Are you accident-prone? Don’t worry, it could end up making the world a better place.
FIRST GLASS
One day in 1903, French chemist Edouard Benedictus was working in his lab when he accidentally knocked an empty glass flask off his workbench. When he picked it up, he noticed something strange: The glass had shattered into many pieces, but they remained stuck together in the shape of the bottle. Upon further investigation, he found that the flask had been filled with collodion, a syrupy chemical solution that, when evaporated, leaves a clear film. The film had coated the inside of the glass and held the pieces together. (Collodion, though quite toxic, was used in those days to seal cuts after surgery.)
Although Benedictus thought this was interesting, he went back to his regular work. A few days later, he read a newspaper story about a woman who had been killed by a broken windshield in a car accident. Benedictus rushed to his lab. By the next night he had invented the world’s first safety glass, which can be found in virtually every car in the world today.
THAT’S JUST SILLY
THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR ACCIDENTS GOES TO…
…Alexander Fleming. In 1928 the Scottish scientist was experimenting with staphylococcus bacteria, the germs that cause staph infections, when he absentmindedly left some petri dishes exposed. Mold grew on the bacteria…and killed them. It was later determined to be penicillium mold, and Fleming named the active ingredient in the mold penicillin.
He wasn’t able to create a medicine from it, but 12 years later two other scientists at Oxford University, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, succeeded. The accident-inspired invention came just in time: Penicillin was mass-produced during World War II and has saved millions of lives since then. In 1945 Fleming, Florey, and Chain were awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.
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Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.
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Source: neatorama