by Molly McGuire

Created on: November 07, 2009   Last Updated: November 09, 2009

Serendipity is the Mother of Invention

Throughout history, some of the most important scientific discoveries happened accidentally. In fact, serendipity plays an important role in scientific experimentation, and many well-known products, pharmaceuticals, and modern machines resulted from lucky mishaps. "Chance favors the prepared mind," is an oft-quoted phrase of Louis Pasteur, who is best remembered for inventing the eponymous process of sterilizing milk: Pasteurization.

Other famous accidents include Edward Jenner's discovery of the small pox vaccine by experimenting with cowpox, which produced some immunity in local farm families. Jenner introduced the smallpox vaccine in 1896, and history credits him with saving more lives than any other person. A close second would be Sir Arthur Fleming's forgotten Petri dish with a mold that turned out to be penicillin. Fleming noticed it killed the Staphylococcus bacteria nearby, leading him to pursue the mold's value. Since its introduction in the 1940s, Penicillin and its derivatives have saved millions of lives. Another explosive discovery was Alfred Nobel's gelignite, an accidental mixture of colloidium and nitroglycerin that became dynamite. Those discoveries alone make a good case for carefully examining a failed experiment before consigning it to the dustbin, but there are many more misadventures that produced a useful, though unintended, result. .

After years of experimentation with photographic processes, Louis Jacques Mand Daguerre, the famous Frenchman considered a father of photography, perfected the Daguerreotype. He finally produced a permanent image when he placed a photographic plate from his camera obscura in his chemical closet and accidentally exposed it to mercury vapor from a broken thermometer.

It would be impractical to list all of the accidental inventions across the centuries. Scientists and inventors agree that coincidence plays a major role in many discoveries, and serendipitous is a word often applied to unexpected results. Some very important inventions of the 20th Century had capricious beginnings, and with these fortunate mishaps, the world gained some tools now taken for granted.

Take Post-It Notes, for example, that mainstay of bookmarking. Way back in 1968, 3M engineer Spencer Silver concocted a very sticky glue, but found no use for the mixture. The company deemed the sticky substance not quite sticky enough, so it sat around for several years until fellow 3M scientist Arthur Fry put

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