One of my favourite stories is the accidental discovery of synthetic purple dye. IIRC there was a chemist researching something completely unrelated and when he disposed some assorted chemicals down a sink he noticed they turned purple.
This is basically the reason we have artificial sweeteners, too.
Some dude was trying to make/do something, and labs were sort of “lol everything is safe” back then so he like… had a sandwich… and noticed it was sweet… so he just sort of tasted all the stuff he was working with and found aspartame. (I believe it was aspartame)
I believe the same is true for fabreeze, the underlying chemical mechanism was an accidental discovery because the researcher’s wife noticed he didn’t smell of cigarettes. It never caught on tho because it, naturally, has no smell, and you become blind to smells you are constantly exposed to, so until they added perfumes (fabreeze as we know it today), even tho it worked, nobody cared to use it. I wish I could actually find it unscented… the scented shit stinks and gives me headaches.
It’s Febreeze. I know I’m being a stupid spelling nazi but I swear everyone spells it wrong and for some reason it drives me crazy. I have similar feelings about Scünci from my youth, but that battle has long been lost.
I mean… No offense or anything but I really don’t care if I mis-spell a brand name. It’s super unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It’s… all just stupid marketing anyway, and if they cared, they would have used a smarter spelling.
What I am concerned about is calling oneself stupid and a nazi (of any sort at this point) while actually being neither. Even as a hyperbolic thing, it’s something I greatly dislike.
Please be kinder to yourself. It’s ok to be pedantic, but just say that instead :)
I also have things that make me unreasonably annoyed. It’s ok to have those things :)
Also, I believe the rubber was discovered by a scientist accidentally dropping a mixture of a bunch of materials like resin onto a burner, which made it volcanize (man I hope I got the word right) into a layer of rubber in the middle
