“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 a failed recipe’s waste

– turning accident into serendipity.

Other times, discovery came out of pure

desperation from a seemingly dead-end experiment.

The entire modern chemical industry

can be attributed to an accidental discovery

that started with, well, garbage.

In the 19th century there was a new kind

of waste floating around: coal tar.

This was a stinky, sticky, awful muck

leftover from turning coal into gaslight.

Before others figured out they 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 Hoffman noticed

that some of the stuff in coal tar was

similar to the stuff in known medicines.

If he 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, which was annoying

and time-consuming.

Perkin knew that quinine and coal

tar had similar chemical formulas.

So, he figured, take some of stuff

in coal tar that’s similar to quinine,

add some other stuff that looks like

little bits of quinine, remove some

useless byproducts, and voila, right?

Not so much.

Perkin’s first attempts got a

reddish-black powder instead

of off-white quinine crystals.

And so he made a couple changes and

tried again with a different coal tar

starting ingredient, thinking a more

simple formula would do the trick.

But wrong again – instead of off-white

he got an even blacker powder.

Oh well, wash it out with a little

alcohol and start 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.

Perikin 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 a purple dye out of garbage!

Perkin called it “mauve” after a French flower,

because “ trashy purple” didn’t 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 influential fashion fans:

Queen Victoria and Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie.

A fashion craze known as “mauve measles”

erupted – suddenly the middle class

could afford a color beyond drab brown,

off-white, or grey.

Perkin amassed a fortunate of over

100 million in today’s dollars and

retired at ripe old age of 36.

On Perkin’s lead, chemical factories

sprang up, dumpster diving nature for

treasure, and this led to even more

profitable accidents.

In 1878, Constantin Fahlberg brought

his gunky coal tar work home with

him – by not washing his hands.

At dinner one night he found his

bread incredibly sweet.

Fahlberg and his labmates realized

the source was a super-sweet

substance derived from coal tar

residue they called saccharin.

The accidental discoveries only grew in the 20th century.

In the late 1930s, Roy Plunkett at Dupont,

was working with refrigerant coolants

named “fluorinated-hydrocarbons”.

One day a new mix annoyingly solidified

into a powder that made stuff so slippery.

Plunkett had stumbled upon new material

called polytetrafluoroethylene,

which Dupont marketed as Teflon.

Teflon was awesome:

it coated metal for a no-stick surface.

Also, Teflon didn’t conduct electricity,

so it was great wire coating.

This led Father and son team

Bill and Bob Gore began slowly

stretching 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 that suddenly expanded

eight times its size.

Turns out this heated -hunk material,

was over 70% air, so it could breathe

easily while retaining the no-stick

properties of its 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-craze-causing mauve,

sweeteners, Teflon, or Gore-Tex,

the chemists behind this stuff were smart

enough to recognize that they accidentally

stumbled onto 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 Kean,

check out a video he did for us on

whether mega sharks still exists.

And if you want history, check out

Five black chemists who changed the world.

And regardless, click that there subscribe

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And a big thanks to the Chemical Heritage

Foundation for helping us out with this video.