10 Total Accidents That Changed the Course of History

We like to think of history’s monumental achievements as being purposeful things completed by driven, hard-working, and focused leaders. That’s the fallacy of history, at least… the idea that everything great was designed by some grand plan put together by somebody super-motivated to change the world. Of course, that does happen every now and then. People do create amazing (and awful) things through the sheer power of will. But just as often, the world’s most important things are made or discovered by complete accident.

We’re going to take a look at some of those accidents in this list. What follows is a deep dive into ten total accidents that completely changed the course of history. From penicillin to Velcro to John F.Kennedy’s presidency, these ten things would have never been invented, discovered, created, or perfected had somebody not made a total mistake leading to the “light bulb” moment. So the next time you mess up, just think: Maybe something great will come out of it!

Related: 10 Eyewitness Accounts of History

10 The Mistake of the Millennium

Scottish doctor Alexander Fleming was in a huge rush to get out of the lab and go on vacation in the summer of 1928. He was in such a hurry, in fact, that he left a dirty stack of petri dishes in his lab’s sink. Oh, and the dishes were smeared with something especially gross: staphylococcus, the pesky bacteria that cause everything from sore throats to food poisoning.

Well, he was off on holiday for a few weeks. And then he returned… to an enlightenment. See, something interesting had happened to the dirty dishes coated in bacteria: they were covered in mold! And the area around it was clear, as if it had protected things by this unseen, unknown barrier. Fleming looked a little bit closer and realized that the mold was a rare type known as Penicillium notatum. And not only that, but it had secreted a compound that effectively killed several strains of the bacteria. Completely by accident, Dr. Fleming had discovered penicillin. Quite a mistake, right?

But that’s only half the story! Fleming promptly published his findings and… nobody noticed. Not for a decade. Not until an Australian pathologist named Howard Walter Florey discovered Fleming’s paper while leafing through old medical journals. Florey started to experiment a bit, and by 1941,he’d come up with enough penicillin to test it out on human patients. When the duo later shared a Nobel Prize, Fleming commented: “I certainly didn’t plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world’s first antibiotic, but I suppose that was exactly what I did.”^[1]

9 Ping, Forrest, Ping!

In 1971, during the World Table Tennis Championships in Japan, American team member Glenn Cowan was busy practicing his table tennis skills. And then, it hit him: He was suddenly the only American in the room! He’d missed the team bus back to the hotel. Quite an embarrassing mistake. And one that could have left him hung out to dry with no way home! Undaunted, he decided to hop on the Chinese bus and take it back. Oops!

But what happened next was incredible: the U.S. and China had broken off diplomatic relations in 1949, and pretty much all Chinese and American people viewed each other with distrust. But now Cowan, and now Zhuang Zedong, the Chinese table tennis team’s captain. The two of them began speaking through an interpreter. They even exchanged T-shirts with each other! That unexpected goodwill exchange led Chinese leader Mao Zedong to invite the entire U.S. table tennis team to visit China. And the next year, American President Richard Nixon made a groundbreaking and historic visit to Beijing, himself. And it all started by missing a bus!^[2]

8 Thankful For Fog

One of the greatest mistakes in history had to do with fog… and the American Revolution. In August 1776, the British had pushed George Washington and the Continental Army all the way to the western edge of Long Island, New York. There, the American forces were trapped. And it looked like things were over for the biggest and strongest military outfit the Americans had at the time. And then the fog descended.

After a heavy rain hit the region, the British paused their plans to finish off the Americans. What followed the rain was a thick, soupy fog. Washington saw his opportunity, and during the fog, he secreted away his entire army. They crossed the water in near-total silence under the cover of fog and snuck away from the looming British forces. When the fog finally lifted, the British were shocked to find that the Americans had vanished.

