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While many of important inventions and discoveries that are today taken for granted came about after years of patient study and experiment, some were the result of a single accident of chance observation.

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The stories behind several are probably apocryphal: For example, Joseph Michael Montgolfier is said to have conjured up the idea of ballooning when he saw his wife’s chemise, drying by fire, rise up as it became filled with hot air. A number of other such stories, however, are known to be true.

Aniline Dye

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During his summer vacation, William Henry Perkin, an 18-year-old student at the Royal College of Chemistry in Britain, was experimenting in his garden shed. While trying to make synthetic quinine from coal tar, he inadvertently created a sticky purple substance. Its principle virtue seemed to be the ability to dye cloth surprisingly quickly. What Perkin had hit upon was the world’s first synthetic dye, aniline. After a dispute as to whether anyone under the age of 21 could, legally, be granted a patent, the boy succeeded in obtaining one in 1856. The properties of mauveine, as the dye became known, revolutionized the textile industry.

Chewing Gum

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In the early 1870’s an American schoolboy, Horatio Adams, was assisting his father, Thomas, in experiments with chicle, the dried sap of a Mexican jungle tree. Thomas originally tried to make rubber out of it. When this failed, he and young Horatio idly chewed pieces of chicle – discovered its most promising use. They soon established a business to manufacture it for chewing. Although various types of tree gum and even flavored paraffin wax had been chewed in the United States since the mid – 19th century, chicle-based gum soon replaced all others.

DDT

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Quite by chance, a 19th-centry Austrian chemist, Othmar Ziedler, invented dichloro-diphenyl-trichloro-ethane, or DDT, in 1874. But he ignored it since he could envision no practical value for it. It was not until 1939 that Paul Mȕller of Switzerland observed its insecticidal properties. It was patented by the German company J. R. Geigy A-G in 1942 and within a few years became the most widely used insecticide in the world.  

Dry Cleaning

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Jean Baptiste Jolly of Paris inadvertently spilled camphene, a type of fuel, onto a dress. The garment, which he feared would be ruined, was instead cleaned. In 1855 Jolly established the world’s first known dry-cleaning company.

Electric Current

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Italian scientist Luigi Galvani was working in his Bologna Laboratory in the 18th century when he accidentally touched a steel scalpel to a frog’s leg that was lying on a zinc plate. The leg twitched, and Galvani believed he had discovered “animal electricity.” In following up Galvani’s research, his countryman, Count Alessandro Volta, showed that it was the two metals that were responsible for generating the electric current – and established the principle of the battery.

Float Glass

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The float-glass process, which creates a high-quality surface, is today used to produce 99 percent of the glass manufactured in the United States. The method was developed in 1950 after Alastair Pilkington, a British glassmaker, observed the way that a film of fat formed on the surface of his wife’s dishwater. Sensing that molten glass could also be floated on a molten metal such as tin in order to produce a smoother finish, Pilkington’s company invested seven years and $16.5 million to perfect the process.

Lithographic Printing

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The technique of lithography was discovered about 1796 by Johann Nepomuk Aloys Senefelder, an aspiring Czech playwright. He is said to have copied his mother’s laundry list onto a piece of limestone, using a wax pencil. When he accidentally spilled water on the stone, he noticed the waxed portion did not become wet. Senefelder realized that the same principle would enable printing ink to be selectively transferred to paper or cloth. The process he developed and patented in 1801 marked a major development in the history of printing.

Matches

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In 1825 John Walker, a 44-year-old chemist from the English town of Stockton-on-Tees, was busy making a “lighting mixture” of antimony sulfide and potassium chlorate for use with a flint and steel. When hr accidentally rubbed some of the mixture against his hearthstone, he discovered that it lit spontaneously. He could light the friction matches he developed from this discovery by drawing them through a piece of folded sandpaper. Walker’s invention, sold only locally, was never patented. It was Samuel Jones who copied and patented the matches in 1828 under the trade of Lucifer. The invention of the modern friction match is attributed to Sir Isaac Holden of Keighley, Yorkshire; in1829 he proceed a match of phosphorus and sulphur that, being more efficient than Walker’s, superseded it by 1833.

Penicillin

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In 1928 the Scottish bacteriologist Sir Alexander Fleming observed the effect of an antibacterial agent when cover on a culture in which he was growing staphylococcus bacteria was accidentally removed and the culture became contaminated by a mold from the atmosphere. Fleming noticed that the mold – a strain of a fungus called penicillium – had destroyed the bacteria. Its potential for combating bacterial disease occurred to Fleming, but isolating and stabilizing the bactericidal substance, which he called penicillin, proved beyond his resources.

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Between 1939 and 1941, however, two other researchers, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, working at Oxford University, resumed Fleming’s initial work. Penicillin was eventually patented in 1943. In recognition of their work, the three men shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Synthetic Fibers

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The centrifugal method used to twist thread evenly in the manufacture of synthetic fibers was invented in England at the turn of the century by Charles Topham, who, while cycling, noticed the way in which mud thrown off the wheels of his bicycle. His “spinning box,” patented in 1900, facilitated the commercial manufacture of cellulose and artificial yarns.

Transfer Printing

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John Sadler, a Liverpool engraver, used to give his children spoiled engravings while the paper was still wet with ink. After noticing that the children amused themselves by transferring the impressions from the paper onto pieces of broken pottery, Sadler conducted a series of experiments. He finally perfected the transfer of printing onto pottery and porcelain – a process that revolutionized pottery design.

Vulcanized Rubber

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Pure rubber has a tendency to harden in cold weather and soften in warm. In 1839 Charles Goodyear, the son of an American store-keeper, accidentally dropped rubber with sulfur onto a hot stove. Because the resulting mixture did not react to temperature changes in the same way, it was ideally suited to temperature changes in the same way, it was ideally suited to the manufacture of tires and other rubber products; indeed, it became the foundation of the rubber industry. Goodyear patented his discovery in 1843, but he was compelled to spend the rest of his life in legal battles against the many firms that infringed his patent. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company com-memorates his name, but he had no connection with it: it was established in Akron, Ohio, in 1898, 38 years after his death.