Lucky Accidents

Many things are invented after years of research and experiments, but some things are invented completely by accident. Many accidental inventions are related to food and cooking. The microwave oven: In 1946, engineer Percy Spencer was working on radar technology when he accidentally invented an appliance that is in most kitchens today: the microwave oven. You’ve probably heard that Spencer had a chocolate bar in his pocket, and it melted when he used his new machine. According to Spencer’s grandson, the food in Spencer’s pocket was not chocolate. It was a peanut cluster, and this is important because chocolate melts at a very low temperature, but peanut clusters do not. Spencer was very surprised that the bar melted, and he did another experiment with an egg. The egg exploded in his face! Finally, he tried his machine with popcorn, and the popcorn popped. That was the beginning of microwave cooking.

Ice-cream cones: It seems that the first ice-cream cones were used at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. The weather was very hot, and there were many ice-cream vendors. Next to one of the ice-cream sellers there was a waffle stand. Unfortunately, because of the hot weather, most people did not want to eat waffles. The ice-cream seller had so many customers that he ran out of paper dishes to serve the ice cream on. The waffle vendor rolled his waffles into cones and gave them to the ice-cream vendor. People loved the waffle cones with the ice cream, and the ice-cream cone was invented!

Chocolate chip cookies: In the 1930s, Ruth Wakefield and her husband owned a hotel in the state of Massachusetts called the Toll House Inn. Ruth cooked all of the meals that were served at the inn, and one day she decided to make some chocolate cookies. She discovered that she didn’t have the type of chocolate she needed for the cookies, so she broke a chocolate bar into small pieces and put them into the cookie dough. She thought they would melt and create chocolate dough when she baked the cookies. However, the pieces of chocolate did not melt, and the result was cookies with small pieces of chocolate in them. People loved them, and a new cookie recipe was invented. Today, chocolate chip cookies are sometimes still called Toll House cookies.