*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Monday, October 22nd, 2012 1:33pm PDT - promote requested by UsesProzac.

Old Wives Tale -- eating moldy bread could cure a fever.

Sometimes the mold was penicillin.

One wonders if Fleming had heard of this tale....

Some of these use an awfully loose definition of "accident"

A guy's drink froze while outside. 20 years later he somehow decided to put a stick in it. Thus, frozen ice on a stick was accidentally invented?

And something gave a guy an idea to create Velcro, so he then successfully created it. So the makers of the video believe any time something inspires someone to invent something, they invented it by accident?

That fella who cooked that candy bar in his pocket standing too close to the magnetron???...That wasn't the only candy that got cooked in his trousers!!-His claim to fame?? Senior VP of Raytheon when he died in 1970.

... But they actually forgot to mention Post-its. 3M was trying to create a glue, but it didn't work. It WAS a complete accident that they created post-its because that glue was supposed to stick - and it doesn't - which gave them the idea to market it as Post-Its.

"In 1968, Dr. Spencer Silver, a chemist at 3M in the United States, was attempting to develop a super-strong adhesive, but instead he accidentally created a "low-tack", reusable, pressure-sensitive adhesive." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note

>> ^schlub:

Some of these use an awfully loose definition of "accident"


Also, a loose definition of "invent".

Velcro doesn't count. He wasn't trying to brew beer when he accidentally made velcro. The rest are interesting, and all but penicillin were news to me. Upvote!

My favorite of the list is Greatbatch, and his story really gets to the value of inspiration and curiousity as an inventor. He was just making a device to record heart beats, and put in an incorrect resistor for his circuit, resulting in a oscillating blip in his recordings. Instead of going 'fuck! I made the goddamn thing wrong! So I threw it on the grooooound!' No he said, 'Woah, thats neat, I have sort-of a built-in time guage that is very regular in my recordings, and can see how irregular the heart beat is ... wait a minute...', and then proceeded to work on the completely crazy idea of an implantable, miniature device to electrically stimulating the heart to keep it beating evenly as people just walked around.

I'd argue that its basically impossible to accidentally invent something. You have to be bright enough to recognize something interesting, and curious enough to follow it off in the direction it leads.