1. Creative science- Lithuania,
May 2011

2. In 1879, Louis Pasteur inoculated some chickens with cholera
bacteria. It was supposed to kill them, but Pasteur or one of his assistants
had accidentally used a culture from an old jar and the chickens merely
got sick and recovered.

3. Later, Pasteur inoculated them again with a fresh
culture that he knew to be virulent, and the chickens
didn't even get sick. Chance had led him to discover the
principle of vaccination for disease prevention.

4. X-rays
Wilhelm Roentgen was experimenting with electrical discharges
one evening at the University of Wurzburg in 1895. There was a
screen coated with a barium compound lying to one side, and
Roentgen noticed that it would fluoresce when an electrical
discharge would occur in the tube he was watching.

5. On reaching for the screen, Roentgen got his hand
between the discharge tube and the screen and saw the
bones of his own hand through the shadow of his skin. In
1901, Roentgen received the Nobel prize for his
accidental discovery of X-rays.

6. Alexander Fleming was a young bacteriologist at St. Mary's
Hospital in London in 1928. One day in his cluttered laboratory, he
noticed that a culture dish of bacteria had been invaded by a mold
whose spore must have drifted in through an open window.

7. Under the microscope, he saw that, all
around the mold, the individual bacteria
that he had been growing had burst. He
saved the mold, and from it produced the
first penicillin.

8. In May, 1886, Coca Cola was invented by Doctor John Pemberton a
pharmacist from Atlanta, Georgia. The soft drink was first sold to the public at
the soda fountain in Jacob's Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8, 1886.About nine
servings of the soft drink were sold each day. Sales for that first year added
up to a total of about $50. The funny thing was that it cost John Pemberton
over $70 in expanses, so the first year of sales were a loss. Until 1905, the
soft drink, marketed as a tonic, contained extracts of cocaine as well as the
caffeine-rich kola nut.

9. In 1887, another Atlanta pharmacist and businessman, Asa
Candler bought the formula for Coca Cola from inventor
John Pemberton for $2,300. By the late 1890s, Coca Cola
was one of America's most popular fountain drinks,
largely due to Candler's aggressive marketing of the
product. With Asa Candler, now managing the business,
the Coca Cola Company increased syrup sales by over
4000% between 1890 and 1900 .

10. Advertising was an important factor in John Pemberton and
Asa Candler's success and by the turn of the century, the drink
was sold across the United States and Canada. Around the same
time, the company began selling syrup to independent bottling
companies licensed to sell the drink. Even today, the US soft
drink industry is organized on this principle.
In 1985, the trade secret "New Coke" formula was
released. Today, products of the Coca Cola Company are
consumed at the rate of more than one billion drinks per day

11. Science has coined the phrase, "the Principle of Limited
Sloppiness" to describe accidental discoveries such as
these. Maybe their time has passed. Certainly, there is no
place in, say, the space program for "limited sloppiness."
Although the mad scientists or eccentric inventors so
often portrayed in old movies are still good for laughs,
that's not what we're talking about here. Surely the need
still exists for the imaginative, the inventive, and the
unshackled experimenter.