20 every day items that were invented totally by accident

If you don’t consider corn flakes to be an invention, you don’t care enough about cereal. Will Keith Kellogg was working with his brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, at a sanitarium in Michigan. Will left some boiled wheat outside one day, and instead of getting rid of it, he baked it. The patients loved it, and the Kellogg brothers went on to revolutionize breakfast. 

You might not think about implantable pacemakers on a daily basis, but if you ever need one, you’ll be glad they exist. And the inventor, Wilson Greatbatch, didn’t even mean for them to exist. He was trying to make something to record the rhythm of heartbeats, but he invented the implantable pacemaker instead. 

In many uses, dynamite isn’t great. But it definitely has its purposes. And it was created by accident. One day in the 1860s, Alfred Nobel accidentally dropped some nitroglycerin, an explosive, onto sawdust, but it didn’t explode. Nobel realized that the sawdust stabilized the explosive, and he worked the formula to create dynamite. 

It makes sense that the slinky was created by accident because whose brain would come up with the idea for it naturally? Inventor Richard James was trying to make a specific type of spring for equipment on ships, but the slinky was born instead, and his wife suggested it become a toy. 

James Wright worked for the U.S. War Production Board during the Second World War, trying to make a cheap rubber alternative. What he made was Silly Putty, and, unsurprisingly, the government didn’t see the substance’s potential. A few years later, it became a children’s toy. 

What would corporate offices look like today without the accidental invention of Post-It Notes? In the late 1960s, Dr. Spencer Silver, a scientist, was trying to create a strong adhesive, but he ended up with a weak one instead. But it worked out for the best after a colleague suggested he use it on paper. 

Imagine a world without ice cream cones. Ice cream has been popular for centuries, but at the 1904 World’s Fair, Arnold Fornachou couldn’t keep up with the demand for ice cream, while Ernest Hamwi couldn’t sell his waffle pastry. The two teamed up and created the ice cream cone. 

Some of the world’s greatest toys are the result of inventors not being good at their jobs. Just kidding. They were probably great at their jobs, but they didn’t mean to make some of these toys, Play-Doh included. Cleo McVicker had set out to make wallpaper cleaner when he ended up with Play-Doh. 

It’s a little crazy to think that one of the most important substances in medicine was made by accident, but such is life. In the 1800s, Crawford Long, William Morton, Charles Jackson, and Horace Wells figured out that inhaling either ether or nitrous oxide reduced pain and adapted the use for dental procedures and surgeries.  

If you’ve ever wondered how people first came up with the idea for certain baked goods, don’t feel too dumb. Chocolate chip cookies were made by accident. Ruth Graves Wakefield — one of the owners and operators of the Toll House Inn near Boston — set out to make chocolate cookies for her guests, but she was out of baker’s chocolate. She used chopped up semi-sweet baking chocolate instead, but instead of melting into the batter, the chocolate stayed mostly intact and greatly pleased the guests. 

In 1853, chef George Crum made a customer some fries, but the patron found them too thick. Crum made more fries, but they were still too thick. Crum then made a third batch, and he made them too thin to be eaten with a fork and too salty to be enjoyable. But the customer, albeit high maintenance, was not a monster and loved Crum’s new recipe. Never be satisfied, people. 

Teflon was created when Roy J. Plunkett was trying to create a coolant gas. When experimenting with tetrafluoroethylene, Plunkett stumbled upon Teflon.  

Fittingly, we have a child to thank for popsicles. Eleven-year-old Frank Epperson made soda one day in 1905 using powdered soda and water and combining it with a stirring stick. He left the soda, stirring stick and all, outside overnight, and it froze, becoming a popsicle. 

In the early 1900s, Thomas Sullivan, a tea merchant, packaged some tea samples in silk pouches and sent them off to Europe, hoping the pouches would keep the leaves from getting mixed up. But the people on the receiving end didn’t quite get the memo, and they put the entire pouch into their boiling water. It was a happy accident, though, and the tea bag eventually took shape. 

Dr. Harry Coover was conducting research for the United States military during the Second World War when his team accidentally came upon a very, very sticky chemical compound. They had no use for it and forgot about it. Nearly 10 years later, while doing more research, the team came across it again, and they eventually made their bosses aware of the substance and started selling it. 

In some ways, it’s sort of comforting that X-rays were made by accident. It’s unsettling to think that someone would want to see inside another person’s body. But German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen stumbled across this discovery in 1895 and effectively changed medicine. 

You probably already know that penicillin is basically just fungus, but did you know it was invented by accident? Imagine what other medicines could be invented by accident. 

God bless Percy Spencer, the accidental inventor of the microwave oven. An engineer, Spencer was making radar equipment when he noticed that the chocolate bar he had in his pocket had melted. Thinking it was the microwaves coming off the radar, he put his theory to the test with some corn kernels and popped them. He then went on to create the first microwave oven. 

Curt Jones was experimenting with flash-freezing animal food in the late 1980s. He figured he could do the same thing to ice cream to make little beads of the frozen treat, and he did. 

Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral noticed that burrs were sticking to his clothing and his dog’s fur. He looked at the burrs under a microscope and worked on a design to replicate that so that things would stick on purpose rather than irritatingly while on a hike.