The Accidental Inventions We Should All Be Grateful For

These days, the freezer section at your grocery store is filled with frozen single-serve dinners, from fancy, gourmet healthy meals to cheap, budget meals. But back in the day, there was exactly one name in frozen dinners: that was Swanson, and they invented what came to be known as TV dinners.

But they didn’t set out to create a new way of making a quick, warm meal. In 1953, the food company accidentally ordered too many turkeys for Thanksgiving—260 tons of extra turkey. The TV dinner was invented as a way to use up all of that extra meat, and it ended up being a huge hit and changing how many of us eat to this day.