A Brief History of Happy Accidents

Quiet down, everyone. It’s pop quiz time! But don’t worry—there are only two questions; it’s open book, and it won’t impact your final grade.

A Quiz on Happy Accidents

Question 1: What do these three products have in common?

Answer: Each of these physical world products was the result of a happy accident!

• Coca-Cola: In 1866, John Pemberton was attempting to develop an alcohol-free alternative to his pain relief drink when his syrup concoction was accidentally mixed with carbonated water.
• Microwave Ovens: In 1945, a self-taught engineer named Percy Spencer, who was leading a radar project for Raytheon, accidentally discovered microwave cooking when he noticed that the candy bar in his pocket had melted from the heat.
• Silly Putty: During World War II, engineer James Wright was tasked with inventing a cheap alternative to synthetic rubber. While working on finding a substitute, Wright dropped boric acid into silicone oil and accidentally discovered a family favorite toy.

Question 2: What do these three products have in common?

Answer: The accidental invention pattern is not limited to the physical world. Each of these digital products was also the result of a happy accident!

• Google Maps API: After the launch of the Google Maps web product, external developers started scraping the API directly and eventually asked Google to allow them to pay for supported access. Bret Taylor felt that the unintended offering was aligned with Google’s mission and spun up Google’s first, fully monetized API product.
• Slack: Originally built as a chat tool inside the online video game “Glitch,” Steward Butterfield saw the sticky awesomeness that is Slack and, in rapid fashion, the enterprise collaboration tool became the catalyst that morphed the company into the fastest growing B2B SaaS startup in history.
• AWS: AWS emerged as a serendipitous consequence of “the Bezos mandate,” requiring all systems at Amazon to communicate through APIs built for potential externalized use or be fired. After several years of making API enabled infrastructure for internal uses, Bezos and the Amazon leadership team saw that it could be pivoted to solve a worldwide problem of technology infrastructure management.

Two Patterns for Happy Accidents

This quiz was less about grading your knowledge of product development history and more about helping enterprise professionals reset their brains to understand how earth-shaking products emerge more often from accidental innovation than from a genius visionary who can predict an explicit future.

In our book, Unbundling the Enterprise: APIs, Optionality, and the Science of Happy Accidents, we break down the constructs that allow these accidental innovations to emerge and give you the tools to accelerate your enterprise innovation processes and make the emergence of game-changing opportunities more and more inevitable.

As we did our research for the book, we kept finding two connected patterns over and over again. First, we found the pattern of accidental innovation, where our interviewees (like Thor Mitchell from Google, or Esat Sezar from Coca-Cola) told us their story of a big windfall that started as an unintended (but welcome) consequence. The second pattern was where our interviewees (like Saurabh Sahni from Slack, or Brian Schween from Anderson Holdings) kept sharing how APIs were the critical factor that allowed these happy accidents to spring to life.

As we were attempting to understand the workings of these patterns, we discovered that accidental breakthroughs have been going on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years with a near innumerable list of critical and loved products that would not be in our world were it not for a single accident that happened in a moment of good providence. This insight became one of the central themes (and the subtitle) of our book, but one thing that just couldn’t fit in the final product was a historical listing of all the amazing breakthroughs that were the result of accidental innovation.

A History of Happy Accidents

Now that the book has launched, we have the time to bring to you a listing of some our favorite stories of accidental innovation from around the world:

