In the 19th century, there was a new kind of waste floating around.
Turning accident into serendipity.
Before others figured out you could paved roads with this stuff, it was pretty much useless. Then the head of London’s Royal College of Chemistry had an idea, August Wilhelm von Hofmann noticed that some of the stuff in coal tar was similar to the stuff in known medicines. If you got the chemistry right, he thought, the world would have cheap, easy cures for disease. So in 1856, he assigned 18-year-old William Perkin to team coal tar. Perkin’s job was to try to turn the gunk into quinine. Quinine was used to treat malaria. But the drug had to be extracted from tree bark, and that was time-consuming and really annoying.
That’s funny.
Other times, discovery came out of pure desperation from a seemingly dead end experiment.
