When we make a mistake ,often our first instinct is to say, "Oh no!"and to feel regret and maybe even embarrassment at our failure. But mistakes and accidents are not always a bad thing. In fact, they somethings give rise to extraordinary ideas. In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out to discover a new route to Asia. He did not reach Asia, but this failure resulted in his discovering the New World!
There are many stories of such happy accidents throughout modern history. For example,one of the greatest medical discoveries of the 20th century was antibiotics,a kind of medication used to kill bacteria that cause disease. Since the discovery,antibiotics may have saved millions of lives. Yet,the discovery of the first antibiotic happened by accident.
In 1928, a Scottish scientist named Alexander Fleming was researching a kind of bacteria called staphylococus. He conducted experiments with the bacteria in dishes. Fleming was brilliant,but he was messy and absent-minded. When he left his laboratory to go on vacation,instead of cleaning up,he left the bacteria in the dishes. When he returned,he noticed that mold had grown in the dishes while he was gone. He could have just thrown the dishes away. Fortunately,instead,he looked at them under a microscope. Fleming found that the area around the mold was free of bacteria. He realized that the dangerous bacteria must have been dissolved by the mold. These dirty dishes led to the discovery of penicillin,the first antibiotic. Today,this lift-saving drug is used around the world. Each year there are over 80 million prescriptions written for penicillin in the U.S. alone!
The discovery of Velcro® is one such fortunate accident. One summer day in 1948, a Swiss inventor named George de Mestral went for a hike. When he returned, he was covered in burrs—seed-sacs that cling to clothes. Nature designed burrs to do this in order to spread seeds to new areas. De Mestral became curious about how these burrs attached themselves to clothes and hair. He inspected one of the burrs from his pants under a microscope. He saw that it had countless tiny hooks that clung to the tiny loops in the fabric of his pants. This gave him the idea to design a new kind of fastener. The fastener would be made of two nylon strips, one side with stiff hooks like the burrs and the other side with loops like the fabric of his pants. His invention, Velcro, has since become ubiquitous. It can be found on everything from shoes to wallets to blood pressure cuffs to space shuttles.