Who says mistakes are always a bad thing? If not for mix-ups and failed experiments, we wouldn’t have some of our favorite foods, toys, and other everyday items! Sometimes, the creative process just doesn’t go the way you planned.
These ingenious creators looked at their unexpected results, saw a chance to innovate, and took it to a new level! Read on to discover some seriously surprising origin stories, courtesy of MUSE Magazine!
Delicious Mistakes
Chances are, you’ve probably eaten all of these foods at some point in your life. Did you know how they were created?
Popsicles
In 1905, 11-year-old Frank Epperson decided to make himself a drink. He mixed some sugary soda powder into water but absentmindedly let it outside on the porch—with the wooden stirring stick still in it! When temperatures dropped overnight, the mixture froze. Voila! A popsicle was born! (Fun fact: Epperson originally called his creation “Epsicles!” It just doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?)
Chocolate Chip Cookies
While working at the Toll House Inn restaurant in 1930, Ruth Graves Wakefield ran out of baker’s chocolate. She’d been planning to melt it into the dough for her chocolate cookies. When she chopped up a block of semi-sweet chocolate and added it instead, the pieces stayed intact in the dough instead of melting. Yum! A new classic was born! To this day, the name “Toll House” is synonymous with chocolate chips, not to mention what is likely the most popular cookies in the USA.
Potato Chips
It all started with a complaint at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs. Legend has it that after a diner sent back his fries (“not thin and crispy enough!”), chef George Crum passive-aggressively prepared the thinnest, crispiest potatoes possible. He sliced potatoes nearly paper thin and deep-fried them for an aggressive crunch. Surprise! The customer loved them. Now, sources on this story vary, and it’s entirely possible things didn’t quite happen this way. Still, the “mistake” narrative has caught on and helped made Crum’s restaurant a big success!
Ice Cream Cones
When an ice cream vendor at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair ran out of bowls, neighboring vendor Ernest A. Hamwi had the perfect solution. He offered up some of his thin, waffle-like pastries called zalabia as edible substitutes. Rolled into a cone shape, they became the perfect way for fairgoers to eat ice cream while walking around and seeing the sighs. As you can likely guess, they were a hit!
Tofu
Okay, maybe this one doesn’t sound as exciting as popsicles or chocolate chip cookies, but hear us out. Tofu is one of the most versatile foods in the entire world and an extremely popular plant-based source of protein. But how exactly did tofu come to be? About 2,000 years ago in China, a cook added seaweed to soy milk, which made it accidentally curdle. Similarly to the process for making cheese, this made the soy milk more transportable and helped it stay good for longer. No wonder it’s stood the test of time!
Cheese Puffs
You’ll never guess where cheese puffs got their start. It wasn’t a restaurant or a fair or anywhere that makes food for humans at all. Our favorite crunchy snack began at a factory producing feed for livestock. If you’re picturing cows chowing down on cheese puffs, it’s not that simple. The Flakall Company of Wisconsin was hard at work pouring cornmeal into an anti-flaking machine. To keep the machine running, workers moistened it to prevent clogs. Instead, the wet, hot cornmeal came out in crunchy little ribbons. Instead of trashing them, employee Edward Wilson saw snack potential. In his kitchen at home, he added oil and flavorings and created the first cheese puffs!
Accidental Fun
Can you believe that several popular toys were created by accident? Here are just a few ways that engineers took mistakes and transformed them into hours of fun for kids and adults!
Slinky
How do you secure equipment on ships making ocean voyages? For the most fragile items, ropes and chains can deal more damage than protection. In 1943, an engineer named Richard James was working on a solution: large springs made of steel wire! Spoiler alert: It didn’t work very well. But when one of the springs fell off of a shelf and “stepped” down on its own, James and his wife, Betty, saw potential in the failed invention. It was Betty who originally came up with the name “Slinky” and ran the company that sold them to delighted households around the world!
Silly Putty
1943 was apparently a big year for silly inventions, and this was the silliest of all. It’s even in the name! When rubber was rationed during World War II, engineers tried to come up with good synthetic substitutes that could be used for boots, tires, rafts, and more essential items. James Wright came up with a substance that had a good bounce to it—but it was also incredibly gooey and stretchy. Not great for boots or tires, but plenty of fun to play with! Initial efforts to market it as a toy didn’t perform very well, but once a marketing consultant Peter C. L. Hodgson packaged it in plastic Easter eggs, it became a hit! Astronauts even took Silly Putty with them to outer space in 1968.
Play-Doh
The substance we now know as Play-Doh didn’t come in many bright colors. It was gray and invented by brothers named Noah and Joseph McVickers in the 1930s as a novel way to clean wallpaper. Call it not-so-silly Putty. It took the ingenuity of their sister-in-law, Kay Zufall, who happened to be a teacher, to realize that it made a great kid-friendly modeling clay. After flopping as a wallpaper cleaner in the 1930s, it became an incredibly successful toy in the 1950s! All it needed was a little color!
Frisbee
The invention of the Frisbee is a perfect example of the joy of open-ended play. Walter Frederick Morrison and his wife Lucille discovered the fun of tossing around a popcorn tin lid one Thanksgiving Day and turned it into a family game. They realized that they could buy cheap cake pans in bulk and turn them into fun beach toys. At the same time, Yale University students had discovered a similar game all on their own—except they were tossing pie pans from the local Frisbie Pie Company all over campus! When executives at Wham-o, who’d been manufacturing plastic versions of the Morrisons’ “flying saucer” toy, heard that people were calling their products “Frisbees,” they decided to officially rebrand the toy. The rest is history.
What was your most fortunate mistake or accidental discovery? Tell us all about it!
