The Accidental Inventions That We’re All Grateful For

A lot of the stories that we’ve been talking about so far have involved a total accident—something breaking or running out. But this next one is a story about someone inventing something and then finding out it had a great secondary use as well. And it has to do with colorblindness and the glasses that help colorblind people see color.

Don McPherson was working on creating glasses that were 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 distinguish between colors that he had never been able to make sense of before. Pretty amazing glasses to be able to do all those things!