One day a new mix unknowingly solidified into a powder that made stuff slippery. In late 1930s, Roy Plunkett at DuPont was working with refrigerants named fluorinated hydrocarbons. The accidental discoveries only grew in the 20th century. Fahlberg and his lab mates realized the source was a super sweet substance derived from coal tar residue they called saccharin. At dinner one night, he found his bread incredibly sweet. In 1878, Constantine Fahlberg brought his gunky coal tar work home with him by not washing his hands. And this led to even more profitable accidents. On Perkin's lead, chemical factories sprang up, dumpster diving nature for treasure. Perkin amassed a fortune of more than $100 million in today's dollars and retired at the ripe old age of 36. Suddenly the middle class could afford a color beyond drab brown and off-white, or gray. A fashion craze known as "mauve measles" erupted. Within a few years, mauve had two influential fashion fans, Queen Victoria and Napoleon III's wife, Empress Eugenie. He quit and started perhaps the first artificial dye factory. Dreaming of broad profit margins, Perkin did what many entrepreneurs did. Perkin called this stuff mauve after a French flower because well, you know, trashy purple didn't quite sound appealing. Forget crushed snails, Perkin just made purple dye out of garbage. So only the very wealthy could afford to wear purple. At the time, purple-dyed fabrics were made using exotic crushed snails. He somehow figured out this purple stuff could dye silk. When he added the alcohol, the black powder produced a breathtaking purple.
Oh well, wash it out with a little alcohol and start over, right? But wait. Instead of off-white powder, he got an even blacker powder. So he made a couple changes and tried it again. Perkin's first attempts got a reddish, black powder instead of off-white quinine crystals. So he figured, take some of the stuff that's in coal tar that's similar to quinine, add some other stuff that looks like little bits of quinine, then remove the useless byproducts, and voila! Right? Yeah, not so much. Perkin knew that quinine and cold tar had similar chemical formulas. But the drug had to be extracted from tree bark, and that was time-consuming and really annoying. Perkin's job was to try to turn the gunk into quinine. So in 1856, he assigned 18-year-old William Perkin to team coal tar. If you got the chemistry right, he thought, the world would have cheap, easy cures for disease. 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. Before others figured out you could paved roads with this stuff, it was pretty much useless. This was a stinky, sticky, awful muck leftover from turning coal into gas light. In the 19th century, there was a new kind of waste floating around, coal tar. See, the entire modern chemical industry can be attributed to an accidental discovery that started with well, garbage. Other times, discovery came out of pure desperation from a seemingly dead end experiment. Sometimes they came from recognizing potential in an unexpected product or even in a failed recipe's waste, turning accident into serendipity. "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.
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