They say that “necessity is the mother of invention.” Every day, a new scientific breakthrough occurs or a new product is invented to solve a problem or fulfill a need. Scientists and inventors often spend years researching and refining their discoveries.

However, it is surprising to find out that many common household items were created by mistake during this research process. Some inventors found that a lab mistake could be adapted to a new purpose straightaway. Others were discarded, only to be repurposed many years later.

Most households around the world wouldn’t be without these laboratory mishaps today.

10 Nonstick Cookware

Where would we be without our nonstick cookware? Scraping off the eggs burned onto the bottom of the frying pan and trying to pry muffins out of baking trays, that’s where.

Teflon, or PTFE as it is known in the scientific world, would have to rank as one of the most useful kitchen inventions. However, polytetrafluoroethylene was actually invented by mistake in 1938 when DuPont scientist Roy Plunkett was developing a new CFC refrigerant.

Sawing open a gas canister used in his experiments, he discovered a reaction had occurred between the tetrafluoroethylene gas and the iron shell of the canister. The result was a waxy, repellent substance for which he initially saw no use. Further experiments on the slippery substance eventually saw it used in manufacturing and military equipment.

It wasn’t until 1954 that anyone thought to coat cookware with the substance to stop food from sticking to pots and pans. Frenchman Marc Gregoire was thinking of coating his fishing gear with Teflon to stop it from tangling when his wife suggested that nonstick cooking pans would be more useful.^[1]

Most cookware used today is coated in a variety of Teflon.

9 Post-it Notes

Post-it Notes would have to be one of the most useful items of stationery. The sticky little squares of paper can be found in any home or office. We use them to bookmark pages, stick handy reminder notes to the fridge or computer, and leave phone messages.

Yet this common stationery item was developed by mistake. Dr. Spencer Silver was a chemist working for 3M in 1968. His research into a super-strong glue seemed to have failed when instead he came up with a very weak adhesive that would only stick things together for a short time. What good was that to anyone?

It wasn’t until 1973 that the worth of this new adhesive was recognized. Arthur Fry, one of Dr. Silver’s colleagues, began using this temporary glue to bookmark the pages in his hymnal.

By 1980, 3M was producing small squares of paper lined with a coating of glue along one edge. Today, we use more than 50 billion of these handy little sticky notes each year.^[2]

8 Safety Glass

Man has been using glass since the earliest civilizations. We use it in windows, cookware, jewelry, and decorative items. Blowing glass into decorative pieces is an ancient art form.

However, the main limitation of glass has always been the fact that it breaks into jagged, potentially dangerous pieces. So it is surprising to find that it was only in the last century that someone found a way to make glass safer.

Today, you will find safety glass in motor vehicles, windows, and cookware. It is tougher and less likely to break into jagged shards. Yet this stronger glass was discovered by accident rather than design.

French chemist Edouard Benedictus accidentally knocked a glass beaker onto the ground in 1903. He was surprised to find that it shattered but did not actually break as it contained cellulose nitrate which had left a film inside the glass.^[3]

This plastic-coated glass was further developed during the early 1900s and was first used for the lenses in gas masks during World War I. Various forms of safety glass have been developed since Benedictus’s discovery, and today, safety glass is mandatory in cars, buildings, and some cookware.

7 Microwave Oven

There are very few homes today without a microwave oven. The handy kitchen appliance certainly changed the way we cook. However, the microwave wasn’t an intentional invention. Percy Spencer, a radar engineer, was conducting experiments on a magnetron, a new vacuum tube in 1945.

During the experiment, Spencer noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. He grabbed some popcorn and, to his surprise, found that the magnetron also made the popcorn “pop.” He had accidentally stumbled upon a new way of cooking.

Raytheon marketed the new microwave oven as a “RadaRange” in 1946. The initial ovens were costly and too bulky for most kitchens. They were the size of a modern refrigerator and took 20 minutes to warm up before you could actually cook anything in them.^[4]

It wasn’t until the late 1960s that the smaller, cheaper versions found in most homes were developed.

