Imagine you are a chemist, working hard to find a synthetic replacement for shellac. You mix some chemicals together and get a blob of gunk that's not liquid enough for your purpose. But instead of throwing it out, you find you've invented plastic. That was in 1907, and while Leo Baekeland himself called the material "plastic," it became known as Bakelite after its inventor. This kind of thing happens a lot in science experiments, so you need to be open to the idea that your screwups might be useful for something besides what you were aiming for. All of our artificial sweeteners were discovered when a scientist was trying for something else entirely, because you know that scientists can't help but taste what they are studying. Read the stories of five such developments wrestled from laboratory accidents at Cracked, none of them leading to artificial sweeteners.
(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)
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