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ACCIDENTAL INVENTIONS AMAZING TOP 10

Louis Pasteur once said, "chance favors the prepared mind." That's the genius behind all these accidental inventions - thescientists were prepared. They did their science on the brink andwere able to see the magic in a mistake, set-back, or coincidence.

No. 10 Saccharin: Saccharin, the sweetener in the pink packet,was discovered because chemist Constantin Fahlberg didn't washhis hands after a day at the office. Prepare to get icked. The yearwas 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 andsomething strange happened. He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularlysweet. He asked his wife if she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but shehadn't. They tasted normal to her. Fahlberg realized the taste must have been

coming from his hands -- which he hadn't washed.The next day he went back to the lab and started tasting his work until he found thesweet spot.

No. 9 - Smart Dust: Most people would be pretty upset if theirhomework blew up in their faces and crumbled into a bunch of tinypieces. Not so 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 discoveredafterward, 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 teensy 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.No. 8 Coke: There are many stories of accidentally invented food:

the potato chip was born when cook George Crum (yes, really hisname!) tried to silence a persnickety customer who kept sendingfrench fries back to the kitchen for being soggy; Popsicles were

invented when Frank Epperson left a drink outside in the cold overnight; and icecream cones were invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. But no food-

vention has had as much success as Coke.Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton was trying to make a cure for headaches. Hemixed together a bunch of ingredients - and don't ask, because we don't know; Therecipe is still a closely guarded secret. It only took eight years of being sold in a drugstore before the drink was popular enough to be sold in bottles.

No. 7- Teflon: After all the damage they've done to the ozone layer,chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, are persona non grata.Back in the 1930s, however, they were (pardon the pun) the hot

new thing in the science of refrigeration.

Young DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett was working to make a new a new kind of CFC.He had a theory that if he could get a compound called TFE to react withhydrochloric acid, he could produce the refrigerant he wanted. So, to start his

experiment Plunkett got a whole bunch of TFE gas, cooled it and pressured it incanisters so it could be stored until he was ready to use it.

When the time came to open the container and put the TFE and hydrochloric acidtogether so they could react, nothing came out of the canister. The gas had

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disappeared. Only it hadn't. Frustrated and angry, Plunkett took off the top of thecanister and shook it. Out came some fine white flakes.Luckily for everyone who's ever made an omelet, he was intrigued by the flakes andhanded them off to other scientists at DuPont.

No. 6 - Vulcanized Rubber: Charles Goodyear had been waitingyears for a happy accident when it finally occurred.Goodyear spent a decade finding ways to make rubber easier towork with while being resistant to heat and cold.

Nothing was having the effect he wanted. One day he spilled a mixture of rubber,sulphur and lead onto a hot stove. The heat charred the mixture, but didn't ruin it. When Goodyear picked up theaccident, he noticed that the mixture had hardened but was still quite usable. At

last! The breakthrough he had been waiting for! His vulcanized rubber is used ineverything from tires, to shoes, to hockey pucks.

No. 5 Plastic: In 1907 shellac was used as insulation in

electronics. It was costing the industry a pretty penny to importshellac, which was made from Southeast Asian beetles, and athome chemist Leo Hendrik Baekeland thought he might turn a

profit if he could produce a shellac alternative. Instead his experiments yielded a

mouldable material that could take high temperatures without distorting. Baekelandthought his "Bakelite" might be used for phonograph records, but it was soon clear

that the product had thousands of uses. Today plastic, which was derived fromBakelite, is used for everything from telephones to iconic movie punch lines.

No. 4 Radioactivity:Two words that you don't ever want to hearsaid in the same sentence are "Whoops!" and "radioactive."

But in the case of physicist Henri Becquerel's surprise discovery, itwas an accident that brought radioactivity to light.

Back in 1896 Becquerel was fascinated by two things: natural fluorescence and the

newfangled X-ray.He ran a series of experiments to see if naturally fluorescent minerals produced X-

rays after they had been left out in the sun.One problem - he was doing these experiments in the winter, and there was oneweek with a long stretch of overcast skies.

He left his equipment wrapped up together in a drawer and waited for a sunny day.When he got back to work, Becquerel realized that the uranium rock he had left in

the drawer had imprinted itself on a photographic plate without being exposed tosunlight first.There was something very special about that rock. Working with Marie and Pierre

Curie, he discovered that that something was radioactivity.No. 3 Mauve: Talk about strange connections - 18-year-oldchemist William Perkin wanted to cure malaria; instead his

scientific endeavors changed the face of fashion forever and, ohyeah, helped fight cancer.

Confused? Don't be. Here's how it happened. In 1856 Perkin was trying to come upwith artificial quinine.

Instead of a malaria treatment, his experiments produced a thick murky mess.But the more he looked at it, the more Perkin saw a beautiful color in his mess.Turns out he had made the first-ever synthetic dye.His dye was far better than any dyes that came from nature; the color was brighter,more vibrant, and didn't fade or wash out.His discovery also turned chemistry into a money-generating science - making it

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attractive for a whole generation of curious-minded people. But the story is not over yet. One of the people inspired by Perkin's work was German bacteriologist PaulEhrlich, who used Perkin's dyes to pioneer immunology and chemotherapy.

No. 2 Pacemaker:This list wouldn't be complete without at leastone absent-minded professor.But it's not flubber clocking in at No. 2, it's a life saving medicaldevice.

That pacemaker sewn into a loved one's chest actually came about because

American engineer Wilson Greatbatch reached into a box and pulled out the wrongthing. It's true.Greatbatch was working on making a circuit to help record fast heart sounds.He reached into a box for a resistor in order to finish the circuit and pulled out a 1-

megaohm resistor instead of a 10,000-ohm one. The circuit pulsed for 1.8milliseconds and then stopped for one second.

Then it repeated. The sound was as old as man: a perfect heartbeat.

No. 1 Penicillin: You read this far into the list looking forpenicillin, didn't you?That's OK. As one of the most famous and fortunate accidents of

the 20th century, penicillin belongs at No. 1 on this list.

If you've been living under a rock for the past 80 years or so, here's how the popularstory goes: Alexander Fleming didn't 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 ofhis cultures. Even stranger was that bacteria didn't seem to thrive near thosecultures. Penicillin became the first and is still one of the most widely usedantibiotics.