--- title: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions | TIME description: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions canonical: https://time.com/video/kvL2Njj6/ og:title: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions og:description: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions og:url: https://time.com/video/kvL2Njj6/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/kvL2Njj6/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions twitter:description: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/kvL2Njj6/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions [Watch (HLS stream): Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/kvL2Njj6.m3u8) (5:37)  _Published 2014-11-10. Accidental Discoveries That Changed The World - Reactions_ --- Jul 27, 2023 5:29 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Two Activists on How They Knew They Wanted to Change the World](/video/rtI4aANS/) ### Two Activists on How They Knew They Wanted to Change the World [Emma Thompson on How She Would Change the World](/video/taBc4O2l/) ### Emma Thompson on How She Would Change the World [Great New Wine Discoveries: 'The World Wine Atlas'](/video/Jo0QWUux/) ### Great New Wine Discoveries: 'The World Wine Atlas' --- ## Transcript Isaac Asimov said it best. The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries is not Eureka, but, that's funny. Throughout the history of science, many major discoveries came accidentally. Sometimes they came from recognizing potential in an unexpected product or even in a failed recipe's waste, turning accident into serendipity. Other times discovery came out of pure desperation from a seemingly dead end experiment. See the entire modern chemical industry can be attributed to an accidental discovery that started with well, garbage. [ MUSIC ] In the 19th century there was a new kind of waste floating around: [ NOISE ] coal tar. This was a stinky, sticky, awful muck left over from turning coal into gas light. Before others figured out you could pave roads with the stuff, it was pretty much useless. Then the head of London's Royal College of Chemistry had an idea. August Wilhelm von Hofmann noticed that some of the stuff in coal tar was similar to the stuff in known medicines. If you got the chemistry right, he thought, the world would have cheap, easy cures for disease. So in 1856, he assigned 18- year- old William Perkin to Team Coal Tar. Perkin's job was to try to turn the gunk into quinine. Quinine was used to treat malaria but the drug had to be extracted from tree bark and that was time consuming and really annoying. Perkin knew that quinine and coal tar had similar chemical formulas so he figured take some of the stuff that's in coal tar that's similar to quinine. And some other stuff that looks like little bits of quinine then remove useless byproducts then Voila !, right? Yeah, not so much . >> Perkins first attempts got a reddish black powder instead of off white quinine crystals. So he made a couple of changes and tried it again. Instead of off white powder, he got an even blacker powder. Oh well, wash it out with a little alcohol and start it over right? But wait, when he added the alcohol the black powder produced a breathtaking purple. Perkin was inspired he somehow figured out this purple stuff could dye silk, Perkins saw dollar signs at the time purple dyed fabrics were made using exotic crushed snails, so only the very wealthy could afford to wear purple. Forget crushed snails. Perkin just made purple dye out of garbage. Perkin called this stuff mauve, after a French flower, because well, you know, trashy purple didn't quite sound appealing. Dreaming of broad profit margins, Perkin did what many entrepreneurs did. He quit, and started perhaps the first artificial dye factory. Within a few years mauve had two influential fashion fans: Queen Victoria, and Napoleon the Third's wife, Empress Eugénie. A fashion craze known as mauve measles erupted and suddenly, the middle class could afford a color beyond drab brown or off- white or gray. Perkins amassed a fortune of more than 100 million in today's dollars, and retired at the ripe old age of 36. On Perkins' lead, chemical factories sprang up, dumpster diving nature for treasure. And this led to even more profitable accidents. In 1878, Constantine Fallberg brought his gunky coal tar work home with him by not washing his hands. At dinner one night he found his bread incredible sweet. Fahlberg and his lab mates realized the source was a super sweet substance derived from coal tar residue they called saccharine. The accidental discoveries only grew in the 20th century. In late 1930s, Roy Plunkett at DuPont was working with refrigerants named fluorinated hydrocarbons. One day a new mix, annoyingly, solidified into a powder that made stuff slippery. Plunkett had stumbled on a new material called polytetrafluoroethylene, which DuPont marketed as Teflon. Teflon was awesome! It coated metal for a no- stick surface! And also, Teflon didn't conduct electricity, so it was great for wire coating. This led father and son team Bill and Bob Gore to work with Teflon to make computer cables. Bill and Bob discovered that Teflon didn't stretch evenly, making it hard to work with. Frustrated, Bob yanked on a hunk of heated teflon and suddenly it expanded to eight times it's size. Turns out, this heated stretched hunk was over 70 % air. So it could breathe easily while retaining the no stick properties of it's teflon parent. And if you wove this into a fabric, it proved fantastic for lightweight raincoats that don't wrap you in your own sauna. You know this material as Gore- Tex. So much of what we enjoy in the modern world came from accidental discoveries. Be it fashion cause causing mauve, sweeteners, teflon or Bortex. The Chemists behind this stuff were smart enough to recognise that they accidentally discovered something special. In the process, these moments became so much more than happy accidents. They became discoveries that changed the world. Hey chem heads thanks for watching if you want more Sam Keen check out a video he did for us on whether mega sharks still exist, and if you want more history check out five black chemists who changed the world, and regardless click that there subscribe button for more chemistry goodness every week. 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