Had it not been for the fog, the British would have completely overrun and decimated the Americans. And that group of Americans was the most important and powerful of all the insurgent military groups. So, that would have effectively lost the Revolution for the Americans. But the happy mistake of a thick fog made it so that the Americans lived to fight (and win!) another day.^[3]

7 If It Doesn’t Fit…

So many people thought O.J. Simpson was going to be found guilty of murdering his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a Los Angeles waiter, Ron Goldman. And then he was asked to try on the glove. One of the trial of the century’s most memorable moments came when assistant prosecutor Christopher Darden asked O.J. to try on the gloves found at the murder scene in court, in front of the jury. O.J. attempted to put the gloves on… and they didn’t fit. He couldn’t get them comfortably onto his hands.

Now, was O.J. lying? Or were the gloves really too small for his hands? Either way, the mistake here was that the assistant prosecutor put one of the trial’s most important pieces of evidence (literally) in the defendant’s hands. And it backfired spectacularly for the prosecution. O.J. was acquitted after his legal team popularized the refrain, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” Looking back, many people believe that Darden’s blunder to have O.J. try on the gloves found at the murder scene was what led the jury to refuse to convict.^[4]

6 Don’t Quit!

Believe it or not, Stephen King and Dr. Seuss have more in common than you might think. Not only are they two of the most successful authors in American history, but they also very narrowly escaped being totally forgotten by history.

Take Dr. Seuss, for one. The author (whose real name was Theodor Geisel) was working as an advertising illustrator in the mid-1930s when he sent a manuscript for a children’s book to a whopping 27 publishers. Every last one of them rejected it. He was about to give up entirely, then, when he bumped into an old college roommate who just so happened to be a children’s book editor. The old pal asked Geisel to send along his manuscript… and they published it! The book came out in 1937 and was an instant icon with a whimsical title And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. Talk about a happy mistake, bumping into an old pal!

As for Stephen King, he had a similar experience being rejected by anybody and everybody that could possibly reject him. But he was actually his own worst critic. See, he started writing a book about a bullied teenage girl who figures out she has amazing mental powers. But he hated the story so much that he chucked the manuscript after only writing three pages. Luckily, it was his wife who found the wasted manuscript in the trash before the garbage trucks came. She pulled it out, read it, and encouraged her husband to get back at it and finish the story. What came out of it was the iconic novel Carrie. It went on to sell more than a million copies in its first year in print. Listen to your wife, Stephen!^[5]

5 A Film for the Ages

If it weren’t for a clerical oversight, we might never have seen It’s a Wonderful Life. Frank Capra’s 1946 film was a financial disaster. It didn’t come close to earning back its $2.3 million budget. Its losses were so bad, in fact, that its production company, Liberty Films, was put out of business. But over the next few decades, the film itself became a true American classic.

How? Well, carelessness—that’s how!

After Liberty Films shut down, nobody thought to monitor the movie’s copyright. It ended up lapsing in 1974. And that meant television stations were then free to broadcast the film without paying any royalties. And, well, that’s exactly what they did. Right up until 1990, when a Supreme Court ruling changed copyright rules, American television stations played It’s a Wonderful Life like crazy. Inevitably, viewers across multiple generations fell in love with the movie. And now, it’s truly an American classic. But had it not been for a clerk forgetting to renew its copyright, that never would have happened!^[6]

4 Shawshank Era

Take It’s a Wonderful Life in the middle of the 20th century, and re-hash it for the modern age with The Shawshank Redemption. The prison movie starring Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins was not a big success at the box office. In fact, it was completely forgotten by most moviegoers. And then, TNT picked it up. The family of networks across the Turner Broadcasting company started showing The Shawshank Redemption again and again and again through the early 2000s.

