Happy Accidents

WEB-EXCLUSIVE: We tend to avoid accidents, but some have improved our health and joy, and even removed our frown lines.

Photo By Leonard Ortiz/The Orange County Register

Ever notice how life doesn’t always go as planned? You wake up on New Year’s Day and vow to hit the gym seven days a week, read the complete works of Dostoevsky and eat more raw foods than a rabbit. But by February, you’re on the couch with a baker’s dozen of dad’s donut holes watching “Monk” reruns. You enter the dealership dedicated to a fuel-efficient commuter car and roll out in an Escalade more pimped out than P. Diddy at the Grammys. I start out plotting to write the most poetic, awe-inspiring prose you’ve ever read and end up with this sentence right here.

The thing is, not all plans that go awry end up in sad disaster. Some result in happy accidents – accidents that give us longer eyelashes, tastier goodies, even office products! Here are 20 of those marvelous mishaps that make our lives in the OC a little happier.

BOTOX
There’s nothing that says OC more than Botox. But how about blood sausage poison? Yeah, not so much. But that’s what the stuff that most moms inject into their faces started out as, specifically botulinum, a toxin formed from bad meat. It was nothing to mess with, so naturally the U.S. military messed with it, developing what was considered the deadliest biological weapon of the time from the stuff.

Not ones to let the military have all the fun, scientists got into the act, only instead of trying to indiscriminately kill foreigners, they treated things such as crossed eyes; facial, neck and shoulder spasms; excessive sweating; writer’s cramp; and even cerebral palsy in children. Most of these were discovered after Irvine’s mega-health care company Allergan acquired the rights to the drug and changed its name to Botox. Botox churned out a nice, steady profit and helped a lot of people until 1992, when a Canadian ophthalmologist Dr. Jean Carruthers, noticed a curious side effect in her blepharospasm patients: They were losing their frown lines. Suddenly, they looked as happy as they were. Carruthers published a study in a medical journal and dermatologists from Hollywood to… well, Hollywood, suddenly had such a hit on their hands that by 1997, the country’s supply of Botox dried up.

With new batches approved by the F.D.A. for cosmetic use in 2002, Allergan launched a multi-million dollar campaign to boost sales. It paid off. By 2003, sales had reached nearly $564 million, making Botox one of the most successful pharmaceutical brand launches in the company’s 53-year history. By 2006, sales hit the billion-dollar mark. Not bad for sausage poison.

LATISSE
And what does every face filled with sausage poison need? A lash-lengthening mistake, of course. And that’s what Allergan got with Latisse, hitting cosmetic gold again with its drug that was developed to treat glaucoma and ocular hypertension. That drug is Lumigan, and is a success in its own right. During its clinical development, however, eyelash growth was reported. And this time, Allergan wasted no time in pursuing the cosmetic benefits, applying to the F.D.A. for approval to market its patented formula using the active ingredient bimatoprost to grow eyelashes longer, fuller and darker. In December of 2008, Latisse gained that approval. And despite the low, but present, risk of side effects ranging from the temporary growth of hair in areas accidentally touched with the liquid formula to permanent iris darkening, all indications point toward Latisse enjoying a very lush future, especially since, like Botox injections, the effects are temporary. This means long lash lovers must spend up to $120 per month to keep their habit going. Not including mascara.

PENICILLIN
When’s the last time you surfed River Jetties? Well, you can thank forgetfulness and mold for the insurance penicillin provides against the tons of urban runoff you’re shredding through. In 1928, bacteriologist Alexander Fleming left a plate of staphylococci near an open window. The next day he noticed mold on the sample, but instead of throwing it away, he examined it and discovered that the mold was dissolving the deadly staphylococci. Soon, other researchers developed penicillin from Fleming’s mold, revolutionizing bacterial infection remedies.

Photo By Eric Wolfe/The Orange County Register

ICE CREAM CONES
The Peninsula’s tourist industry owes a lot to the 1904 World’s Fair and the stifling Missouri heat. It was there that Syrian immigrant Ernest A. Hamwi was selling a thin Persian waffle treat called zalabia. Actually, it’s more accurate to say, he wasn’t selling them – they weren’t too popular. The stall next door, however, was selling so much ice cream that they ran out of dishes. Hamwi decided to roll his zalabia waffles into a cone shape and plop a scoop of ice cream on top. Soon after, he formed the Cornucopia Waffle Company and the rest is mouth-watering history.

MICROWAVE OVENS
Life in the OC is more frantic than Disneyland’s Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. And if it weren’t for one World War II-era radar scientist, we might all actually use those custom 12-top stoves in our gourmet kitchen. In 1945, self-taught American engineer Percy Spencer was making magnetrons for radar sets, which were vital for the war effort. One day, however, he noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Being fairly smart – and not too fried – Spencer put two and two together and started experimenting with other foods. He popped some popcorn and accidently exploded an egg. Then, wisely, he decided to build a box to contain the microwaves. In 1947, the first microwave oven, the Radarange, was built. It was six feet tall, weighed 750 pounds and cost approximately $5,000. Things have improved slightly, and today about 90% of households have a microwave oven.

