Which Accidental Discoveries Make the Most Interesting PODs?

What about ice cream cones (a stall at the 1904 World Fair happened to run out of plates, and decided to improvise by rolling up waffles into cones) and popsicles (in 1905, 11 year old Frank Epperson absentmindedly left his mixture of self-made soda pop out on the porch, where it froze overnight, with the stirring stick still in it)? Other interesting candidates- the synthetic dye Mauve (created in 1856 by 18 year old chemist William Perkin, as a byproduct of a failed experiment to research a cure for malaria) and Cornflakes (in the 1890's, Will K. Kellogg accidentally left some corn bread dough sitting out for several hours, and upon finding the flaky dough, he decided to bake it anyway). Not immensely important (no more so than potato chips/ crisps anyway), but still, potentially worthy of being divergences in an ATL.
i'm mainly considering stuff that would probably have larger effects on the world. honestly, i can't imagine how much the lack of ice cream cones would affect the world from then on, whereas penicillin, for instance, has its wide-ranging medicinal properties.
Does the fact that Columbus was looking for Asia, rather than for a new continent, count?
that was also on the list of accidental discoveries, but i'm disregarding that one for now
The Olmecs developed their own techniques and processes to cure rubber a few thousand years earlier.
that in and of itself is good for a POD, since Mesoamericans figure into the larger part of my ASB ATL ;)
Play-Doh wasn't an accident, a kindergarten teacher noticed that their wall-paper cleaner, which was cheap due to fireplaces being replaced with furnaces, was mold able and brought a bucket of it to class to be played with. She sent a letter to the company and they colored it and everything.
strike that one from the list, then ;)
 
i'm mainly considering stuff that would probably have larger effects on the world. honestly, i can't imagine how much the lack of ice cream cones would affect the world from then on, whereas penicillin, for instance, has its wide-ranging medicinal properties.

I don't know, ice cream cones can contribute to diabetes. Just imagine how many people might have lived longer without snorkeling down a few of them.
 
I don't know, ice cream cones can contribute to diabetes. Just imagine how many people might have lived longer without snorkeling down a few of them.

I can't think of any great contributors to society that had diabetes.
Also, a few ice cream cones won't make much difference as to diabetes.
 
Play-Doh wasn't an accident, a kindergarten teacher noticed that their wall-paper cleaner, which was cheap due to fireplaces being replaced with furnaces, was mold able and brought a bucket of it to class to be played with. She sent a letter to the company and they colored it and everything.

Wait. My "Play-Doh" nickname for the archival cleaning substance Absorene turns out to be retroactively true? :eek::D
 
Well, if he hadn't died so young, he might've revolutionized medicine. As it is, he instead wound up dying of malaria at the age of 29.

The thing is, he might very well not have. Discovering something and recognising its most salient useful property are two different things, and he really had no reason to sniff the stuff till he passed out (or to imagine that having passed out, he would be impervious to pain, I mean, it's not exactly intuitive).
 
Point is, when there's more than a thousand years of research invested in something, you can't really claim it was an accidental discovery, any more so than the development of biological, chemical and nuclear weapons (with all of these fields of research also initially conducted with the intention of reducing human mortality instead).

That is an interesting interpretation of how alchemists worked, Chinese alchemists even more so.

It took the Chinese several centuries before they figured out that half the ingredients and procedures (realgar, et cetera) used were redundant, to call that "research" in the modern sense isn't correct.

Though I love the first application of gunpowder - use bamboo tube, fill it with densely packed blackpowder mixed with tar, sulfur and other horrible things, put it on a stick and voíla, a flame thrower to use against those neatly arranged enemy shield-walls.

IIRC military screwing with mustard gas and acidentally exposing civilians to it caused scientists to realize that the substances in question tended to kill fast-dividing cells quicker, leading to chemotherapy. I vaguely remember something about this happening in Italy with mustard gas stored just-in-case Hitler would resort to CW's.
 
The very best example (along with penicillin, one of the few which is both very random and very important) is the discovery of radioactivity by Henri Becquerel.
 
While blood transfusion was not invented by accident, it would be interesting if Native Americans figured this out. IOTL 17th century Europeans experimented with blood transfusion in animals and humans until it was banned by the church. The prohibition delayed further research for 150 years.

Blood was widely known as an essence of life, I suspect the reason people didn't figure out transfusion earlier was the different blood types. Native Americans OTOH were pretty much all type O. This would have made success with unintentional experimentation much more likely. Considering the obsession with blood people like the Aztecs had, the Spaniards could encounter this practice in the New World as part of their religious ritual or perhaps "blood doping" to boost warrior performance in battle - leading to earlier experimentation in Europe.
 
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