1. Viagra Men being treated for erectile dysfunction should salute the working stiffs of Merthyr Tydfil, the Welsh hamlet where, in 1992 trials, the gravity-defying side effects of a new angina drug first popped up. Previously, the blue-collar town was known for producing a different kind of iron. 2. LSD Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann took the world's first acid hit in 1943, when he touched a smidge of lysergic acid diethylamide, a chemical he had researched for inducing childbirth. He later tried a bigger dose and made another discovery: the bad trip. 3. X-rays Several 19th-century scientists toyed with the penetrating rays emitted when electrons strike a metal target. But the x-ray wasn't discovered until 1895, when German egghead Wilhelm Röntgen tried sticking various objects in front of the radiation - and saw the bones of his hand projected on a wall. 4. Penicillin Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming was researching the flu in 1928 when he noticed that a blue-green mold had infected one of his petri dishes - and killed the staphylococcus bacteria growing in it. All hail sloppy lab work! 5. Artificial sweeteners Speaking of botched lab jobs, three leading pseudo-sugars reached human lips only because scientists forgot to wash their hands. Cyclamate (1937) and aspartame (1965) are byproducts of medical research, and saccharin (1879) appeared during a project on coal tar derivatives. Yummy. 6. Microwave ovens Microwave emitters (or magnetrons) powered Allied radar in WWII. The leap from detecting Nazis to nuking nachos came in 1946, after a magnetron melted a candy bar in Raytheon engineer Percy Spencer's pocket. 7. Brandy Medieval wine merchants used to boil the H20 out of wine so their delicate cargo would keep better and take up less space at sea. Before long, some intrepid soul - our money's on a sailor - decided to bypass the reconstitution stage, and brandy was born. Pass the Courvoisier! 8. Vulcanized rubber Rubber rots badly and smells worse, unless it's vulcanized. Ancient Mesoamericans had their own version of the process, but Charles Goodyear rediscovered it in 1839 when he unintentionally (well, at least according to most accounts) dropped a rubber-sulfur compound onto a hot stove. 9. Silly Putty In the early 1940s, General Electric scientist James Wright was working on artificial rubber for the war effort when he mixed boric acid and silicon oil. V-J Day didn't come any sooner, but comic strip image-stretching practically became a national pastime. 10. Potato chips Chef George Crum concocted the perfect sandwich complement in 1853 when - to spite a customer who complained that his fries were cut too thick - he sliced a potato paper-thin and fried it to a crisp. Needless to say, the diner couldn't eat just one. 0. The Popsicle Frank Epperson was but a young lad of eleven, when he accidentally came up with what some would later describe as the most important invention of the twentieth century. Who would say that exactly I'm not sure, but Lady Luck was surely smiling the day Frank, mixed himself a drink of soda water powder and water- a popular drink back in 1905. For some reason he never got round to drinking it and left it on the back porch overnight with the stirring stick still in it. Of course, when the temperature dropped overnight, the mixture froze and Frank had a stick of frozen soda water to show his friends at school. Eighteen years later, Frank remembered the incident and started producing what he called 'Epsicles' in seven fruit flavors. The name never took off, but today over three million 'Popsicles' are sold every year. 9. Velcro In the early 1940's, Swiss inventor George de Mestral was walking his dog. When he got home, he noticed his dog's coat and his pants were covered with cockleburrs. When he took a closer look under the microscope he discovered their natural hook-like shape. He recognized the potential for a new fastener, but it took him eight years to perfect the invention. Eventually he developed two strips of nylon fabric, one containing thousands of small hooks, just like the burrs, and the other with soft loops, just like the fabric of his pants. When the two strips were pressed together, they formed a strong bond, but one that's easily separated, lightweight, durable, and washable. Voila Velcro! 8. Superglue Superglue, or Krazy Glue, is actually a substance called 'cyanoacrylate'. Dr. Harry Coover accidentally discovered it twice, the first time in 1942, when he was trying to develop an optically clear plastic for gun sights and the second time nine years later, when he was trying to develop a heat-resistant polymer for jet canopies. On both occasions his new product proved to be too sticky for the job, in fact he got into trouble when he stuck together and ruined a very expensive pair of glass lenses. Finally he realized his super sticking glue might have a use and in 1958 it was marketed as Superglue. In fact Superglue turned out to be more than just useful. It saved the lives of countless soldiers in Vietnam when it was used in to seal battlefield wounds before the injured could be transported to a hospital. 7. Post-it Notes In 1970, Spencer Silver was working at the 3M research labs trying to develop a strong adhesive. What he actually came up with, was weaker than what had already been developed. It stuck, but then it easily unstuck. That seemed like a pretty useless invention, until 4 years later when a colleague was singing in the church choir. He used markers to keep place in the hymn book but they kept falling out. So he coated them with Spencer's glue. They stayed in place but came off easily without damaging the pages. The 'Post-it note" was born and today they are a nuisance in just about every office around the world. 