The Greatest Accidental Discoveries
Nobody Was Looking There
True Stories of Accidental Discoveries Found in Disasters and in Places No One Thought to Look
by Daniel Whitmore
About this book
Research usually answers the question it was funded to investigate. This book follows discoveries made while people were dealing with a different problem or emergency, in places they had no reason to search before.
Investigators searching for the cause of an accident found more than they expected. An engineer picked up a message without a wire to carry it. An expedition went off course to a place more useful than its intended destination, and a crew pulled something unexpected from the ground. The stories follow the people who recognized what they had found.
Some discoveries came at a cost to people other than the discoverer: a building collapsed, a ship sank, or people became ill for reasons nobody understood. Investigating those events produced knowledge now used in drinking water, weather forecasts, phone signals and building safety rules.
