1. Happy Accidents
When we make a mistake, often our first instinct is to say “Oh no!” and to feelregret and maybe even embarrassment at our failure. But mistakes and accidentsare not always a bad thing. In fact, they sometimes give rise to extraordinaryideas. In 1492, Christopher Columbus set out to discover a new route to Asia. Hedid not reach Asia, but this failure resulted in his discovering the New World! There are many stories of such happy accidents throughout modern histo ry.For example, one of the greatest medical discoveries of the 20 th century wasantibiotics, a kind of medication used to kill bacteria that cause disease. Since thediscovery, antibiotics may have saved millions of lives. Yet, the discovery of thefirst antibiotic happened by accident.In 1928, a Scottish scientist named Alexander Fleming was res earching a kind ofbacteria called “Staphylococcus”. He conducted experiment with the bacteria indishes. Fleming was brilliant, but he was messy and absent-minded. When he lefthis laboratory to go on vacation, instead of cleaning up, he leftthe bacteria in dishes. When he returned, he noticed that moldhad grown in the dishes while he was gone. He could have justthrown the dishes away. Fortunately, instead, he looked themunder a microscope. Fleming found that the areaaround the mole was free of bacteria. He realized that thedangerous bacteria must have been dissolved by the mole.Each year there are over 80 million prescriptions written forpenicillin in the U.S. alone! Not all lucky accidents have changed the way we live in dramatic ways.Some fortunate accidents have just made life a little more convenient. But many ofthese conveniences have become such a part of our everyday lives that we’ve cometo take them for granted.The discovery of Velcro is one such fortunate accident. One summer day in 1948, aSwiss inventor named George de Mestral went for a hike with his dog. When theyreturned, they were covered in burrs—seed-sacs that cling to animal fur and clothes.Nature designed burs to do this in order to spread seeds to new areas. De Mestral
2. became curios 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 newkind of fastener would be made of two nylon strips, one side with stiff hooks likethe 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 fr om shoes towallets to blood pressure cuffs to space shuttles. Another modern invention we owe to a happy accident is Post-it Notes,those small pieces of notepaper that can be stuck and unstuck again and again.In 1970, Spencer Silver was working in a research laboratory, trying tocreate a strong adhesive. He created a new adhesive thatstuck to objects, but it could also easily be lifted off them.Because the adhesive was so weak, Silver consider edita failure. He shouldn’t have. A few years later, a co-worker ofSilver’s place in the song book, but the scraps kept falling out.Remembering Silver’s invention, the co-worker put some of theadhesive on the scraps. It was perfect! The scraps stayed inplace, but came off easily so they didn’t damage the book.Post-it Notes were introduced in 1980, and quickly became anessential office product around the world.All of these stories show that accidents are not always a bad thing, and that notall mistake should automatically be discarded. Instead, perhaps we should take acloser look at our accidents and mistakes. They just may reveal the solutions to aproblem, or pave the way to an extraordinary new idea.