6. Scotchgard Another 3M invention makes it into the Top Ten at No 6. Back in 1953, Patsy Sherman was trying to develop a rubber material that didn't deteriorate when it came into contact with aircraft fuel. An assistant spilled one of the experimental compounds on her new tennis shoes. She was none too happy when it refused to budge even with soap or alcohol, but Sherman was inspired. She set to work improving the compound's liquid repellency and just 3 years later Scotchgard hit the market, on a mission to protect the world's suede shoes. 5. Safety Glass Safety glass, the kind that doesn't splinter on impact, is everywhere these days, but when Edouard Benedictus, a French scientist was working in his lab at the turn of the last century there was no such thing. But one day in 1903 he accidentally knocked a glass flask to the floor, heard it break, but was amazed to see that all the broken pieces still hung together. Turns out the flask had been full of a liquid plastic. It had evaporated, but a thin coat of the stuff got left behind and this is what was holding the flask together. Around that time there was a rash of car accidents in Paris as the French got to grips with traveling faster than horses, and the most common form of injury were cuts from shattered windshields. Edouard saw an immediate use for his discovery, but setting a precedent rigorously followed for most of the rest of the century, the car industry rejected this life-saving safety feature on the grounds of expense. It wasn't until WW 1, when his invention proved a great success for lenses in gas masks, that the automobile industry reversed its position and safety glass's major application became car windshields. 4. Cellophane Back in 1908 Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist working for a French textile firm, was trying to make his fortune with a stain proof tablecloth. He got the stain proof part right by coating the cloth with a thin layer of viscose, but the fortune never came. Apparently people liked stains on their tablecloths. Fortunately Jacques had a bit of a eureka moment and realized the potential of his product to package food- after all it was airtight and waterproof. But it was another ten years before he perfected the machine to produce his cellophane and its delights became available to the public. 3. Vulcanized Rubber In 1496 Christopher Columbus brought back the first rubber balls from the West Indies. This seemed like a magical discovery except that rubber rotted, it smelled terrible, got too sticky when warm and too rigid when cold, and in the end people pretty much gave up trying to think of a way to make it useful. Some three hundred years later Charles Goodyear would not be defeated by rubber and resolved to solve these problems. In 1839 he tried boiling it with magnesia, lime, bronze powder and nitric acid, but to no avail. Finally he tried sulphur but that didn't work either until he accidentally dropped the mixture onto a hot stove. Vulcanization, the process of treating rubber with sulphur at great heat, named after the Roman god of fire was born! In a matter of seconds Charlie had improved rubber's strength and resilience, reduced its stickiness and stopped it smelling. This should have been a great day for Charlie, after all vulcanized rubber is now used in everything from rubber bands to hockey pucks, but even though his discovery made millions for others, Charlie died a pauper. 2. X- Rays X-Rays were discovered in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen. He was actually studying cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs. Willie wanted to know if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. He couldn't, but by chance he did notice a glow appearing in his darkened laboratory several feet away. At first he thought there was a tear in the cardboard allowing light from the high-voltage coil inside the tube to escape, but he soon realized rays of light were right passing through the cardboard. He named these penetrated rays, X-rays and found that as well as penetrating solids they were pretty handy at recording images of human skeletons on photographic negatives. Doctors soon adopted X-rays as a standard medical tool and in 1901 Röntgen took home one of the first Nobel prizes. 1. Penicillin Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Of course he wasn't actually looking for it at the time- he was researching the 'flu. He noticed that one of his petri dishes had become contaminated with mould. Other scientists may have recoiled in horror at this result of shoddy work practice, but not Alexander. He chose to investigate. Whatever this intruder was, it was killing off the Staphylococcus bug - a bug causing everything from boils to toxic shock syndrome. Eventually he identified it as the fungus Penicillium notatum and it put the knife into Staph by means of a chemical that destroyed its ability to build cell walls. Being a scientist, he thought long and hard about what to call this new chemical, a chemical released from the fungus Penicillium notatum. That's right he called it penicillin. Nice one Alex. Unfortunately naturally occurring penicillin isn't very stable and thus not very useful. Fleming had found a wonder drug, but couldn't do much with it. Luckily just three years later two Oxford researchers created a stable form and today it's one of our most important tools in the fight