3 Inventions That Were Discovered by Accident
No. 2 will surprise you….
You've probably heard of scientists and inventors who had an idea in mind before coming about their inventions, but did you know that there are some inventions that came about purely by accident?
First on the list is:
• Chocolate Chip Cookies
This delicacy was invented in 1938 by Ruth Wakefield, the co-owner of Toll House Inn.
She decided to bake a batch of chocolate cookies, but along the line, she discovered that she had run out of baker’s chocolate. Rather than head to the store to get more, she grabbed a bar of Nestle chocolate, chopped it into small pieces, and dumped it in the batter, expecting it to melt and blend into the batter.
But the chunks had other ideas, as they stayed solid, and this eventually gave birth to the first chocolate chip cookies.
• Microwave
During WWII, radar technology was developed to detect Nazi airplanes. It functioned by sending out high-energy radio waves, and if these waves encountered an object in their paths, they were reflected, and the radar system detected the said object.
One day, American engineer Percy Spencer was standing near one of these devices called a magnetron when he noticed that the candy bar in his pocket had melted. He must have put two and two together, and eventually, he introduced other things to the magnetron (corn kernels), thus producing the first microwave popcorn.
He further worked on it, and the first microwave was produced.
• The Implantable Pacemaker
Wilson Greatbatch was working on a piece of equipment to record heart rhythms when he reached into a box of parts for a resistor to complete the circuitry. He accidentally pulled out one of the wrong sizes and discovered that when he installed it, the circuit it produced emitted intermittent electrical pulses — just like the human heart.
“The oscillator required a 10 KΩ resistor at the transistor base. I reached into my resistor box for one, but I misread the color coding and got a 1 MΩ resistor by mistake,” he later explained.
A healthy human heart beats an average of 50 to 70 times per minute — but for one not working properly, every second begins to matter. Greatbatch eventually realized that this small device could drive a human heart, but it took heart surgeons much longer to believe in his idea.
So it might seem like nothing much, but back then, patients with so-called heart block were suffering from blackouts, dizziness, and even death because their heart's own electrical impulses could not properly function. And the early pacemakers that were available were bulky and painful for patients to use.
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