51 Accidental Inventions That Changed America | History for Sleep

Now on Spotify, listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/033EGYA... Support the channel and keep the archives open: https://buymeacoffee.com/sleepyameric... The story of American invention usually gets told as a parade of geniuses with a plan. The reality is messier. Most of the objects that built the modern world started as mistakes, failures, and accidents that someone refused to throw away. In this video we walk through fifty-one of them. From a moldy cantaloupe bought in a Peoria grocery store in 1943 that became the basis for all wartime penicillin and an estimated 200 million lives saved, to the melted chocolate bar in Percy Spencer's pocket that turned a Raytheon radar test into the microwave oven, to the wrong resistor Wilson Greatbatch grabbed by mistake and built into the first implantable pacemaker. You will hear how George de Mestral turned the burrs stuck to his dog into Velcro, how a weak adhesive nobody wanted became the Post-it Note, how a failed gun-sight plastic became Super Glue that sealed wounds in Vietnam, and how a failed heart drug became Viagra. Every one was a failure first. Resources: National Inventors Hall of Fame, invent.org Smithsonian Institution, si.edu Science History Institute, sciencehistory.org Encyclopaedia Britannica, britannica.com