Thursday, June 12, 2008

Some Accidental Discoveries

There is lot of hard work involved in all the discoveries.The concerned person put lot of efforts in discovering a new thing,but sometimes few things just happen by luck or by accident.Some of such accidental discoveries are.
1.Viagra
Men being treated for erectile dysfunction should salute the working stiffs of Merthyr Tydfil,the Welsh hamlet where,in 1992 trails,the gravity-defying side effects of new angina drug first popped up.Previously, the blue-collar town was known for producing a different kind of iron.
2.X-Ray
Several 19th-century scientists toyed with the penetrating rays emitted when electrons strike a metal target.But the x-ray wasn't discovered until 1895, when German egghead Wilhelm Rontgen tried sticking various objects in front of the radiation - and saw the bones of his hand projected on the wall.
3.LSD
Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the world's first acid hit in 1943,when he touched a smidge of lysergic acid diethylamide,a chemical he had researched for inducing childbirth,He later tried a bigger dose and made another discovery:the bad trip.
4.Penicillin
Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue green mold had infected one of his petridishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it.All hail sloppy lab work!
5.Artificial Sweeteners
Speaking of botched lab jobs,three leading pseudo-sugars reached human lips only because scientists forgot to wash their hands.Cyclamate(1937) and aspartame(1965) are byproducts of medical reasearch,and sacharin(1879) appeared during a project on coal tar derivatives,Yummy.
6.Microwave Ovens
Microwave emitters(or magnetrons)powered Allied radar in WWII.The leap from detecting Nazis to nuking nachos came in 1946, after a magnetron melted a candy bar in Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer's pocket.
7.Brandy
Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H2O out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea.Before long,some intrepid soul-our money's on a sailor - decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born.Pass the Courvoisier!
8.Vulacanised Rubber
Rubber rots badly and smells worse,unless it's vulcanised.Ancient Mesoamericans had their own version of the process,but Charles Goodyear rediscovered it in 1839 when he unintentionally(well, at least according to most accounts) dropped a rubber-sulfur compound onto a hot stove.
9.Silly Putty
In the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil.V-J Day din't come any sonner,but comic strip image-streching practically became a national pastime.
10.Potato chips
Chef George Crum concocted the perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when-to spite a suctomer who compalin that his fries were cut too thick-he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp.Needless to say,the diner couldn't eat just one.
Might be some luck involved in them but after all of this lot of the discoverers effort was involved in bringing them to real worlds use.If you have any such thing share it.

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