3/27/15 Happy Accidents?

       While in Galveston during Spring Break I found this book, Happy Accidents at Kroger.  I had been telling Chubs about paying attention that sometimes the biggest discoveries in science have been by accident.  This book is about 400 pages long and covers about 200 of these discoveries.  It was very interesting and I am glad to add it to my collection of informative books.  About half of the discoveries are science based, such as the discovery of fission or nylon.  But a lot of them are fun discoveries of stuff we use day to day, such as Levi's or even ice cream cones. 
    Surely, the biggest "accidental" discovery was Columbus looking for a short cut to India for the spice trade and finding a continent Europe was unaware of.  Columbus died thinking he had found the short cut.  Amerigo Vespucci forged ahead and in 1501 landed and named Brazil and the west indies (named by Columbus) were part of a vast new continent between Europe and Asia.
    Brandy was also an accidental discovery.  Turns out, Dutch merchants trying to ship wine from France to the Netherlands decided to lessen the cost of shipping by distilling out the water from the wine,  which upon arrival to the Netherlands, the water could be added back.  After tasting the condensed version, the Dutch decided to market the new product as "brandewign" (burnt wine).  This became Anglicized and eventually became brandy.
    Smallpox vaccination came from a milkmaid telling an apprentice Edward Jenner working under surgeon Daniel Ludlow that she could never get smallpox because she had contracted and survived cowpox, a mild viral infection of cows.  After completing his medical training, he remembered the milkmaids words.  Looking into it further, he noticed milkmaids rarely contracted smallpox even when exposed to people who had it.  He took an infection from a milkmaid, scratched up the 8yr old arm of his gardener's son and rubbed it in.  The boy got the mild cowpox, and got over it within a week.  To test whether the boy was now protected, he inoculated the boy with smallpox and the boy did not develop the disease.  His work helped in eliminating smallpox from the earth.  Although it was a dick move to infect the son of his gardener.
    These are some of the examples of "discoveries" made accidentally which have shaped how and even where we live.  These contributions to society are as great and sometimes greater as the more sophisticated and thought out solutions that come out of think tanks or universities by men and women who spend their whole lives chasing a solution for a problem the rest of society doesn't even realize needs solving.