20 Everyday Inventions Born From Workplace Accidents And Problems

While working at the defense contractor Raytheon as a self-taught engineer in 1945, Percy Spencer was testing the magnetrons of radar tubes when he noticed that a candy bar in his pocket had melted. He then tested some popcorn kernels, which popped, and an egg, which blew up from its own steam. Spencer managed to seal the energy in a metal box. Raytheon’s first Radarange was taller than most people, more than 700 pounds, and designed to be used on ships and in restaurants, not in domestic kitchens.

Ruth Wakefield ran the kitchen of the Toll House Inn in Massachusetts. There, she chopped a bar of Nestlé chocolate with an ice pick and tossed the shards into her butter cookie dough. She assumed they would melt right into the mixture. They didn’t. They held their shape, creating the chocolate chip cookie. That new favorite led the inn to sell the recipe and Toll House name to Nestlé for practically nothing.

Charles Goodyear, a Connecticut hardware dealer who researched the properties of rubber while on leave from debtor’s prison, inadvertently dropped some raw rubber mixed with sulfur and lead onto a hot stove in his Massachusetts workshop in 1839. The material didn’t melt, but instead blackened to become a hard, waterproof material. In 1844, he received a patent for what he called “vulcanization,” but legal battles over his invention made him destitute. Goodyear died in 1860 in debt for approximately $200,000. It wouldn’t be until years later that the tire firm bearing his name would be established.

In April of 1938, DuPont chemist Dr. Roy Plunkett and lab tech Jack Rebok were testing refrigerant gases when they opened a cylinder which was supposedly empty but which still weighed like it was full. They sawed it open and discovered a white powdery substance that had been created when the gas reacted under pressure. In 1945, DuPont trademarked it as Teflon. The cookware didn’t come along until 1954, and that invention was made independently by a French engineer.

In early 1849, Walter Hunt, a mechanic from New York, found himself owing a friend $15. To come up with cash to pay his debts, he sat down to work on an invention that might sell. About three hours later he had twisted a piece of brass wire into a coiled spring with a clasp on one end. It was the first safety pin. Hunt got a patent for it that April, but sold the rights for only $400 to pay off his debt and missed out on a much bigger payday.

Dr. Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist at a London hospital, returned from vacation in September 1928 to discover mold growing on a culture dish he had left out, and the bacteria surrounding the mold were dead. He identified the mold as Penicillium and gave its substance the name penicillin. But he was unable to stabilize it or produce it in quantity. It took a further decade of work by researchers Howard Florey, Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley at Oxford University to accomplish that. Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize.

In 1859, Robert Chesebrough, a 22-year-old chemist, headed to the Pennsylvania oil fields to capitalize on the latest craze in the petroleum business. He observed how the drillers would scrape off a viscous substance known as “rod wax” that built up on their pumps and how the workers would apply it to cuts and burns to speed healing. It took him more than ten years of experimentation to purify the waxy sludge into a clear, odorless ointment. In 1872, he patented it as Vaseline.

Wilson Greatbatch, an engineering professor in Buffalo, was building a circuit in 1956 designed to record sounds associated with heartbeats when he mistakenly picked up the wrong resistor. The circuit did not remain silent. Instead, it produced a regular pulse, then a pause, then another pulse, just as a heartbeat works. Greatbatch and surgeon Dr. William Chardack then turned the accidental invention into the first implantable pacemaker powered by a battery. They successfully implanted the device in animals in 1958 and in a human patient two years later.

In 1853, George Crum, the head chef at the Moon’s Lake House resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, grew weary of having his fried potatoes returned because they were too thick. At least that’s the story. He supposedly cut a batch paper-thin, deep-fried them until they were crisp, and heavily salted them to get back at the customer, who ended up loving them. Called Saratoga Chips, they quickly became the restaurant’s specialty. Crum never patented the recipe; thin-fried potatoes appeared in cookbooks decades before Crum’s version.

René Laennec, a doctor in Paris, was listening to a young woman’s heart and did not want to put his ear against her breast. Besides, her size made it hard for him to hear much that way anyway. Then he remembered that sound travels well through a solid, rolled material. So he rolled up some paper, held it to her breast with one end and his ear with the other, and heard her heart beating as if it were only a few inches from him. Soon he made a wooden stethoscope.

