The testament to the idea that mistakes are very common is the amount of them we have experienced throughout history. Some instances could even take us back hundreds if not thousands of years.
One of the most famous mistakes is the crash of the Titanic. A moonless night paired with an unexpected obstacle caused the loss of 1,514 people. However, as more people are continuing to look into the matter, more mistakes are being found.
Louise Patten, a writer and granddaughter of Titanic second officer Charles Lightoller, once revealed that the steersman of Titanic made a huge mistake when trying to avoid disaster. In a snap decision, he turned the wrong way when the crew identified the iceberg ahead.
You see, the steering systems in steel boats work in the opposite way compared to sailboats. This, together with the fact that this massive ship was going very fast, made the collision unavoidable.
Another major mistake that resulted in a wreckage of a vessel that, fortunately, didn’t take any lives happened in 1999. Mars Climate Orbiter was a robotic space probe that was designed by NASA to study the red planet. However, it didn’t succeed in its mission. That is because the company that made the spacecraft, Lockheed Martin, used US customary units while building it even though NASA used the metric system designing it. The silly mistake caused the orbiter to get too close to the planet and, subsequently, destroyed.
Some mistakes, however, aren’t that unfortunate. In fact, one could call them lucky accidents. One of them is Ian Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, which made a huge impact on today’s medicine and earned him a Nobel prize.
Apparently, he came back to his (messy?) London lab after his summer holiday and noticed that one of the discarded petri dishes with staphylococcus bacteria had mold in it. The thing that made him curious was the fact that the mold was surrounded by “juice” that protected it from bacteria. He, together with a group of other scientists, started looking into it and soon enough discovered penicillin.
Another medical discovery that could be called a lucky accident is, of course, Viagra. Pfizer scientists were looking for medication to treat high blood pressure and angina, chest pain related to coronary heart disease.
During the trials, the scientists noticed that a common side effect of the drug was increased erections. Once the chance of the drug working as heart medicine was out of the window, Pfizer pursued a patent for erectile dysfunction medication that soon took the world by storm.