Inevitably, fans picked up on it just like they had a few decades earlier with It’s a Wonderful Life. Television viewers were immediately drawn to the stunning, slowly unfolding portrayal of prison life in rural Maine and the fact that Robbins’s character was in jail for something he didn’t do. That it all ended with the perfect escape and an emotionally satisfying conclusion, with the awful prison warden was even better. But had it not been for the Turner Broadcasting family deciding to show Shawshan pretty much every waking hour (or at least that’s what it felt like), nobody would have picked up on it like they did.^[7]

3 A Presidency-Saving Coconut

John F. Kennedy would have never been president if a coconut hadn’t saved his life twenty years before. The night was August 2, 1943, and Kennedy was a 26-year-old Navy lieutenant in a PT boat. They were patrolling the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific Ocean when a Japanese destroyer sliced through the fog unexpectedly and cut the boat in half. Two men were killed; meanwhile, Kennedy and ten other survivors were left to huddle around the wreck. But eventually, they realized that they had to swim to a nearby island. And for the next five hours, the men swam through shark-infested waters to Plum Pudding Island, where they started eating coconuts to survive.

But here’s where things get weird: after several days, the men were able to flag down two native Solomon Islanders who were passing by in a canoe. The men agreed to take the following passage to American forces on another island: “NAURO ISL … COMMANDER … NATIVE KNOWS POS’IT … HE CAN PILOT … 11 ALIVE … NEED SMALL BOAT … KENNEDY.” Oh, and we forgot one thing: the message itself was carved into a coconut. Seriously.

The Solomon Islanders made good on their promise and delivered the message to the Allied forces. Days later, Kennedy and his men were rescued. And two decades later, the U.S. got a president they otherwise never would have had were it not for an impromptu message scrawled into the most improbable of places… a coconut.^[8]

2 Thanks, Mom!

It was a long road for women to finally secure the right to vote in the U.S.. It all hinged on the most unexpected moment: a note from mom that convinced an otherwise undecided politician to vote in favor of the suffragettes. So, after the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, was passed by Congress in 1919, it needed to be ratified by at least 36 states to become law. A year later, the amendment was just one state from victory. And that state, as it turned out, was Tennessee. There was just one problem: Tennessee’s state legislature at the time was split 48-48 between Democrats and Republicans. And nobody knew how things were going to go when it came time for the state to decide on whether women should be allowed to vote.

Well, the youngest representative in the state was a 24-year-old man named Harry Burn. He was expected to vote no and go against the right for women to vote. He even wore a red rose in his lapel on the day of the vote—the universal symbol of those seeking to vote against the amendment. There was just one thing holding him up: his momma, an old Tennessee woman named Phoebe”Miss Feb” Burn.

On the morning of the impactful vote, Phoebe wrote a note to her son. In it, she implored him to”be a good boy” and support the measure. Harry must have thought twice (or more!) about that note because he tucked it into his jacket pocket on the day of the vote. And when it came time to call the roll, he bellowed out “aye.” The vote shocked Tennessee… and the world. Later, he said this about it: “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.” Thank goodness Phoebe wrote that note!^[9]

1 Thanks, Dog!

If it hadn’t been for a dog, the world never would have had Velcro. One day in the middle of the 1950s, Swiss engineer George de Mestral was hiking in the mountains with his dog. He got home that afternoon and was frustrated to find that his dog’s coat was nearly completely covered with spiky burs. And his pants were, too! Even worse, George quickly realized that he couldn’t just sweep the burs off in short order. He had to carefully pick every single one out of his poor dog’s coat. That took time and agony. And immediately, he was frustrated. But just as quickly, the inventor’s lightbulb went off in his brain.

Once he finally cleared all the burs off his poor pup, George got to work. He put the burs under a microscope and saw that they had tiny “hooks” at the ends of their bristles that made them attach to pretty much anything. He was fascinated by how effectively they stuck to stuff and couldn’t easily be pulled away. And he wanted something similar for himself, especially since metal zippers tended to freeze in the Swiss winters and become useless. So, he started experimenting with materials that could hook easily, just like those burs. A few years later, voila! With his dog to thank, George invented Velcro. The rest is history.^[10]