Accidental inventions

Louis Pasteur once said, “chance favours the prepared mind.” That’s the genius behind all these accidental inventions - the scientists were prepared. They did their science on the brink and were able to see the magic in a mistake, set-back or coincidence.

Saccharin

Saccharin, the sweetener, was discovered because chemist Constantin Fahlberg did not wash his hands after a day at the office. The year was 1879 and Fahlberg was trying to come up with new and interesting uses for coal tar. After a productive day at the office, he went home and something strange happened.

He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularly sweet. He asked his wife if she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but she had not. They tasted normal to her. Fahlberg realized the taste must have been coming from his hands - which he had not washed. The next day he went back to the lab and started tasting his work until he found the sweet spot.

Penicillin

Alexander Fleming did not clean up his workstation before going on vacation one day in 1928.

When he came back, Fleming noticed that there was a strange fungus on some of his cultures. Even stranger was that bacteria did not seem to thrive near those cultures.

Penicillin became the first and is still one of the most widely used antibiotics.

- Discovery Science

Smart dust

Most people would be pretty upset if their homework blew up in their faces and crumbled into a bunch of tiny pieces. Not student Jamie Link. When Link was doing her doctoral work in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, one of the silicon chips she was working on burst. She discovered afterward, however, that the tiny pieces still functioned as sensors.

The resulting 'smart dust' won her the top prize at the Collegiate Inventors Competition in 2003.

These tiny sensors can also be used to monitor the purity of drinking or seawater, to detect hazardous chemical or biological agents in the air, or even to locate and destroy tumour cells in the body.