Sudden strokes of luck: 7 inventions and accidental discoveries

Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, said his famous (and fictional) phrase: "When one door closes, another opens." In other words, even failure or deadlock can lead to something great. To prove Bell's principle, just look at the seven inventions below, all of which surprised their makers.

1. Penicillin

Life before antibiotics was certainly bleak and short.

Infections, especially sexually transmitted diseases, have spread, making simple illnesses that we cannot blink at present amount to a death sentence.

Luckily for us in 1929, the young Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming went on vacation, and before leaving, his vacation must have been his concern, because he forgot to cover a petri dish of staphylococcus that he was growing in his laboratory.

Upon his return, Fleming noticed that the mold in the dish had killed many other bacteria.

He identified this mold as Penicillium notatum, and further research was conducted to discover that it could kill other bacteria and could also be given to young animals without getting sick.

A decade later, Howard Fleury and Ernest Chen continued where Fleming left off, isolating the bacteria-killing substance, turning it into a fully eatable drug.

For their efforts in medicine and science, the trio won the Nobel Prize – and they deserve it!

2. Dynamite

Many inventors were thrilled by their accidental discoveries, but not all. The unexpected path that led to dynamite terrified one of its creators, who never intended to use the explosive at all.

In 1847, Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero invented nitroglycerin, and he performed the reaction with glycerin as a genius in electronics.

While tampering with the magnetron that emits microwaves, a piece usually found in the interior of radar arrays, Percy suddenly felt a strange sensation in his pants.

Stunned, he paused, and found that the chocolate bar in his pocket had begun to melt.

He thought microwave radiation from a magnetron was the cause, and immediately set out to reap the rewards of this potential.

The end of the game was the microwave oven, the savior of students and single men around the world.

3. Super adhesive

In 1942, Dr. Harry Coover embarked on the development of a new and accurate rifle scope, but failed miserably.

The material he created, cyanoacrylate, was a complete failure, remaining glued to everything. Frustrated and depressed, Cofer gave up and moved on, forgetting his invention.

Six years later, while Cofer was overseeing a new experimental design for aircraft parachutes, he once again found himself glued to objects because of the damn cyanoacrylate!

But this time, Cofer had a moment of light bulb shine, and noticed how this material forms incredibly strong connections between objects without applying any heat.

This prompted him and his team to think, and with a little experimental operations and sticking objects together in the lab, they realized that they had found a use for this annoying ball.

Cofer patented the discovery, and in 1958, 16 years after it first adhered, the Super Glue was sold on shelves all over the world.

4. Microwave

Percy Spencer, a man who was orphaned when he was 18 months old and taken out of school at the age of 12 to work in a paper mill, was the occasional inventor of the microwave oven.

Spencer was an engineer at Raytheon after his time in the U.S. Navy during World War I, known to everyone for turning penicillin into a viable drug. It was first tested on a patient in 1940 and began to be widely used in 1942. Today, penicillin is the most widely used antibiotic in the world.

5. Viagra

In 1998, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer began treating angina, or coronary artery spasms of the heart, in plain English. In order to do this, they developed a disk called UK92480.

However, UK92480 failed somewhat terribly to achieve the desired effect, but, with pun intent, the secondary effect of their little blue pills was certainly exciting.

This pill has become one of the best-selling drugs in the world, Viagra.

In fact, it is estimated that seven Viagra tablets are sold worldwide every second – that's 604,800 tablets per day!

6. Velcro

During a hunting trip in 1948 with his trusted dog companion, Swiss engineer Georges de Mistral noticed that plant bumps were sticking to his socks and his dog's fur.

Upon returning home, while examining the plant bumps under his microscope, George noticed small "hooks" glued the bumps to both fabric and fur.

Mistral experimented for many years with a variety of textiles before dealing with the newly invented nylon, Velcro Fold.

However, Velcro's popularity did not flourish until almost two decades later after NASA showed a special admiration for fixable and openable objects.

7. Insulin

Although the discovery of insulin was not a direct coincidence, the discovery that later allowed researchers to find insulin was an accident.

In 1889, two doctors at the University of Strasbourg were trying to understand how the pancreas affects digestion. In order to do this, they removed the pancreas of a healthy dog, and a few days later they noticed that the flies were flocking around the dog's urine. They decided to check their urine and found sugar in it.

This led them to realize that, by removing the pancreas, they had given the dog diabetes.

The doctors never realized that what the pancreas produces regulates blood sugar.

It was only after a series of experiments at the University of Toronto that researchers were able to isolate pancreatic secretion, which they called insulin, that researchers were able to isolate pancreatic secretion.

Thus transforming diabetes from certain death into a treatable condition.