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Happy icciaenes
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 sometimes 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 20 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 staphylococcus. 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 life-saving drug is used around the world. Each year there are over 80 million
prescriptions written for penicillin 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 of these conveniences have become such a part of our everyday lives that we've
come to take them for granted.
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. Hisertention, Velcro, has since become
• siniquitove tianie found on everything from shoes
to wallets to blood cressure cuffs to space shuttles.
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