The Hungarian newspaper editor László Bíró got fed up with his fountain pens smudging and leaking as he edited articles. He realized that the ink used for printing was much thicker and didn’t take long to dry, but was too thick to run through a normal pen nib. He and his chemist brother György invented a tiny rolling ball at the tip of the pen which would take up the thick ink, without leaking or drying up. It became the first ballpoint pen that actually worked well on paper.

Constantin Fahlberg was in the lab of Ira Remsen, a Johns Hopkins University chemistry professor, working with chemicals found in coal tar. One night he left for dinner without washing his hands, bit into some bread, and was amazed by how sweet it was. The sweet taste was on his hands, so he ran back to the lab and tasted his way through the beakers until he found it. He called it saccharin. Fahlberg patented the chemical without Remsen, and a battle over credit ensued.

Richard Drew was a young lab technician for 3M whose duty was to deliver samples of its sandpaper to auto body shops. Painters constantly told him that there was no product that could be used to mask off areas in their popular two-tone paint jobs without peeling the new layer of paint away or leaving a gooey residue. He spent two years experimenting with glues, oils, and treated paper until he developed Scotch Masking Tape, which would adhere securely yet come off cleanly.

In late 1860, John Charlton, a Philadelphia stationer, observed that merchants needed a cheaper, faster way to send brief, unsealed correspondence such as quotations or reminders than sealed letters. He devised a stiff card, with one side pre-printed with the address, leaving the other side available for writing, and applied for a copyright on the card in February 1861. Charlton subsequently licensed production to another stationer who sold them as postal cards more than ten years before the government’s release of its own.

While Robert Gair was running a paper bag factory in Brooklyn, New York, a press operator accidentally raised a metal creasing rule too high while printing seed bags. The rule sliced clean through thousands of bags, ruining the order. Examining the wreckage, Gair realized that combining cutting blades with creasing rules in one press could cut and fold cardboard in a single pass, letting flat cardboard be mass-produced into ready-to-fold boxes for goods like biscuits.

In 1888, Willard Bundy, a jeweler and watchmaker in Auburn, New York, was tired of his employees squabbling over who arrived on time or how many hours they worked. So he created a wooden time clock that required workers to insert a numbered metal key into a slot. The key stamped the worker’s number and the exact time on a locked-up paper tape. Bundy and his brother Harlow formed a company to sell the time clocks in 1889. Mergers after that eventually transformed it into IBM, one of the world’s biggest firms.

Dr. John Harvey Kellogg ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan with his brother Will Keith Kellogg, where they made simple foods for their patients. One day an emergency call summoned them from their kitchen, and a pan of boiled wheat dough was left to sit, drying out over several days. They didn’t throw it away. Instead, they rolled it through metal pins expecting flat sheets, but it shattered into thin flakes that patients found delicious when toasted. Will later tried the same thing with corn, creating Corn Flakes, and started up a cereal company.

In Sheffield, England, Harry Brearley, the chief metallurgist at a research laboratory, was tasked by weapons manufacturers with preventing gun barrels from eroding when exposed to high temperatures during continuous firing. By mixing chromium into steel, he increased its melting point and produced an alloy that did not corrode when immersed in acid. Many months later, he saw discarded samples from this experiment in a wet scrap yard, yet they had not rusted. Seeing their usefulness for knives and forks, he named the alloy rustless steel; today we know it as stainless steel.

Richard Drew, the 3M lab technician who had invented masking tape, faced a new challenge in the late 1920s. Bakeries and food companies were using a new moisture-proof plastic wrap called cellophane to pack their goods, but they had no good way to seal the package. Heat could damage the fragile plastic. So Drew spent nearly five years formulating a new rubber-based adhesive that was mild enough for cellophane. In 1930, he introduced Scotch Transparent Tape. It proved popular for mending paper, books, and clothing during the Depression.

When Bette Nesmith Graham became an executive secretary at a Dallas bank, the new electric typewriters ruined her work because they smudged when she tried to erase mistakes. She got the idea to use a painter’s technique of touching up window displays. So she mixed a water-based paint in her kitchen blender and painted over her mistakes at her desk with a small brush. Other secretaries wanted their own bottles, so she marketed the product as Liquid Paper and eventually sold the company to Gillette for $47.5 million.

This content was created with the help of AI.