Accidental Inventions Make Millions!

Chocolate chip cookies were discovered by accident! (photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Millions and millions of dollars have been made from products that were discovered completely by accident! Like chocolate chip cookies! What? Yep! The story is that the owner of Toll House Inn was trying to come up with a chocolate dessert when her experiment produce a cookie type goodie when the chocolate she used
just didn’t quite melt as she had hoped.  Swiss-owned, Nestle, was the company that originally sold her choice of chocolate bits and owns the Toll House trademark. I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of many inventions that are better than this one!

Silly Putty is another Oops! Legend says that an inventor working for General Electric was trying to invent a synthetic rubber substitute amid a shortage of the real stuff during World War 2. As fake rubber, it was a total failure, but he shopped it around until a toyshop owner decided to put in a plastic egg and market it to children!

Penicillin was accidentally discovered by an alchemist who thought he could chemically extract gold from urine, and instead wound up with the life changing drug. Another drug discovered by accident is Warfarin, sold as Coumadin which is a common blood thinner. It was initially a rat poison until a lower-dose was stumbled upon to do what it does now. Nice! How many people do you know on that drug! Let’s see, my husband, my mother, my grandmother! Scary!

Viagra was an accident as well. Chemists were actually trying to develop a pill for cardiovascular ailments when they noticed the pill was raising different issues in patients.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was a vegetarian who had invented graham crackers, but didn’t stop there! He began experimenting with boiled wheat and voila! He and his brother replaced the wheat with corn and the rest is history! Kellogg eventually ended up in a sanitarium with a guy named C.W. Post who used his own variation of the cereal to create Post Toasties!

What would we ever do without the microwave oven? Thankfully we don’t have to since an engineer was experimenting with a magnetron and noticed a candy bar he had in his pocket was melting. He is the first person to make microwaved popcorn too! The first oven was more than 5 feet tall and cost about $5,000 until Amana began selling a smaller version at $500!