Our daily lives are full of serendipity: those happy accidents, like walking down a completely random street and finding a restaurant you’ve been planning to visit for months but didn’t know exactly where it was located.
In the dictionary definition, serendipity is a “favorable event that occurs fortuitously; happy accident; accidental discovery; gift of making good discoveries by chance.” The term was coined by the Englishman Sir Horace Walpole in 1754. He was impressed by a Persian fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip,” the ancient name of the country now known as Sri Lanka. The tale described how traveling princes made constant and surprising discoveries about things they didn’t plan to explore. He then created the word serendipity to refer to accidental discoveries.
Although science, in general, is associated with careful experiments and many hypothesis tests, countless discoveries were pure serendipity: results of experiments that yielded unexpected or undesired results, or even by sheer chance. Here are some of the most famous examples:
- Penicillin
In 1928, Scottish biologist Sir Alexander Fleming was conducting tests with the Staphylococcus bacteria when he noticed that one of the plates was contaminated by mold. Instead of starting over from scratch, he decided to see what would happen. And he noticed that the bacteria didn’t grow where the mold, identified as Penicillium, had developed. The substance it produced gave rise to penicillin, still an antibiotic used to treat various infectious diseases today.
- Viagra
In the 1990s, pharmaceutical company Pfizer was testing a medication for angina, a heart condition that narrows the veins and arteries that carry blood to the heart. The drug in question did help relax the arteries but didn’t give the expected result. Until the patients who participated in the test reported an unusual side effect: erections. Until 1998, there was no oral medication for erectile dysfunction, which was generally treated with injections or prosthetics.
- Saccharin
Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg was working with Ira Remsen, one of the most famous American chemists of the 19th century, in the Johns Hopkins University laboratory. After an intense day of working with coal tar derivatives, phosphorus, and ammonia, Fahlberg forgot to wash his hands. After the meal, he noticed that his fingers had a sweet taste. The year was 1878, and the first chemical sweetener was discovered.
- Microwave oven
American engineer Percy Spencer was working on a set of radars for the Raytheon Company in 1945 when he noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Intrigued, he exposed corn kernels to the waves, which quickly turned into popcorn. He then created a high-density field by injecting microwaves from a magnetron into a metal box so they couldn’t escape. Five years later, the first version of the oven was put on sale.
- X-rays
When German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was studying the phenomenon of luminescence produced by cathode tubes in 1895, he noticed that if he covered the tube with thick paper, a sheet of paper treated with barium platinocyanide emitted light. He called this “invisible light” “X-rays” because he considered them enigmatic. By testing opaque bodies to visible light between the tube and photographic paper, he discovered that X-rays passed through soft tissues, leaving bones as visible shadows, creating the first radiographs.