The Accidental Inventions We Should All Be Grateful For

Some of our greatest medical and scientific discoveries have come from people who were actually researching something else entirely. That’s the case with a pacemaker, a very important device that can be used to manually stimulate the heart, for people with heart problems.

John Hopps, a Canadian medical researcher, was actually looking into using radio frequencies to treat hypothermia (and what could be more Canadian than having to worry about hypothermia?) when he discovered the mechanism that he would eventually use to develop the pacemaker. We all owe the frozen north a debt of gratitude.