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Isn't it amazing how sometimes a scientist or inventor devotes himself to trying to discover or invent something, only to find that he has discovered or invented something else purely by accident? This has happened many times in the history of the world and I am sure many of the early stories of what happened, in a particular situation, have disappeared. We do know about later discoveries and inventions, so let's take a peek back into the recent and not so recent past.

Friedrich Wöhler was born in Germany in 1800. He was a doctor who advanced his studies in the field of chemistry. In 1828 while mixing some chemicals he accidentally synthesized Urea. This may not seem like much to the lay person, but it was the first time that an organic substance was created artificially. This started the whole field of organic chemistry. Science had felt very strongly that an organic substance could never be created in a lab.

Wilson Greatbatch worked as an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Buffalo. In the late 1950s he was working on a machine that would record heart sounds. He needed a resistor and reached into his parts bin and installed it into his machine. He hadn't noticed it, but he picked the wrong one, the one he installed was 100 times more powerful than the one he thought he needed. The mistake went undetected as he turned on his machine. As he checked the machine he realized that it was now capable of pacing the heart. He had invented the pacemaker, all quite by accident.

Alexander Fleming was a scientist that changed the world of medicine in 1928. One day when he went to work he noticed that a mold formed on a sample that he was working on. Then he noticed something even more incredible, the mold was dissolving the bacteria in the sample. Fleming had discovered penicillin.

George Crum was neither an inventor or a scientist, he was a chef. Crum got very disturbed when a patron sent back some fries that he had made and asked him to make them thinner. Crum was so angry that he purposely sliced a potato so thin, that the patron would not be able to get a fork into it. The scheme backfired, the patron loved the potatoes and word spread. Soon the restaurant was serving these thin, crispy potatoes regularly. This is how the potato chip was born.

Earl of Sandwich We all know that the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich, but how many of us know how it came about? I will tell you. The Earl was a lover of gaming. One day he was gambling and didn't want to leave the table to eat, so he order his servant to take two slices of bread and pile food between the slices. This allowed him to continue without getting up.

Ernest Hamwi was just a regular guy. As a matter of fact, he was working very hard selling pastry at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. He had an ice cream vendor next to him. The ice cream vendor came to him in a panic. He had run out of plates. Hamwi rolled some of his pastry into a cone shape and the ice cream vendor put his ice cream into it. This became very popular and thus the ice cream cone was born.

Luigi Galvani found out, in 1791, that nerve impulses are electrical. This happened when he was experimenting with frog's legs. He had attached some copper wire to them and had them hanging near a balcony. A gust of wind caused the legs to touch the balcony and a spark made the legs jerk. This is where the word 'Galvanized' comes from.

The 3M company had one of their scientists working on a synthetic rubber. The idea was to use it the fuel lines of airplanes. As he was working with this substance, he spilled some on an old tennis shoe. Try as he would, he couldn't remove it. When the shoes got older, they look dirty and dingy all over except for the spot when the chemical mixture had spilled. This caused the scientist to investigate what had happened and try to refine the mixture. Scotchgard was born.

Ruth Wakefield was an innkeeper. She was baking Butter Drop Do cookies which date back hundreds of years, but she really wanted chocolate cookies, so she cut up a chocolate bar she had and put it into the batter. She thought that the cookies would now be chocolate flavored. To her shock the cookies had chunks of chocolate in them when she took them out of the oven. This is how the chocolate chip cookie was born.

We can see by the above how accidents play an important part in invention and discovery. This may not be so true in the future as work becomes more structured, one can only hope.