Safety Glass
Clumsy mistakes lead to disasters - and to inventions. But for a clumsy mistake, safety glass would have never been invented.
In 1903, a French scientist, Edouard Benedictus, was working in his laboratory. Accidentally, he knocked off a flask containing celluloid. The flask crashed on the hard floor, but - and this is what surprised Benedictus - the glass pieces did not fly off. The flask was, of course, broken, but it retained its shape. Sensing that he had discovered something important, Benedictus experimented further, and finally perfected a process of sealing celluloid between two sheets of glass.
Benedictus had to wait for some years, before his invention found users. It was in 1914, when automobile manufacturers started equipping cars with windshields made of safety glass.
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