6 Plastic

We can find plastic everywhere in most modern homes—from kitchenware to toys, furniture, and even packaging. Society is becoming increasingly aware of the environmental effects of this man-made substance, with worldwide attempts to minimize the use of plastic.

Ironically, plastic was developed to protect wildlife by reducing the need for ivory, tortoiseshell, horn, and other animal products as well as minimizing the industrial use of our natural resources.

In 1869, John Hyatt answered a New York firm’s call to find a substitute for ivory billiard balls. He found that combining cellulose (derived from cotton fiber) with camphor produced a substance which was flexible, strong, and moldable.

His newly discovered “celluloid” could be used in manufacturing instead of animal by-products, and it was even used in filmmaking. This new synthetic product would reduce the slaughter of animals for the use of their horns, tusks, and shells in manufacturing.

Leo Baekeland was researching an alternative electrical insulator to shellac in 1907. Expanding on Hyatt’s invention, he developed “Bakelite,” the first fully synthetic plastic which could also withstand extremely high temperatures without melting.^[5]

Chemical companies soon began researching and developing new plastics for every use imaginable—from wartime equipment to furniture, cookware, and motor vehicles. The applications for plastic were endless.

Given the origins of plastics, it is ironic that they have become an environmental concern, with more people returning to naturally produced products.

5 Super Glue

A researcher at Eastman Kodak found himself in a sticky mess when he was trying to invent a plastic lens for gunsights during World War II. Yet a handy little tube of the adhesive he had discovered can probably be found in most kitchen drawers around the world.

Harry Coover initially thought that his cyanoacrylate was useless as it stuck to absolutely everything it touched.^[6]

In 1951, he and colleague Fred Joyner were looking for a temperature-resistant coating for jet cockpits. After spreading the cyanoacrylate between two lenses during scientific experiments, they were alarmed to find that they could not pull the lenses apart, which ruined expensive laboratory equipment.

It was then that they realized the potential for this glue, which almost instantly bonded two surfaces together. Super Glue was first marketed in the late 1950s and has become a popular remedy for many small household repairs today.

4 Stainless Steel

Stainless steel is something we take for granted in our modern lives. Cutlery, kitchen appliances, medical equipment, motor vehicles, and even skyscrapers all use the strong, noncorrosive metal.

French scientist Leon Gillet first made a steel alloy mix in 1904. However, he failed to notice the rustproof properties of this new metal compound.

In 1912, metallurgist Harry Brearley was experimenting to find a rustproof gun barrel. During his research, he had added chromium to molten metals. He eventually noticed that previously discarded metal samples were not rusting like other metals.

Based in Sheffield, the home of silver cutlery, Brearley soon began marketing his “rustless steel” to cutlery manufacturers in place of the traditional silver- or nickel-plated cutlery.

Manufacturing companies soon began researching and further developing this new grade of metal. The uses of stainless steel today go way beyond Brearley’s original stainless cutlery. Planes, trains, ships, and cars are made from it. You will find stainless steel in every kitchen and at most building sites. It is also used extensively in medical equipment.^[7]

It is hard to imagine that this essential metal was initially thrown on a laboratory scrap heap.

3 Bubble Wrap

We probably take the protective packaging in most parcels for granted. Many people enjoy popping the small air-filled pockets in the Bubble Wrap in which their parcel contents were wrapped.

But did you know that Bubble Wrap was initially meant to be a textured wallpaper?

In 1957, scientists Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes put two shower curtains through a heat-shrinking machine in an attempt to develop a textured wallpaper. The result was a sheet of plastic covered in tiny air bubbles. Their efforts to use the product as a greenhouse insulation also proved to be a failure.^[8]

In 1960, IBM was looking for a way to protect delicate computer components during transport. Fielding and Chavannes’s cushioned plastic was the perfect solution to their problem.

The usefulness of “Bubble Wrap” soon caught on and is the world’s most common packaging material today.

2 Cling Wrap

Every household has a tube of “cling wrap” in the kitchen drawer. The sticky plastic film wraps our sandwiches and covers our food to keep it fresh.

