5 Lab Accidents That Went Horribly Right

5 The Apron That Caught Fire

In 1846, chemist Christian Schönbein was messing around with some vials of stuff when he spilled a bunch of nitric acid and sulfuric acid on his table. The acids weren’t quite strong enough to eat through the table and through whoever lived one floor below, so he just grabbed an apron and mopped up the spill. Then he tossed the apron over the nearby stove to dry. 

The apron caught fire. That’s not supposed to happen. Though cotton can catch fire, a damp cloth is supposed to take in a lot of heat without igniting, otherwise we could never iron clothes. But a chemical reaction had occurred, and Schönbein had created nitrocellulose, a deeply flammable material. Flammable stuff has its uses, and nitrocellulose later became guncotton, used in guns. Sure, one early factory making the stuff exploded, killing 20 workers, but factories were exploding all the time back then regardless, so it was a good invention overall. 

Later, we discovered a new use for nitrocellulose. We could use it to make film, jump-starting photography. This, in turn, led to celluloid, which remained similarly flammable. If you’ve been planning to set any assassination targets on fire, we recommend doing so in a 1940s movie theater. 

4 The Slow Creation of LSD

Sure, spilling acid on the table can be nice, when it catches fire. But we know what sort of acid you’re really interested in. It’s lysergic acid diethylamide, that psychedelic drug that had its heyday back in the 1960s because it was completely legal until 1968.

LSD was famously invented by Albert Hofmann, who went on to be a great proponent of such drugs. But Hofmann didn’t set out to create a chemical to make you see swirling colors. He was trying to make an analeptic, a stimulant that hits the respiratory system. In 1938, this resulted in his synthesizing LSD. Because it wasn’t what he was aiming for, he did nothing with the discovery for five years. 

Then in 1943, he returned to the substance he’d made. This time, he accidentally ingested some, through his fingertips. This felt stimulating in a whole other way from what he’d planned, and he abandoned his old hobby of respiratory treatment in favor of something far more fun. 

3 The First Plastic

Long before we started making plastics out of oil, we’d been on the hunt for some material we could mold into any shape we like. We had ceramics, of course, but those tended to be brittle. We also hemacite, a mixture of blood and sawdust. This, too, offered some disadvantages.

Then, in 1907, an inventor named Leo Baekeland was messing around with two chemicals, phenol and formaldehyde. He wasn’t trying to make a moldable material. He was trying to make a replacement for shellac, which is a shiny wood coat made from mushed-up insects. But a moldable material was what he found himself with. 

We call the result Bakelite, after its creator. It was the first plastic made from synthetic materials. In fact, Baekeland was the first person to refer to materials as “plastics.” If it weren’t for him, we’d still have ended up making plastics from oil, but we would have called it something else, like whackadillies. 

2 When They Made Penicillin, They Thankfully Used the Wrong Animal

You’ve surely heard about how penicillin was accidentally discovered. Alexander Fleming was trying to culture bacteria, and some unintended mold was keeping the stuff from reproducing properly. He gradually realized that this substance with antibiotic properties wasn’t a problem but a solution.

But the penicillin that Fleming found wasn’t so great after all. He had discovered the fungus Penicillium notatum all right, but it didn’t make enough penicillin for anyone to be able to use it. Scientists now tried a bunch of other molds to see if they worked any better, and none seemed to. We only got a useable strain of Penicillium because a lab worker named Mary Hunt found some on a rotting cantaloupe. She bought the fruit to serve and eat it, not hoping to find mold there, but then she did find mold and tested it because the lab was trying every mold they could get their hands on.

We also settled on penicillin thanks to a third bit of serendipity. The scientists testing how it worked at killing infections in animals tested it on mice. That sounds normal, since there are plenty of reasons to test on mice, but you might know that guinea pigs were the other traditional animal for testing. Well, penicillin is toxic to guinea pigs, so if they’d tried it on guinea pigs, the subjects would have all died. Had that happened, the scientists would have said, “Huh, guess mold kills you, unsurprisingly,” and would never pursued that line of research again. 

1 No One Would Have Made the Plasma Globe on Purpose

And now, let’s touch on the most important scientific invention of all-time. It’s this thing:

It’s called a plasma globe. You probably saw it once at a museum as a kid, where it was supposed to teach you something or another, and you haven’t thought about it in years. It ostensibly aimed to teach you electricity (voltage across noble gases creates plasma, and your hand conducts electricity, so colored plasma shows up wherever you touch), but it really aimed to get you interested in the broad concept of science.

It was invented in 1971 by MIT undergrad Bill Parker, who was trying to create rocket fuel. He increased the pressure in a vial too much, and suddenly, electricity made visible plasma. This had no applications whatever for rocket engines, but he noted (like so many others soon would) that it looked really cool.

Years later, he’d get a job at a museum, he’d put the globe on display and it would become famous. But the night he invented it, he just took it home to his girlfriend’s to show off at a house party. We don’t know if there was LSD at this party, and frankly, we don’t think they needed any. 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.