Serendipity

/// Something I spoke about during biz comm ... 2 min elevator pitch kinds 2011///

It has been voted as one of the ten English words that are hardest to translate; but in simplest of words it means “a happy accident”. Serendipity is when one finds something that one was not expecting to find.

However my science teacher always used to refer to it as discovering something by making mistakes.  For example: Alexander Fleming, in his great hurry to go for a vacation forgot to clean bacterial dishes. So when he came back from his vacation he saw a green mold developing, which had killed the bacteria. That green mold turned out to be Penicillin which we all now know is the ground-breaking anti-biotic.

So from the beginning that has what it meant for me: something good resulting out of your mistakes.  Like for example: Did you know that Saccharin, the artificial sweetener, was discovered because a chemist didn't wash his hands after a day at the office? Yes, Constantin Fahlberg was trying to come up with new and interesting use for coal tar. After coming back from office, he went home and something strange happened.

He noticed the rolls he was eating tasted particularly sweet. He asked his wife if she had done anything interesting to the rolls, but she hadn'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 the sweet spot.

There are many stories of accidentally invented food: the potato chip was born when cook George Crum tried to silence a fussy customer who kept sending french fries back to the kitchen for being soggy; But no food-invention has had as much success as Coke. Atlanta pharmacist John Pemberton was trying to make a cure for headaches. He mixed together a bunch of ingredients. It only took eight years of being sold in a drug store before the drink was popular enough to be sold in bottles.

But is it all luck-by chance? Discovery by mistake? Love by chance happening?
Louis Pasteur once said, "chance favors the prepared mind." That's the genius behind all these accidental inventions - the scientists were prepared. They did their science on the brink and were able to see the magic in a mistake, set-back, or coincidence.

After finding out this list, I was just wondering: what discoveries have been lost due to small chance? How many discoveries have been made, but never told about? What applications of discoveries have we missed? Which mistake have we made that could have made us famous?