Greatest Accidental Inventions of all time!
1. Vulcanized Rubber
Charles Goodyear was looking for ways to make rubber easier to work with and more resistant to heat and cold. One day, while turning the lights off, he spilled a mixture of rubber, sulphur and lead onto a hot stove. The mixture was charred but was not completely ruined. Goodyear noticed that the mixture had hardened and had become quite usable. He used this technique (now known as vulcanization) to fortify the strength of rubber. Today, vulcanized rubber is used in the tyres of our cars, our sports shoes, etc.
2. Fireworks
All those fireworks that you see were discovered by a Chinese cook somewhere around 2000 years ago. We really do not know what he was trying to invent when he accidentally mixed together some common kitchen items like charcoal, sulphur, and saltpetre and compressed them in a bamboo tube. When this concoction was brought near the flames, it exploded into multi-coloured fireworks and though the cook did not get any credit for inventing any new recipe, he certainly gave the world the basic concept of manufacturing fireworks.
3. Play Doh
Play Doh, was actually a material invented to clean houses. Earlier, coal was commonly used to heat homes. This left dark stains of soot on the walls. Noah and Joseph McVicker of Kutol Products, an American soap manufacturing company, created a dough-like material to rub the soot off the walls. With the advent of cooking gas, coal was phased out and only a few people needed Kutol’s cleaning product. In the early 1950s, Joseph McVicker learnt that his sister, a schoolteacher, was using his material as modelling dough in her classroom. Soon, his company started marketing their nontoxic creation as a children’s toy material and started earning mega bucks.
Did you know?
Many common toys were also invented by accident. The Frisbee, the Slinky, and Silly Putty were all invented by mistake.
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