The sticky film, “Saran,” was discovered in 1933 in the Dow Chemical laboratories. Ralph Wiley was working in the lab developing dry cleaning products and discovered the substance when trying to clean used beakers.^[9]

It was originally used as a protective spray in fighter jets and in motor vehicles. It was even used to line soldiers’ boots.

Saran Wrap was introduced into households as a food wrap in 1953. Concerns about the chemicals in the film being in contact with food led to further research and the development of “safer” plastic films. This effectively wrapped up the array of plastic food packaging we use every day.

1 Safety Pin

There are hundreds of uses for the humble safety pin. Clothing pins have been with us for thousands of years. However, the pointy ends were prone to give the wearer a nasty jab.

In 1849, New York mechanic Walter Hunt was sitting in his office fiddling with a piece of wire as he tried to come up with a way to pay a $15 debt.

He found that he had successfully twisted the wire into a useful object. He could see how the item in his hands could be used as a pin. The piece of wire now had a coiled spring at the bottom. Hunt added a clasp to the top, allowing the pointy end of the safety pin to be secured at the top and preventing users from being stabbed with the sharp end of the pin.^[10]

A clever inventor, Hunt was unfortunately not a sharp business man. A few years earlier, he had invented an eye-pointed needle sewing machine. He failed to patent his invention as he feared that it would cause people to lose their jobs. His design was later copied and marketed by others.

While he did patent his safety pin invention, he sold the rights to the patent to the person to whom he owed the money.

Lesley Connor is a retired Australian newspaper editor who provides articles to online publications and her own travel blog.

“We are not just battling the virus, but also conspiracy theories,” a spokesman for the Wuhan Institute of Virology has said.^[1] “Conspiracy theories do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice.”

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He was trying to squash an idea that has been growing in popularity ever since the 2019-nCoV Coronavirus outbreak began: that his Virology Lab, at the heart of Wuhan, might be responsible.

In a way, he was right. In a time of crisis, the last thing anyone would want to do is spread fear — especially if it’s based on nothing but a baseless rumor.

But when you start looking into those claims that the epidemic that’s already infected almost 250,000 people across the world started in a Wuhan Virology Lab, it starts looking like something other than a conspiracy theory. It starts looking like an explanation that holds up unnervingly well — and that, if we take the time to look into it, could help prevent something similar from happening again.

10 The Outbreak Started Across The Street From A Virology Lab

The official story is that 2019-nCoV started in a seafood market in Wuhan. Unclean animals sold there were carrying the virus, Chinese scientists have suggested, and, as a result, some unlucky shoppers ended up becoming patient zeros for a global crisis.

You’ve probably already heard that explanation before, and there’s a good chance you’ve accepted it as a fact — but there are some glaring problems with it.

For one thing, the first patients with 2019-nCoV have no connection to the market whatsoever. They lived nearby, and they appear to have spread the disease to people who went there — but the real patient zeros never actually stepped foot inside of it.^[2]

Also, 2019-nCoV is believed to have originated in bats — and this was a seafood market. Nobody was selling bats inside of this market. Bats just aren’t something people in Wuhan normally eat.^[3]

Even China’s scientists have started backing away from this theory. To quote one directly:

“It seems clear that [the] seafood market is not the only origin of the virus… But to be honest, we still do not know where the virus came from.”^[4]

A lot of people have pointed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which is just a 30 minutes drive for the seafood market. But if that’s not close enough for you, there’s another lab that researches bat coronaviruses that’s even closer: The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention.

It’s not just on the other side of town. It’s on the other side of the street.^[5]

9 The Wuhan Virology Lab Was Studying Bat Coronaviruses

The Wuhan Center for Disease Control & Prevention isn’t just an administrative office. Scientists were inside that building actively conducting research — including studies on coronaviruses in bats.^[6]

A lot of researchers in Wuhan were. It had been a major project for the city, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology took great pride in. They were at the forefront in researching the causes of SARS, and it was their researchers who had proven that the last SARS outbreak originated in bats.^[7]

They had to look at an awful lot of sick bats to do it, though. Researchers had been gathering bats infected with the coronavirus since at least 2012, and they were focusing on ones that could spread their illness to human beings.^[8]

There were hundreds of bats in Wuhan’s labs when the 2019-nCoV outbreak started, and the researchers there were studying at least 11 new strains of SARS-related viruses in them.^[9] And, yes — they were doing it across the street from the place where the outbreak started.

