Accidental Inventions & Discoveries Quiz

Answer: The becquerel, equal to one decay per second. Becquerel had put uranium salts on a photographic plate in a drawer for lack of sunshine for his experiments, yet the plate was fogged. The curie, an older unit, honours Pierre and Marie Curie, who shared the 1903 Nobel Prize with him.

Answer: 11. The next morning, in 1905, the mixture had frozen around the stick. Epperson only patented his 'Epsicle' in 1923, later renamed 'Popsicle' at the urging of his children, who called it 'Pop's sicle'.

Answer: 400. Engineer Richard James had seen a spring fall off a shelf and 'walk' across the floor. His wife Betty found the name in a dictionary. At the demonstration at Gimbels in Philadelphia, the stock sold out in an hour and a half. More than 300 million have been sold since.

Answer: Textured wallpaper. Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes had sealed two plastic shower curtains together, trapping air bubbles. As wallpaper it flopped, as greenhouse insulation too. Salvation came from packaging: IBM used it to protect its computers. Popping the bubbles has become a worldwide pastime.

Answer: He supposedly ate a spoonful every day. The chemist noticed that Pennsylvania oil workers treated their cuts with a waxy residue that clogged the drilling rigs. He purified it and marketed it in 1870. He lived to 96, which he readily credited to his Vaseline.

Answer: Nobody knew how to purify it or produce it in quantity; Florey and Chain managed it around 1940. Fleming observed the mould's effect but couldn't isolate a stable substance. In Oxford, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain revived the research; industrial production, mainly in the US, made it possible to treat soldiers from 1943-1944. The three men shared the Nobel Prize in 1945.

Answer: No: it was founded in 1898, nearly 40 years after his death, and named in his honour. Around 1839 Goodyear discovered that rubber heated with sulphur became stable, neither sticky in summer nor brittle in winter. Yet he spent his life in debt and lawsuits and died penniless in 1860. The company, founded by Frank Seiberling, simply borrowed his name.

Answer: Among discarded samples, one did not rust. He was looking for a wear-resistant steel for gun barrels. A chromium-rich alloy, set aside, stayed shiny while the others rusted. Chromium forms a very thin protective layer that repairs itself. Cutlery was one of the first uses.

Answer: 1998. Sildenafil was meant to widen the heart's blood vessels, but trials were disappointing. Volunteers did, however, report an unexpected side effect, which steered Pfizer towards an entirely different use. It became one of the world's best-known drugs.

Answer: Horace Wells. At a travelling show where people inhaled nitrous oxide for fun, Wells saw a volunteer injure his leg without feeling a thing. The very next day he had a tooth pulled under the gas. His public demonstration in Boston failed, however, when the patient cried out.