• Beer: Nobody is sure exactly how or when beer was first made. In what might be the first known accidental invention, the commonly held belief is that someone left their bread dough outside just before a rain storm. Upon returning, the dough was a sloppy, wet, fermented mess. The natural yeast would have worked wonders to transform the grain’s sugars into alcohol and, voila, beer was born somewhere around 10,000 BC.
• Matches: British pharmacist John Walker invented the match by accident in 1826. While experimenting with multiple substances in an endeavor to create a paste that might be used in guns, he inadvertently scraped the wooden instrument he was using to mix the substances in his paste, and it caught fire. With a little more work, Walker produced a flammable paste which he then applied to cardboard strips. He dubbed his invention “friction lights” and started selling them to locals, and the accidental invention caught fire with the populace.
• Vulcanized Rubber: Legend has it that in 1839, American inventor Charles Goodyear was experimenting and accidentally spilled a mixture of rubber and sulfur onto a hot stove. In an unexpected surprise, the rubber did not turn into a sludgy mess but instead became charred and hardened. This transformative accident would soon lead to the commercial production of vulcanized rubber.
• Dynamite: In 1866, Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel forever changed mining, construction, and many other fields by making large-scale projects more feasible and efficient when he discovered, by chance, that by mixing nitroglycerin with an absorbent material he could create a safer and much more controllable explosive compound. In his later years, after being deeply affected by the destructive potential of dynamite, he established the Nobel Prizes, using his fortune to recognize and reward positive contributions to humanity in peace, physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature.
• X-rays: German physicist, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, made one of the most significant accidental discoveries in the history of science while conducting cathode ray experiments in 1895. He noticed a mysterious fluorescent glow in a nearby screen, even though the cathode rays were supposed to be confined within a glass tube. Through more investigation, Roentgen discovered, and named, X-rays (X signifying their unknown nature), an invisible form of radiation that could pass through various materials. In an effort to harness the potential of this newly discovered form of radiation, Roentgen developed a rudimentary device (a cathode ray tube and a fluorescent screen) to allow him to visualize X-rays. Realizing the potential medical applications of his discovery, Roentgen captured X-ray images of various items, including his wife’s hand, which became the world’s first X-ray photograph.
• Radiation: In 1896 French physicist Antoine Henri Becquerel made an accidental discovery when conducting an experiment with uranium and photographic plates. Becquerel found that the plates were already fully exposed before being subjected to bright sunlight. After further investigation, he concluded that the fluorescent mineral wrapped with the plates in thick black paper emitted its own nuclear radiation.
• Corn Flakes: In the late 1890s, a revolution in breakfast emerged from the kitchen of the Michigan-based Battle Creek Sanitarium, an early health spa started by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. In one particular afternoon of cooking, the Kellogg brothers were called away from their kitchen and returned to find that a batch of dough for a wheat-based cereal had fermented. After choosing to go ahead and bake the unexpected result, they were happily surprised to find that it turned into perfect crispy and tasty flakes. After continued experimentation the Kellogg brothers eventually found that corn created the corn-based crunchy flakes that stock grocery shelves everywhere.
• Safety Glass: In 1903, French chemist Édouard Bénédictus accidentally dropped a flask that contained a dried residue of an alcohol solution of collodion. He was surprised not to see it shatter into thousands of shards but instead, be held together in one piece. Bénédictus’s accidental discovery eventually birthed “unbreakable” glass that, without much change, is still used as one of the main types of safety glass today.
• Popsicles: Frank Epperson accidentally invented the very first Popsicle when he was the ripe old age of eleven! in the San Francisco Bay Area way back in 1905. Frank went inside but forgot his cup of soda with a stirring stick still in it out on his porch. Left out overnight, the soda froze like a tasty icicle! Curious, Frank gave the frozen soda a try and named his invention the “Epsicle.” It quickly became not only his favorite treat but one for many of the kids in his neighborhood as well. Frank patented the “Epsicle” in 1924 and began to share his ice pops with the world! Eventually, at the suggestion of his children, Epperson changed the treat’s name to Popsicle (given that they called it “a Pop’s ‘Sicle”).
• Penicillin: Penicillin began its journey to becoming the most widely-used antibiotic in the world at a lab in Scotland in 1928 and eventually found its way to mass production in a moldy cantaloupe in Peoria, Illinois. When Sir Alexander Fleming, sometimes thought to be a “careless lab technician,” left a culture plate of staphylococcus on the table, he returned not only to find that mold had contaminated the culture but also that the mold halted the growth of the staphylococci. Neither Fleming nor a team of Oxford researchers could figure out how to scale production until 1942 after a worldwide search revealed a modified strain of penicillin that came from a moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria market produced the largest amount of penicillin
• Teflon: In April 1938, Dr. Roy J. Plunkett was working with refrigeration gases and made an unexpected discovery when examining a compressed sample of tetrafluoroethylene: The sample had spontaneously polymerized into a white, waxy solid to form the most slippery material in existence: Teflon. Teflon has become one of the most valuable, versatile technologies invented and is used in aerospace, communications, electronics, industrial processes, and architecture.
• Smoke Detectors: In the late 1930s, Walter Jaeger, a Swiss physicist made another failed attempt while working on a sensor for detecting poison gas. Frustrated, he lit a cigarette—and the smoke moved the meter on his gadget. This discovery led to the modern smoke detector that is now in use in 9 out of 10 homes in the USA.
• Superglue: In 1942, while attempting to make a clear plastic for use in gun sights during World War II, chemist Dr. Harry Coover stumbled upon a sticky substance that could rapidly bond surfaces so tightly it became a challenge to separate objects once they were stuck together. It wasn’t until 1951 when Coover, now at Eastman Kodak’s chemical plant working on jet canopies, revisited the powerful adhesive and transformed it into the product we now know as super glue.
• The Slinky: In 1943, while trying to develop springs to keep ship equipment steady at sea during World War II, mechanical engineer Richard James accidentally invented the Slinky. James was experimenting with tension springs when one of them fell off his desk and began to move down the floor in a series of arcs. He was intrigued and showed the spring to his wife, Betty, who came up with the name Slinky. Richard and Betty James then refined and launched the item that would become one of the bestselling toys of the 20th century.
• Velcro: In 1948, Swiss engineer George de Mestral invented Velcro after he and his dog were covered in hundreds of burrs after hiking in the woods. The burrs had hooks that looked like fangs that grabbed onto loops in clothing, animal fur, or human hair. After examining the hooks under a microscope, de Mestral realized how the hooks and loops worked together and was inspired to create a fabric fastener that acted like the burrs.
• Valium: In 1957, one of Leo Sternbach’s assistants was cleaning out old unused bottles and found one which apparently was the 40th untested compound from previous work that was halted by his employers at Roche. When his assisant asked Sternbach, who was accustomed to hardship and perseverance having escaped from the Nazis in the early 1940s, if he should throw the bottle away, Sternbach instead asked his colleagues to run the testing protocol on this one last sample, which had….you guessed it!…been the last result of a failed attempt at making a synthetic dye. With this one last hail mary, the almost-thrown-away compound, which had been developed for an entirely different purpose, changed the world by first showing a dramatic impact on anxiety and aggression and then being further developed into the blockbuster drug of Valium.
• Bubble Wrap: Inventors Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes failed in their 1957 attempt to make and market 3D wallpaper. When interior decorators didn’t fall in love with the bubbly wallpaper concept, Fielding and Chavannes failed again in an attempt to market bubble wrap as an insulator for greenhouses. The third attempt was the charm, however, in 1960 when IBM used bubble wrap rolls as a protective packaging material for computers and other fragile items.
• Viagra: In the early 1990s, after four years of work, a team of Pfizer chemists working in southwest England were about to throw in the towel on a drug they had been developing as a treatment for high blood pressure. On the brink of failure, just as it appeared Pfizer was going to call it quits, something happened that gave the product an unexpected lift (and affected sexual norms all over the world). A few study participants reported that the drug was giving them more erections.

