40 Incredible Inventions That Were Born Out of Chance

Many of the stories we’ve discussed have involved a total accident—something breaking or running out. But this next one is about someone inventing something and then finding out it also had a great secondary use. It concerns colorblindness and the glasses that help colorblind people see color.

Don McPherson was working on creating glasses tinted in a certain way to help surgeons distinguish between blood and tissue during surgery. When a colorblind friend put them on, he was surprised to realize that they helped the friend differentiate between colors he had never made sense of.