Saccharin 1879
Saccharin was invented partially through bad lab practices and partially due to a man who was willing to go above and beyond for the sake of science. Constantin Fahlberg was born in 1850 in Tambov, Russia. He went to work at Johns Hopkins University under professor Ira Remsen. It was actually during his lunch break that he revolutionized the food and beverage industry forever. He left his lab and went to lunch. As he started to eat he noticed that the bread tasted sweet. He examined the bread but saw that there was nothing unusual about it to make it taste sweet, unlike how the bread normally tasted.
That was when Fahlberg remembered that he had spilled a chemical on his hand while working in his lab. He had never bothered to wash his hands after leaving his lab and it was that chemical that was still on his hands that was making his bread sweet. He ran back to this lab and began tasting the different chemicals in his lab to see which one was the one that has been causing his hands to taste sweet. In 1880 he published a paper with Ira Remsen on the discovery that the chemical saccharin had the benefit of making things taste sweet.
In 1884 Fahlberg filed for a patent without Remsen and began producing saccharin as a sweetener. It did not really come until use until World War I when sugar was rationed. Then the popularity of the sweetener increased further in the 1960s and 70s with the introduction of diet drinks and Sweet’N Low. Today it remains as the oldest artificial sweetener in the world and it all came to be because one scientist failed to wash his hands.