against disease. Allergy Charles Robert Richet, a French physiologist, made several experiments testing the reaction of dogs exposed to poison from the tentacles of sea anemones. Some of the dogs died from allergic shock, but others survived their reactions and made full recoveries. Weeks later, because the recovered dogs seemed completely normal, Richet wasted no time in reusing them for more experiments. They were given another dose of anemone poison, this time much smaller than before. The first time the dogs' allergic symptoms, including vomiting, shock, loss of consciousness, and in some cases death, had taken several days to fully develop. But this time the dogs suffered such serious symptoms just minutes after Richet administered the poison. Though Richet was puzzled by what had happened, he realized he could not disregard the unexpected result of his experiment. Later, he noted that his eventual conclusions about the dogs' affliction were "not at all the result of deep thinking, but of a simple observation, almost accidental; so that I have had no other merit than that of not refusing to see the facts which presented themselves before me, completely evident." Richet's conclusions from his findings came to form the theoretical basis of the medical study and treatment of allergies. He eventually proved that there was a physiological state called anaphylaxis that was the antithesis of prophylaxis: When an allergic subject is exposed to an allergen a second time, he or she is even more sensitive to its effects than the first time. Instead of building immunity to the substance through exposure (prophylaxis), the allergic subject's immunity becomes greatly reduced. In 1913 Richet received a Nobel Prize for his discovery and articulation of diseases of allergy. Banting Frederick Banting (above) and John MacLeod discovered insulin, the elusive substance that regulates blood-sugar levels in the body. Insulin Frederick G. Banting, a young Canadian doctor, and Professor John J.R. MacLeod of the University of Toronto shared a Nobel Prize in 1923 for their isolation and clinical use of insulin against diabetes. Their work with insulin followed from the chance discovery of the link between the pancreas and blood-sugar levels by two other doctors on the other side of the Atlantic decades earlier. In 1889, German physicians Joseph von Mering and Oscar Minkowski removed the pancreas from a healthy dog in order to study the role of the pancreas in digestion. Several days after the dog's pancreas was removed, the doctors happened to notice a swarm of flies feeding on a puddle of the dog's urine. On testing the urine to determine the cause of the flies' attraction, the doctors realized that the dog was secreting sugar in its urine, a sign of diabetes. Because the dog had been healthy prior to the surgery, the doctors knew that they had created its diabetic condition by removing its pancreas and thus understood for the first time the relationship between the pancreas and diabetes. With more tests, von Mering and Minkowski concluded that a healthy pancreas must secrete a substance that controls the metabolism of sugar in the body. Though many scientists tried in vain to isolate the particular substance released by the pancreas after the Germans' accidental discovery, it was Banting and MacLeod who established that the mysterious substance was insulin and began to put it to use as the first truly valuable means of controlling diabetes. Papanicolaou in laboratory Dr. George N. Papanicolaou, who devised the "Pap" smear test for cancer, examines a slide in his laboratory in 1958. Pap smear Dr. George Nicholas Papanicolaou's chance observation, while doing a genetic study, of cancer cells on a slide containing a specimen from a woman's uterus spawned the routine use of the so-called "Pap smear," a simple test that has saved millions of women from the ravages of uterine cancer. In 1923, Papanicolaou undertook a study of vaginal fluid in women, in hopes of observing cellular changes over the course of a menstrual cycle. In female guinea pigs, Papanicolaou had already noticed cell transformation and wanted to corroborate the phenomenon in human females. It happened that one of Papanicolaou's human subjects was suffering from uterine cancer. Upon examination of a slide made from a smear of the patient's vaginal fluid, Papanicolaou was astonished to discover that abnormal cancer cells could be plainly observed under a microscope. "The first observation of cancer cells in the smear of the uterine cervix," he later wrote, "gave me one of the greatest thrills I ever experienced during my scientific career." Papanicolaou quickly realized that doctors could administer a simple test to gather a sample of vaginal fluid and test it for early signs of uterine and other cancers. Penicillum mold Penicillium mold (enlarged here many times) is a fungus that differs little from one that appears on bread in warm, humid weather. Penicillin The identification of penicillium mold by Dr. Alexander Fleming in 1928 is one of the best-known stories of medical discovery, not only because of its accidental nature, but also because penicillin has remained one of the most important and useful drugs in our arsenal, and its discovery triggered invaluable research into a range of other invaluable antibiotic drugs. While researching the flu in the summer of 1928, Dr. Fleming noticed that some mold had contaminated a flu culture in one of his petri dishes. Instead of throwing out the ruined dish, he decided to examine the moldy sample more closely. Fleming had reaped the benefits