8 2019-nCoV Is a 96% Match For A Bat Virus In The Wuhan Virology Lab

The coronavirus that’s spreading around the world at this very moment has been called “novel” because it’s unique. It’s different from past diseases, like SARS. About 30% different, to be exact.

That’s not just a number we pulled out of our heads. Scientists have compared the genetic sequence of SARS to 2019-nCoV, and they’ve found that they’re about 70% similar.^[10]

That’s a rough number — the real one might be a bit higher. But the real number probably isn’t 96% — which is the percentage match scientists have found between 2019-nCov and a form of the coronavirus carried by bats inside of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.^[11]

“But wait a minute,” you say. “If those bats had the virus, there were probably bats all around Wuhan that had it — right?”

Afraid not. 2019-nCoV isn’t just similar to bat coronaviruses in general — it’s similar to a very specific strain of bat coronavirus carried by bats in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not every bat coronavirus has that 96% match — in fact, when another lab compared 2019-nCoV to their own bats, the closest match they could find was 88%.^[12]

And those bats weren’t local. If you were living in Wuhan and you really wanted to find one of those bats, you’d either have to go to the virology lab or to the place those bats had come from: Yunnan and Zhejiang.

That’s a little over 900km away.^[13]

7 An Infected Bat Bled On A Researcher Shortly Before The Outbreak

Ok, so a disease lab was researching diseases. So what? That doesn’t prove that it ever got out — right?

While it’s highly unlikely that the Wuhan Institute of Virology deliberately plagued its own people, it really wouldn’t have been that hard for somebody to catch it by accident.

Imagine if a bat attacked a researcher and, in the chaos, spilled its blood onto his bare skin. Or imagine if he got a bit too close and got bat urine on his body. Or imagine both of those things happened to the same person not long before the 2019-nCoV outbreak began.

That’s exactly what happened. According to a report by Chinese researchers Botao and Lei Xiao,^[14] a researcher named Junhua Tian described these exact experiences in an interview with the Changjiang Times.

Junhua Tian claims he quarantined himself to keep from spreading these disease — but even if he and his colleagues used every possible precaution, it’s possible that the virus still could have leaked out.

One thing we’ve learned since the outbreak is that people can show no symptoms at all and still be infected. And, according to a recent study out of Japan, people who have recovered can still carry the virus.^[15]

6 SARS Escaped From A Beijing Lab Twice

Of course, it’s also possible that the staff at the Wuhan Institute of Virology just didn’t use every possible precaution.

It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s walked out of a Chinese virology lab carrying a deadly sickness. It’s happened before — in fact, it once happened twice in a single month.^[16]

On April 4, 2004, a postgraduate student working at a virology lab in Beijing was diagnosed with SARS. She had gotten infected while researching the virus, and, unaware that she was sick, walked out into the public and very nearly caused a second outbreak.

That’s pretty bad — but what makes it downright terrifying is that, two weeks later, another postgraduate student working at the exact same lab did the exact same thing.

That’s not just negligent. According to scientist Antoine Danchin, it should technically be impossible.

“Normally, it’s not possible to contaminate people even under level two confinement if the security rules are obeyed,” he said after the incident. “It suggests there has been some mishandling of something.

“The lab might have all the right rules, but the people may not comply.”

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5 The Wuhan Virology Lab Was Testing A Virus That Matches 2019-nCoV

In case there was any doubt, the Wuhan Institute of Virology definitely had postgraduate students on staff.

We can confirm that because, on Nov. 18, 2019, shortly before the breakout, the institute put up a job posting^[17] asking for postgraduate students to help study the coronavirus in humans and bats.

