Serendipity

•Isaac Newton's famed apple falling from a tree, led to his musings about the nature of gravitation. •The German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz dreamed about Ourobouros, a snake running around and forming a circle, leading to his solution of the closed chemical structure of cyclic compounds, such as benzene. •Archimedes' prototypical cry of Eureka when he realised that his body displacing water in the bathtub allowed him to measure the volume of any irregular body, such as a gold crown. •Penicillin by Alexander Fleming. He failed to disinfect cultures of bacteria when leaving for his vacations, only to find them contaminated with Penicillium molds, which killed the bacteria. However, he had previously done extensive research into antibacterial substances. •The anesthetic nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Initially well known for inducing altered behavior (hilarity), its properties were discovered when British chemist Humphry Davy tested the gas on himself and some of his friends, and soon realized that nitrous oxide considerably dulled the sensation of pain, even if the inhaler were still semi-conscious. •Bioelectricity, by Luigi Galvani. He was dissecting a frog at a table where he had been conducting experiments with static electricity; Galvani's assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel, which had picked up a charge, provoking a muscle contraction. •Vaccination, discovered by English physician Edward Jenner, after he observed that milkmaids did not catch smallpox after exposure to benign cowpox. •Discovery of the planet Uranus by William Herschel. Herschel was looking for comets, and initially identified Uranus as a comet until he noticed the circularity of its orbit and its distance and suggested that it was a planet, the first one discovered since antiquity. •S. N. Bose discovered Bose-Einstein statistics when a mathematical error surprisingly explained anomalous data. •X rays, by Wilhelm Roentgen. Interested in investigating cathodic ray tubes, he noted that some fluorescent papers in his lab were illuminated at a distance although his apparatus had an opaque cover •Electromagnetism, by Hans Christian Oersted. While he was setting up his materials for a lecture, he noticed a compass needle deflecting from magnetic north when the electric current from the battery he was using was switched on and off. •Discovery of the principle behind inkjet printers by a Canon engineer. After putting his hot soldering iron by accident on his pen, ink was ejected from the pen's point a few moments later.

•Corn flakes and wheat flakes were accidentally discovered by the Kelloggs brothers in 1898, when they left cooked wheat untended for a day and tried to roll the mass, obtaining a flaky material instead of a sheet. •Polyethylene by Hans von Pechmann, who prepared it by accident in 1898 while heating diazomethane. •Teflon, by Roy J. Plunkett, who was trying to develop a new gas for refrigeration and got a slick substance instead that was used first for lubrication of machine parts. •Cyanoacrylate-based Superglue (Krazy Glue) was accidentally twice discovered by Dr. Harry Coover, first when he was developing a clear plastic for gunsights and later, when he was trying to develop a heat-resistant polymer for jet canopies. •Cellophane, a thin, transparent sheet made of regenerated cellulose, was developed in 1908 by Swiss chemist Jacques Brandenberger, as a material for covering stain-proof tablecloth. •Rayon, the first synthetic silk, was discovered by French chemist Hilaire de Chardonnet, an assistant to Louis Pasteur. He spilled a bottle of collodion and found later that he could draw thin strands from the evaporated viscous liquid.

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