For those who’ve read our book, you’ve already seen our favorite accidental inventor, Marvin Pipkin, who may be more responsible than Thomas Edison for the scaled usage of electrical lightbulbs (even if his discovery was an accident). If you haven’t yet read our account of Pipkin, and you’d like to learn how to turn your enterprise into a playground of ever-emerging happy accidents, you’ll have to make at least one purposeful move and buy the book. 🙂

- About The Authors

Stephen Fishman

Stephen Fishman (Fish) is the NA Field CTO for Boomi. He is a practicing technologist who brings creativity, rigor, and a human-centric lens to problem-solving. Known as an expert in aligning technology and business strategy, Stephen places a premium on pushing business and technology leaders to embrace iteration and the critical need to collaborate across disciplines. Throughout his career, Stephen has consulted with organizations desiring to transform their technology-based offerings to better meet the needs of organizations and the people they serve. In addition to consulting with large organizations, Stephen is an in-demand speaker and advisor. Stephen has led multidisciplinary teams to deliver amazing results at Salesforce, MuleSoft, Cox Automotive, Sapient, Macy's, and multiple public sector institutions including the US Federal Reserve and the CDC. He lives in Atlanta with his family and when he's not working can be found biking on the many trails in Georgia.

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Matt McLarty

Matt McLarty is the Chief Technology Officer for Boomi. He works with organizations around the world to help them digitally transform using a composable approach. He is an active member of the global API community, has led global technical teams at Salesforce, IBM, and CA Technologies, and started his career in financial technology. Matt is an internationally known expert on APIs, microservices, and integration. He is co-author of the O'Reilly books Microservice Architecture and Securing Microservice APIs, and co-host of the API Experience podcast. He lives with his wife and two sons in Vancouver, BC.

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