That’s not exactly out of the ordinary — but the description in the job posting is a little disturbing. It says that they were particularly interested in molecular mechanisms that let coronavirus lie dormant for a long time without symptoms.

Sound familiar? That’s one of the distinguishing traits of 2019-nCoV — the fact that people can go around without any apparent symptoms and still spread it.

322 of the people on the Diamond Princess cruise ship tested positive without symptoms,^[18] and there’s proof that those asymptomatic people can spread the disease. In fact, one woman is confirmed to have spread it at least five people without showing any symptoms of her own.^[19]

4 Researchers At The Lab Had Recently Created A New Coronavirus

The staff at Wuhan Institute of Virology didn’t just work on cures. They also spent some developing new, super viruses of their own.

In 2015, two researchers at the Institute participated in an international experiment led by American scientist Ralph Baric.^[20] The goal? Create a new coronavirus with the ability to infect human beings.

If that sounds like a weird goal to you, you’re not alone. A significant part of the scientific community was outraged by this experiment.

“The only impact of this work is the creation, in a lab, of a new, non-natural risk,” biologist Richard Ebright protested when the work came out.^[21]

French virologist Simon Wain-Hobson agreed. “If the virus escaped,” he warned,^[22] “nobody could predict the trajectory.”

3 2019-nCoV Has Eerie Similarities to HIV

According to a controversial study out of India, some aspects of 2019-nCoV have “uncanny similarities” to HIV.^[23]

Full disclosure — this study’s gotten a fair degree of scrutiny. Some scientists have questioned whether it used enough data to be statistically significant, and they’ve put it through the wringer enough that, at this point, the study’s authors have withdrawn their work.^[24]

But while their work might be unproven, that doesn’t necessarily make it wrong — and there’s a little bit of evidence to back it up. HIV drugs are proving to be remarkably effective in treating the drug,^[25] and most patients are showing low white blood cell counts^[26] — something that doesn’t happen with any other form of coronavirus.^[27]

That’s creepy — because researchers in the Wuhan Institute of Virology have worked on or conducted studies combining SARS-CoV and an HIV pseudovirus in bats and humans.^[28]

There’s no hard proof that the 2019-nCoV is a man-made virus — but if scientists ever find proof that it is, there’s a lot of reason to be worried.

2 The Communist Chinese Government Ordered Silence

Infectious disease specialist Daniel Lucey got the chance to review the documents and data China had in its possession when 2019-nCoV broke out, and he came out of it baffled. Their official story, he said, just didn’t make any sense.

“China must have realized the epidemic did not originate in that Wuhan Huanan seafood market,” Lucey told the press.^[29]

Perhaps he was right. Perhaps somebody in Wuhan knew that the story didn’t add up even when they first announced it. But if they did, they were under strict orders not to say anything about it.

On Jan. 2, 2020 — the day after the Huanan seafood market was blamed for the disease — the Wuhan Institute of Virology sent out a disclosure strictly “prohibiting disclosure of information” on 2019-nCoV.

Some scientists have spoken up anyway. A good part of this article, for example, draws from a study by the National Natural Science Foundation of China called “The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus”.

It might not surprise you to find out that, shortly after that study was released, the communist government did its best to pull it off the internet with as much vigor as they are using in attempting to stop people referring to the virus as a “Chinese virus” or as the “Wuhan flu”.^[30]

1 The Chinese Government Is Tightening Up Biolab Security

The biggest smoking gun of them all came straight out of the mouth of President Xi Jinping.

On Feb. 14, 2020, President Xi gave a speech on the need to contain 2019-nCoV. Chinese, he said, needs to “learn our lessons… so we can strengthen our areas of weakness and close the loopholes exposed by the epidemic.^[31]

While Xi was never completely explicit about how those loopholes were to be closed, he did announce his plan to push through a new law for “biosecurity at laboratories” specifically targeting the use of biological agents that “may harm national security”.

The very next day, the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology followed up on Xi’s speech with a new directive entitled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”^[32]

There’s only one microbiology lab in all of China that handles advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.

It’s the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

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