold.
really f**king useful, did you read that line on wiki just now from google?
I remember the time my grandfather told me about the time he ws immensly ill and the new mirical drug that saved his life...pennecillen...ah the wonder drug...lol
that one is bulls**t from a kid, maybe medi or wathcin them still young unclear path 5050 from over here with that sen t only, no name lol
Please learn to properly and coherently form sentences in the future, as I havn't a clue as to what you are talking about. Thank you for your cooperation.
I don't know which pipe you're hitting aersix, but you need to cut it out, man.
erases doubles to enforce a fake old spam attack, ctrl c ctrl v enter enter enter? not this, simply flow and unknown db table length and convenient location
ReplyPlease kill yourself. Don't make me get out of this chair.
the two lines exist and are real, but break the design and do not mesh with the kit, do not hack into the kit except as an example, if you cannot rewrite you cannot control it, so instead access thru api or by tearing apart and rebuilding identical to understand all lines here, including those other weird xml bulls**t ones, look those up on google mostly arbitrary for complier settings etc
Replythat delay is there so a programmer could add something useless and claim useful, 1 line simple obvious generically named functions portin from c# or gcc, f**kin 30 seconds and no other comment mods? post the code diffs from kit lol, bet that two lines and lots of bluffin was what, $150k ?
Replywhy is it 1 per 30 seconds per ip? spambots rotate and are fake, nobody poisons their own business puttin someone elses name also risky and low reward if more than +2 other legal patent entities, both of which are diff due to microwave vs. oven vs. kiln, note f**k therostat and weakmat holes in oven it's a superkiln assumin stainless primary durablility construction, they put weak hoses and s**t so you gotta reaplce the meat+ melt s**t with real hoses same design otherwise fire is very hot and will keep gettin 'hotter' to max temp (maybe can boost thru some kind of fire coil? maybe just watts boosts volts thru coil lol, more heat from same torch with less quant or similar, but same fuel? lol maybe you gotta coilspin the fuel first lol that's hotter
Replythey reform fast at small and bigger scales from minerals, sun, all other stuff to so it's ok to burn it, very large plus more over there probably, or we just fling bugs at it until their minerals become ours, or possibliy just organics since minerals are generic maybe, perhaps theirs use something comepletely diff than random mutation, maybe that + extra mecahnism we ain't got can maybe mod splice in, plus we got s**t they ain't to keep too
Replyit stays here, organics will burn to minerals every time if fire hits them over x volts hot over min chain watt threashold for exposed thin areas or not
Replyis throwin away like sending free s**t to mexico or much later for the dolophis? where's it gonna go, the other side of earth (brown humans with unpronouncable names and similar boxes with roads and cellies stores etc, paper is wrong color diff number)
Reply