22 Scientific Discoveries Average Joes Made By Accident

Lots of scientific breakthroughs were made by accident. Alexander Fleming grew penicillin in a petri dish he left out while he was on vacation. Sweet’N Low was a byproduct of experimentation with coal tar. The Professor accidentally spilled Chemical X into sugar, spice and everything nice and created the Powerpuff Girls.

But those guys were all scientists. Even if they didn’t know what they were creating, they had some idea of the underlying principles involved. By contrast, the average person’s understanding of science ends at “baking soda plus vinegar equals cool volcano,” so they’re always stumbling upon scientific properties already known by people smarter than they are.

Take, for example, user narelie, who “put super glue on my daughter's backpack and it burst into flames,” as they told r/AskReddit. It turns out that cotton and super glue don’t mix, and “the cotton lining on her backpack was very thin and had some sort of a coating on it that must've acted as an additional accelerant.” 

They then asked, “What strange science things have you discovered firsthand, by accident?,” and the Nobel Committee should stand at the ready.