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So often in science, breakthroughs arrive when scientists are looking for one thing but stumble upon something unexpected. The key is to be open to alternative possibilities: fortune favours the prepared mind, as Louis Pasteur once noted. Here鈥檚 a whirlwind tour of lucky breaks, from the cold depths of space to the heat of the bedroom.

Radio astronomy

In the 1930s, an engineer at Bell Labs in the US called Karl Jansky was investigating interference in transatlantic radio transmissions. He discovered that the static was coming from a fixed direction in the sky: radio waves from space! It was a clear case of serendipity in action, and the birth of radio astronomy.

Pulsars

It was good that Jansky got the ball rolling, because 50 years ago this month, 23-year-old Jocelyn Bell at the University of Cambridge was using a radio telescope array that she had helped build to look for signals from quasars. But wouldn鈥檛 you know it, she detected a signal from the first pulsar instead. She dubbed the signal LGM-1, for little green men, as a joke. It turned out to be a massive, spinning neutron star, sweeping a powerful beam of radio waves across the sky 鈥� not unlike a lighthouse in space. She recalled the experience in this 快猫短视频 exclusive.

Microwave ovens

From radio waves, we slide up the electromagnetic spectrum into microwaves. In 1945, an engineer called Percy Spencer at US firm Raytheon was working with a radar machine when he noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket was melting unnaturally fast. Realising it must be connected with the microwave radio signals from the radar, he began experimenting with food and an electromagnetic generator inside a metal cage. A few years later, Raytheon produced the first commercial microwave oven.

Incidentally, back in the 1950s, James Lovelock, who went on to develop the Gaia hypothesis, was using a in an attempt to bring 鈥渇rozen鈥� hamsters back to life.

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X-rays

And from microwaves, up to X-rays. In 1895, physicist Wilhelm R枚ntgen discovered that certain electromagnetic rays could form images on fluorescent plates, and later that they could pass through flesh more readily than through bone. It remains one of the biggest advances in medical history.

Here鈥檚 our amazing gallery showing some of the things X-rays can do, from revealing the skeleton of a mummified pet preserved from ancient Egypt, to showing the locations of bullets inside a human body.

The dangers of exposure to X-rays weren鈥檛 understood for decades. When it was discovered that X-rays could make hair fall out, painless X-ray 鈥渢reatments鈥� were provided to people with excess hair and as a beauty treatment to women who wanted to remove facial hair. The consequences of this radiation exposure were disastrous.

Penicillin

Another medical breakthrough and the poster child of scientific serendipity, penicillin鈥檚 discovery by Alexander Fleming, is well known. But you may not know the story of how sibling heroes from the dawn of antibiotics, Leonard and Dora Colebrook, pioneered the use of Prontosil red, an antibiotic that became widely available before penicillin. The Colebrooks prevented large numbers of women from dying of sepsis in maternity wards, and the antibiotic was developed just in time to save countless lives in the second world war.

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Viagra

If antibiotics were a critical leap in medicine, the little blue pill offered an advance of a different kind. Viagra, formerly known as UK92-480, was discovered by accident in 1992 during clinical trials of a drug treatment for angina. A happy accident for the men enrolled in the trial, it seemed, since a surprising number of them reported an uptick in their sex lives. A very happy accident for Pfizer, too, which soon found its coffers substantially swollen.

Sucralose

Here鈥檚 another sweet result. In 1976, chemist Shashikant Phadnis was asked to test a chlorinated sugar compound being investigated as a possible insecticide. Phadnis misheard, thinking he鈥檇 been asked to taste it 鈥� or so the story goes 鈥� and found it to be super sweet. Hello, artificial sweetener sucralose (marketed as Splenda, among other names).

Teflon

In 1938, Roy Plunkett of chemical firm DuPont, in New Jersey, was developing a new refrigerant using tetrafluoroethylene. During his work, he found a white, waxy powder in a tank holding the gas. It turned out to be a polymer, polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE). Teflon, as it is better known, has since been used to create low-friction surfaces on everything from spacesuits to frying pans.

Almost two decades ago, a superhard 鈥渃eramic alloy鈥� called BAM, which is slicker than Teflon, was also created by accident.