5. The Color Mauve
In 1856, 18-year-old chemist William Perkin turned out to be quite the young prodigy, inventing synthetic dye and going on to help fight cancer. Only, dye was nowhere close to what he intended on making.
Perkin was working on a creating an artificial version of the malaria drug quinine. Instead, his experiments produced a dark oily sludge. Not only did the sludge turn silk a striking shade of light purple, it didn't wash out and was more vibrant and brighter than the existing dyes on the market. Up to that point, dyes were made mostly of insects, mollusks, or plant material. As later chronicled in the book Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color That Changed the World, by Simon Garfield, Perkin's invention of mauve coloring became the hit of the Paris and London fashion scenes; Queen Victoria even wore it to her daughter's wedding in 1858.
Perkin's work with dyes inspired German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich, who used the inventions to pioneer immunology and the first chemotherapy, eventually winning a Nobel Prize.
6. Plastics
Can you imagine carrying water bottles made of clay or using disposable utensils made of eggs and animal blood? The legend of the discovery of plastic says that were it not for two accidents, those might be the materials we'd be stuck with today.
The first tale starts in the lab of Charles Goodyear (yes, that Goodyear), who combined rubber and sulfur and accidentally put it on the stove for a period of time. When he came back, he found a tough and durable material--created through a process eventually called vulcanization.
The second was a spill in John Wesley Hyatt's shop. Inspired by a $10,000 contest to find a replacement for elephant ivory in billiard balls, Hyatt accidentally spilled a bottle of collodion, only to discover that when it dried it formed a flexible-yet-strong material. He didn't win the contest (nor did anyone, for that matter), but by 1872 his brother Isaiah coined the term celluloid to describe what was becoming the first commercially successful plastic--even used in the first motion-picture film used by George Eastman.
7. Saccharine
The familiar sweetener in the pink packet was discovered because chemist Constantin Fahlberg failed to do what even a high school chemistry student knows: Always wash your hands.
Prepare to be grossed out. Here's the scene: It's 1879, and Fahlberg was sitting in his lab, toying around with new uses for coal tar, to no great success. The work interested him so much he forgot about his supper until late, then rushed off for a meal with his hands all still covered in laboratory goo, as he later admitted in an interview with Scientific American.
He broke a piece of bread, put it to his lips, and noticed it tasted unusually sweet. He rinsed his mouth, wiped his mustache with a napkin, and found the napkin tasted sweeter, too. Even the water in his cup tasted syrupy. Then he did what would surely gross out any scientist passerby: He stuck his thumb in his mouth, then went back to his laboratory and tasted every beaker and dish in the lab until he found the one that contained saccharin.
Luckily for dieters everywhere, he managed not to poison himself along the way.
8. Corn Flakes
Dr. John Kellogg and his brother Keith would have fit right into today's world of new agey health fads. In 1894, however, they were probably laughed at as weirdo health freaks who put visitors at their hospital and health spa in Battle Creek, Michigan, through strange health regiments that included abstaining from meat, alcohol, tobacco, and even sex. One part of that regiment was eliminating caffeine by using a coffee substitute made of a type of granola. After cooking some wheat, the men were called away, as happens when you're running a busy sanatorium. When they came back, the wheat had become stale, but, ever the budget-conscious hippies, they decided to force it through the rollers anyway.
Instead of coming out in long sheets of dough, each wheat berry flattened and came out as a thin flake. The brothers baked the flakes, and, boom, a new breakfast cereal fad was born, as the Kellogg's official website points out.
That wasn't the only cereal trend that was born at the Battle Creek sanatorium: Charles William Post, who later founded Postum Cereal Company (aka Post Cereals), was a student of Kellogg's. He developed his own line of products based on the cereal he ate at the clinic. The Post cereal company went on to make Honeycomb, Fruity Pebbles, Waffle Crisp, and lots of other sugary cereals the health-conscious Kellogg probably would have shaken his head at.
9. Pacemaker
Wilson Greatbatch made a classic dumb move: pulling the wrong part out of a box of equipment. It was a major act of numskullery that became a major part of saving millions of lives.
In 1956, Greatbatch was working on building a heart rhythm recording device at the University of Buffalo. He reached into a box and pulled out a resistor of the wrong size and plugged it into the circuit. When he installed it, he recognized the rhythmic lub-dub sound of the human heart. The beat, according to his 2001 obituary in The New York Times, reminded him of chats he had had with other scientists about whether an electrical stimulation could make up for a breakdown in the heart's natural beats. Before then, pacemakers were hulking machines the size of TVs. Greatbatch's implantable device of just 2 cubic inches forever changed life expectancy in the world. Now, more than half a million of the devices are implanted every year. Not bad for a numskull.