Photo By Steve Zylius/The Orange County Register

CHAMPAGNE
With so many perfect wedding spots along the coast, where would we be without this bubbly? But the bubbles actually represent a defeat, not a triumph. In the late 1600s, the now-famous Benedictine monk Dom Perignon worked tirelessly for years to get the bubbles out of his monastery’s white wines. Not only were the bubbles considered a sign of poor winemaking, they were notorious for spontaneously exploding the bottles, which sometimes had a chain reaction and injured cellar workers. The problem became so bad that many wore protective iron masks and some labeled the stuff as “The Devil’s Wine.” But try as he might, Perignon could not exorcize the bubbly. But when the sparkling wine became a hit with the aristocracy, its evil connotation burst and a new rage began.

POST-IT NOTES
Believe it or not, this ubiquitous and oh-so-pedestrian office product actually had a somewhat religious beginning. It also represented a total failure. In 1970, 3M employee Spencer Silver was working hard to invent a new, super strong adhesive. Instead he came up with an adhesive that was even weaker than 3M’s current one – a total failure – and was shelved. Four years later, Silver’s co-worker Arthur Fry was singing in his church choir but was having trouble keeping his place in his hymnal due to his bookmarks falling out. He remembered Silver’s failed glue, coated his markers with the stuff and was delighted to find that while it kept his bookmarks in place, it didn’t stay on the pages when he removed them. Voila, one of the most popular office products was christened.

SANDWICHES
Next time you pack the beach cooler with a load of turkey on wheats, say a little thank you to an English gambling addict, John Montagu, better known as the Earl of Sandwich. Though bread had been eaten with other food in the Middle East since the end of the Stone Age, and later used as a wrap, sandwiching food between slices didn’t become popular until the mid-1700s. It was then that Montagu, an obsessive gambler, didn’t want to leave the gaming table to feed his hunger. He ordered his servants to bring him meat between two pieces of bread so he could hold it in one hand while holding his cards in the other. It worked well, and suddenly others were asking for “the same as Sandwich.” From there, it was merely a case of editing; the “sandwich” was born.

VULCANIZED RUBBER
What is it, you ask? Everything, pretty much, from your shoe soles to your low-pro car tires to the Mighty Ducks’ hockey pucks. And yeah, a total mishap. Rubber, of course, has been used for centuries for everything from balls to shoes, but it melted to goo under the sun and froze to brittle in the cold (though the sap from trees wasn’t called rubber until 1770 when an English scientist discovered the stuff could be used to “rub” out his mistakes). All that changed in 1839, however, when Charles Goodyear dropped a blob of his new rubber-sulphur mixture on a hot kitchen stove and noticed that it had not melted but instead had become firm and flexible. He stuck it outside in the New England cold for the night and in the morning it was the same. Goodyear named the “vulcanization” process after the Roman god of fire and founded one of the world’s biggest industries.

TEA BAGS
Convenient, ubiquitous, not planned. In 1904, New York coffee and tea merchant Thomas Sullivan decided that shipping samples of his tea would be easier and cheaper in small hand-sewed silk muslin bags rather than tins. He was more right than he could ever imagine, as he soon had a record number of orders. But they were not for the tea only, which he assumed people would remove from the bags before brewing. People, it seemed, were both lazier and more visionary than Sullivan thought: The orders were for the “tea in bags” he sent because they made brewing so convenient.

PONG
What would your kids do without video games? More important, what would your “me time” do without your kids’ computer games? Thank Pong, one of the simplest (and most addicting) games ever invented, and one that started out as a test. In 1972, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell hired an electrical engineer named Allan Alcorn. But since Alcorn had no experience with video games, of which there were only a handful, he gave Alcorn a warm-up exercise to create a simple game with a moving dot and paddles. Alcorn came up with Pong, which Bushnell decided was too addictive to remain merely a test. He marketed it and by 1975, it had become the most popular game of the holiday season and had started the home video gaming revolution.

SCOTCHGARD
Irvine’s Allergan isn’t the only double winner in the area of unintended inventions. 3M scored another, too, with Scotchgard. Researcher Patsy Sherman was working with fluorochemicals to use in aircraft and spilled some on her shoe. She soon found it was almost impossible to remove, so she left it. Over the next several weeks, Sherman discovered that though the rest of her shoe had been stained from wear, the spot with the fluorochemical solution had stayed clean. By 1956, 3M was marketing Scotchgard. However, in 2009, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), a key ingredient in Scotchgard’s original chemical formula was labeled a persistent organic pollutant by the Stockholm Convention. Fortunately, 3M replaced it in the Scotchgard formula in 2003, thanks to USEPA pressure.

