1. The Light Bulb.
I bet most of you were thinking of that one. But it is true: the light bulb was originally meant to be food! Nikola Tesla was working on a way to use pure electricity to create human sustenance. After a few weeks, he devised a small “bulb”-shaped object that you could hold for a few seconds and thus not have to eat for several hours. It had the side effect of electric diarrhea, however.
Luckily, when Thomas Edison stole the invention, he didn’t know what it was for and dubbed it the “electro-candle”.
2. The Felt Pen.
The inventors of what came to be known as the felt pen, or “magic marker”, had planned to create something entirely different, which was to be called a “Lucky Tampon”. The idea was to have a short tube full of absorbent material that could be reused a number of times by uncapping one end and letting the menstrual fluid empty out. After a trial run, it was quickly noted that one could write letters and make images with the Lucky Tampon.
Seeing a large market, Frederick and William Sanford decided to change their entire business plan to that of writing instruments! The “Marker Pen” was such a huge success, that after three years of steady sales, they were forced to switch to using ink rather than menstrual fluid.
3. Windshield Wipers
When the auto-mobile was first coming onto the scene, it was fashionable to wave tiny flags with your house crest or emblem while driving through town. Less fortunate people who couldn’t afford such a luxury would know who their betters were, and to ignore any fallen person whose face was enshrouded with such a flag.
When the motorists began to tire of the constant waving, auto-mobile manufacturers added the Flag-Waver feature to newer models. As you can imagine, the waving flags mounted to the hood of the car obscured the drivers’ vision and caused many deaths, but also had the pleasant side effect of occasionally wiping the windshield glass!
After a while, flag waving finally fell out of fashion (in favor of moving one’s eyebrows up and down quickly), and the mechanism remained and was replaced with a more efficient “squee-gee”, so named because it was made from hog penis.
4. Bananas
It’s common knowledge that the modern banana has been cross-bred and engineered into its current delicious form. Did you know that this was the result of a drunken experiment?
The banana used to be a long, flat, leathery seed-pod that people could use to tie their hair back. (The word “bandana” comes from the same native plant: the “ba-gnania” which roughly translates to “stretchy hog-penis”.)
A couple of scientists working late and drinking “Johnny-beers” began cross-pollinating and grafting roots of the ba-gnania plants in their back yard, trying to make a fruit that could be used to wrap the feet of baskets-ball players. The result was much too slippery, but soon it was noted that the flesh and skin was quite edible. One of the scientists was noted as exclaiming, “Tasty,” followed by a scientific thumbs-up (thumb and pointer-finger extended, with pointer finger directed to ward the object of note).
