11 Items (Like Chocolate Chip Cookies) That Were Invented By Accident

“Play-dough. It was used to remove dirt/marks off walls, and wound up becoming a popular kids toy.” — DogButtholeFingers

“I love how the video game character Kirby was created and how he became his own series. Originally, Kirby was created to be sort of a ‘test dummy’ that would get a more detailed design later on, but the designers ended up falling in love with him as is and kept him as he was. The franchise reached its 30th anniversary this year and it’s one of Nintendo’s strongest properties to this day.” — KipsyCakes

“Special effects. For a while, it was assumed you had to keep the camera rolling thru a whole scene, also easier to splice the movie together. A director (forgot his name) was filming a bus when his camera jammed, by the time he fixed it, the bus had left and there was a bench right behind it. When they looked at the film during editing, it looked like the bus had magically turned into a bench.” — stealthkoopa

“Chocolate chip cookies! In 1930, Ruth Wakefield made them by accident. While making a batch of chocolate cookies she ran out of baker’s chocolate. She decided to use a slab of semi sweet chocolate, break it into pieces and mix it into the dough, hoping it would melt into the mixture while it baked. But the pieces of chocolate stayed in place.” — SuvenPan

“Post-its. They were looking for a strong glue and produced a weak one, but the secretaries of the inventors pointed out that that it was ideal for making removable notes.” — amerkanische_Frosch

“Bandaging wounds. A French field surgeon had run out of coal to heat up his cauterizing irons and all he had was strips of cloth so he bandaged wounds instead of burning them. The bandaged patients had much better outcomes.” — [deleted]

“Penicillin. Often described as a careless lab technician, Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon examination of the mold, he noticed that the culture prevented the growth of staphylococci.” — hopelesscaribou

“Velveeta cheese was a byproduct that was considered waste. Someone noticed that factory workers were dipping bread into that vat of byproduct during lunchtime. From there, Velveeta was born.” — Drlmichele88

“Artificial sweeteners. It was on their hand and they licked their finger to turn a page in a book or something and noticed it was very sweet. Boom: Artificial sweetener.” — bananamber

“X-Rays. Roentgen was fooling around with cathode ray tubes and decided to put a piece of metal in the path of the electron beam. And got very interesting radiation coming off the metal. The resulting radiation penetrated flesh, but not bone.” — [deleted]

“Tea bags. From what I’ve read, they were created by an American tea importer, who put loose leaf tea in silk pouches and sent them out as samples. The string attached had the name of the tea company at the end. The recipients didn’t know they were supposed to open the pouches and use the tea leaves as usual, and instead used them as we do today. It wasn’t until they started receiving requests for more of the pouches that they realized there was a market for them.” — FlightlessGorilla