of taking time to scrutinize contaminated samples before. In 1922, Fleming had accidentally shed one of his own tears into a bacteria sample and noticed that the spot where the tear had fallen was free of the bacteria that grew all around it. This discovery peaked his curiosity. After conducting some tests, he concluded that tears contain an antibiotic-like enzyme that could stave off minor bacterial growth. Six years later, the mold Fleming observed in his petri dish reminded him of this first experience with a contaminated sample. The area surrounding the mold growing in the dish was clear, which told Fleming that the mold was lethal to the potent staphylococcus bacteria in the dish. Later he noted, "But for the previous experience, I would have thrown the plate away, as many bacteriologists have done before." Instead, Fleming took the time to isolate the mold, eventually categorizing it as belonging to the genus penicillium. After many tests, Fleming realized that he had discovered a non-toxic antibiotic substance capable of killing many of the bacteria that cause minor and severe infections in humans and other animals. His work, which has saved countless lives, won him a Nobel Prize in 1945. Quinine The story behind the chance discovery of the anti-malarial drug quinine may be more legend than fact, but it is nevertheless a story worthy of note. The account that has gained the most currency credits a South American Indian with being the first to find a medical application for quinine. According to legend, the man unwittingly ingested quinine while suffering a malarial fever in a jungle high in the Andes. Needing desperately to quench his thirst, he drank his fill from a small, bitter-tasting pool of water. Nearby stood one or more varieties of cinchona, which grows from Colombia to Bolivia on humid slopes above 5,000 feet. The bark of the cinchona, which the indigenous people knew as quina-quina, was thought to be poisonous. But when this man's fever miraculously abated, he brought news of the medicinal tree back to his tribe, which began to use its bark to treat malaria. Since the first officially noted use of quinine to fight malaria occurred in a community of Jesuit missionaries in Lima, Peru in 1630, historians have surmised that Indian tribes taught the missionaries how to extract the chemical quinine from cinchona bark. In any case, the Jesuits' use of quinine as a malaria medication was the first documented use of a chemical compound to successfully treat an infectious disease. To this day, quinine-based anti-malarials are widely used as effective treatments against the growth and reproduction of malarial parasites in humans. Jenner vaccinating Phipps A depiction of Edward Jenner vaccinating James Phipps, a boy of eight, on May 14, 1796. Smallpox vaccination In 1796, Edward Jenner, a British scientist and surgeon, had a brainstorm that ultimately led to the development of the first vaccine. A young milkmaid had told him how people who contracted cowpox, a harmless disease easily picked up during contact with cows, never got smallpox, a deadly scourge. With this in mind, Jenner took samples from the open cowpox sores on the hands of a young dairymaid named Sarah Nelmes and inoculated eight-year-old James Phipps with pus he extracted from Nelmes' sores. (Experimenting on a child would be anathema today, but this was the 18th century.) The boy developed a slight fever and a few lesions but remained for the most part unscathed. A few months later, Jenner gave the boy another injection, this one containing smallpox. James failed to develop the disease, and the idea behind the modern vaccine was born. Though doctors and scientists would not begin to understand the biological basis of immunity for at least 50 years after Jenner's first inoculation, the technique of vaccinating against smallpox using the human strain of cowpox soon became a common and effective practice worldwide. Röntgen Physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923), discoverer of the X-ray. X-Rays X-rays have become an important tool for medical diagnoses, but their discovery in 1895 by the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen had little to do with medical experimentation. Röntgen was studying cathode rays, the phosphorescent stream of electrons used today in everything from televisions to fluorescent light bulbs. One earlier scientist had found that cathode rays can penetrate thin pieces of metal, while another showed that these rays could light up a fluorescent screen placed an inch or two away from a thin aluminum "window" in the glass tube. Röntgen wanted to determine if he could see cathode rays escaping from a glass tube completely covered with black cardboard. While performing this experiment, Röntgen noticed that a glow appeared in his darkened laboratory several feet away from his cardboard-covered glass tube. At first he thought a tear in the paper sheathing was allowing light from the high-voltage coil inside the cathode-ray tube to escape. But he soon realized he had happened upon something entirely different. Rays of light were passing right through the thick paper and appearing on a fluorescent screen over a yard away. Röntgen found that this new ray, which had many characteristics different from the cathode ray he had been studying, could penetrate solids and even record the image of a human skeleton on a photographic negative. In 1901, the first year of the Nobel Prize, Röntgen won for his accidental discovery of what he called the "X-ray," which physicians worldwide soon adopted as a standard medical tool.