DONUTS
Dads owe a debt of gratitude to a hungry 19th-century captain and his ship’s spoked wheel. Now sailors have been known to hold their own against fishermen when it comes to telling a tall tale, but legend has it that back in the mid-1800s, sailor Hansen Gregory was fighting at the helm of a lime-trader against a vicious storm while eating a fried cake. The storm became so violent that he needed both hands, so he shoved his cake onto one of the wheel’s spokes, thereby punching out the center. Later, he was pleased to discover that his rash act had removed his least favorite part of the cake – the greasy middle – and had become the template for all donuts to come. He passed the advice on once he returned to land and donuts soon hit the big time.

SAFETY GLASS
Panoramic ocean views and indoor-outdoor living means big sliding glass doors, and thanks to a clumsy Frenchman, they’re a bit safer. In 1903, French chemist Edouard Benedictus knocked a glass flask onto the floor where it shattered, but surprisingly, all the pieces stayed together. Curious, Benedictus discovered that a lab assistant had used the flask to hold a liquid plastic known as cellulose nitrate, which had evaporated but left a thin film. But Benedictus wasn’t sure what he had until he read a newspaper article that spoke of the huge number of injuries and deaths caused by shattering windshields during car accidents. The auto industry at the time, however, rejected Benedictus’ plan for safety glass. That is, until years later, after safety glass had proven itself on the battlefields of World War I in soldiers’ gas masks. Car accidents haven’t been the same since.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES
What would grandmas do without this delicious mistake? In 1930, Ruth Wakefield, who ran the Toll House Inn on a toll road in Massachusetts, ran out of baker’s chocolate for her chocolate cookies. With no time to get more, she broke some semi-sweetened chocolate into bits and added them to her dough, expecting them to melt in the oven and create chocolate cookies. To her dismay, however, the bits didn’t melt entirely and she ended up with the first chocolate chip cookies. They were a hit and became known as Toll House cookies, and Wakefield sold her recipe to Nestle for a lifetime supply of chocolate chips. Today, they’re the most popular cookie in America.

LEOTARDS
There’s a reason all the OCPAC ballerinas look like they’re wearing underwear. Nelson Hower, a bareback rider in a traveling show in 1928, had a problem during one performance: His costume hadn’t come back from the cleaners. But as the old saying goes, the show must go on, so he performed wearing his long underwear. Turns out, it was kind of comfortable – and catchy – and soon, many other performers copied his style. It wasn’t until the late 1800s, however, that the leotard got its name, when French wire-walker and trapeze artist – and the man for whom the song “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” was written – performed in a one-piece, tight-fitting outfit. Thanks to his fame, that was no mistake.

POTATO CHIPS
Saratoga Springs chef George Crum had a very high-maintenance customer in 1853: allegedly, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Seems no matter what Crum did, Vanderbilt always sent his order of fried potatoes back for being too thick and mushy. So Crum decided to fix him once and for all by cutting potatoes so thin that they would defy any fork. He went two further by frying them until they curled and heavily salting them. To his utter disappointment, Vanderbilt not only didn’t choke on them, but loved the dish. Word spread and soon “Saratoga Chips” were the most popular thing on the menu. People, it seemed, couldn’t eat just one.

SUPER GLUE
Like Botox and Latisse, Super Glue, the stuff most famous for sticking a man in a helmet to a skyscraper’s beam, started its life as a fortunate side effect of something designed for a completely different use. In 1942, Kodak Laboratory scientists Dr. Harry Coover and Fred Joyner made the chemical cyanoacrylates, hoping for a crystal-clear plastic for gun sights. Instead, it stuck their lab equipment together with unprecedented strength. Within a few years Kodak marketed it as the first super glue and no man in a hard hat has been safe since.

PIGGY BANKS
What’s in a name? A lot of money. In the Middle Ages, instead of expensive metals, people used a clay called pygg for dishes and kitchen pots. The pots in turn were often used by housewives to save money and became known as pygg banks. Flash forward a few hundred years and pygg is not so commonly known. So, in 19th-century England, when potters received orders for “piggy banks,” they naturally mistook it to mean a money pot shaped like a pig. But the mistake was loved by customers, especially kids, and the piggy bank soon raked in the cash.

POPSICLES
Kids, next time you create a mess on the porch, remind your parents that the little mishap could mean a new Ferrari for pops. Then tell the story of 11-year-old Frank Epperson of San Francisco, who left a batch of soda powder and water, with the stirring stick still in it, on the porch. Thanks to a record low temperature that night, the next day little Frank had a mold of frozen soda water on a stick. He named it the Epsicle. It wasn’t until 1923, however, that Epperson introduced his Epsicle in seven different flavors at Neptune Beach, an amusement park in Alameda. They caught on and a business started. And after his children kept calling them Popsicles, he changed the name, and in 1925, he sold the rights to the treat to New York’s Joe Lowe Company.