The Mistakes That Became Things You Still Use
A melted candy bar, a cylinder that would not empty, burrs on a dog, and a glue too weak to hold a bookmark in a hymnal.
The product was supposed to be something else. A radar engineer noticed the candy bar in his pocket had turned to goo. A chemist opened a cylinder of refrigerant and found the gas had become a white powder. A man came home from a walk covered in burrs and took one to a microscope. The failure, every time, was the invention.
Percy Spencer was standing in front of a magnetron at Raytheon in 1945 when the chocolate melted. He fetched popcorn next. Roy Plunkett sawed a cylinder open on April 6, 1938, and found the slippery powder that became Teflon. George de Mestral put a burdock burr under a microscope after a walk in the Alps and spent a decade copying the hooks. Spencer Silver’s glue had been too weak to sell since 1968, until Art Fry, losing his place in a hymnal in 1974, wanted a bookmark that would stick and then let go. A Cincinnati wallpaper cleaner nobody needed once homes stopped burning coal became Play-Doh after a nursery school teacher suggested letting children squish it. Constantin Fahlberg sat down to dinner in 1879 with coal-tar chemistry still on his hands, and the bread tasted sweet. Lonnie Johnson was trying, in 1982, to build a refrigerator that would not eat the ozone layer when a jet of water crossed his bathroom. Donald Stookey opened a furnace in the early 1950s expecting a puddle. The controller had stuck, the plate had crystallized, and when it slipped off the tongs it bounced off the concrete. That plate became CorningWare.
This page is the shelf those accidents share. Start here for the microwave, Teflon, and Velcro, and for the longer record of household things that began as somebody’s mistake.
- The Overheated Glass Plate That Bounced Off the Floor — and Became CorningWare
- The Wallpaper Cleaner Nobody Needed Anymore That Became Play-Doh
- The Rocket Scientist Whose Leaky Fridge Idea Became the Super Soaker
- The Burrs Stuck to a Dog That Became Velcro
- The Chemist Who Forgot to Wash His Hands and Discovered Saccharin
- The Cylinder That Weighed Too Much and Became Teflon
- The Melted Candy Bar That Invented the Microwave
- The Weak Glue That Took Six Years to Find a Job — and Became the Post-it Note