Mark Wagner - Yet Another Blog

Through our history people made discoveries that changed that way we live, but all by accident. I thought it would be interesting to compile a list of some of the ones that I thought were interesting. This is just a small sample from the hundreds I’ve found online and in some books.

Here is a list of various discoveries based on accidental discoveries.

SMALLPOX VACCINATION
The vaccination for smallpox was discovered by Edward Jenner in 1796. Jenner was a British scientist and surgeon. He found out through a milkmaid that people who would get cowpox, which is a harmless disease caught by going in contact with a cow, never got smallpox.

Jenner took samples of the cowpox off of the hands of the milkmaid and injected an 8 year old boy with the disease. The boy (James Phipps) did get sick from the injection, but only ailments he had were a few lesions and a slight fever. A few months later Jenner injected him with smallpox. His son never developed the disease. Jenner’s first inoculation, the technique of vaccinating against smallpox using the human strain of cowpox soon became a common and effective practice worldwide.

While this borders on accidental and just an intelligent man finding a sure, if the milkmaid had never told Jenner this he would have never made the discovery.

X-RAYS
You’ve probably have had several of these in your life. This discovery was purely made by accident. It was discovered in 1895 by a German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. He was studying cathode rays and wanted to see if he could see the cathode rays escaping from a glass tube if covered in black cardboard. While performing this experience, he started to notice a glow appearing in his dark laboratory on his cardboard-covered glass tube.

He first thought it was a tear in the cardboard. Upon closer inspection he realized that rays of light were passing right through the thick paper and appearing on the fluorescent screen over a yard away. He received the first Nobel Prize in 1901 for this accidental discovery. The picture depicts the first x-ray ever taken.

VIAGRA
This accidental discovery is one of the more recent ones. The pill was originally designed for use in hypertension (high blood pressure) and angina pectois (a form of ischaemic cardiovascular disease). When the drug was initially tested it was found that it had little effect on angina but was able to cause an erection.

LCD (Lysergic acid diethylamide)
LSD was accidentally synthesized by Dr. Albert Hofmann on November 16th, 1938. Hofmann was looking for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. Its psychedelic properties were not found out until 5 years had passed.

While working with the chemical he accidentally absorbed a small amount through his skin. LSD was provided free under the name “Delysid.” It was used for many years (and accepted) to treat patients with schizophrenia to better understand it.

POST-IT NOTES
Even something as simple as Post-It Note was discovered accidentally. In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist at 3M came upon a glue that was not sticky enough. Six years pass, and in 1974 a colleague of Dr. Silver’s was singing in a church choir and was frustrated that his bookmarks would keep falling out of place. He took some of Dr. Silver’s glue and put them on the bookmarks. They were officially launched in 1977.