Saccharin was discovered by not washing up before dinner.
In 1879 chemist Constantin Fahlberg noticed his bread tasted sweet, and traced it to a compound from his Johns Hopkins lab still on his fingers.
More amazing facts
- 1876 · 1877 Bell wanted people to answer the telephone with a sailor's 'Ahoy!'. What stuck was 'Hello!', suggested by Thomas Edison in 1877.
- 1876 The telephone and the end of samurai swords arrived together: Bell patented the telephone in March 1876, and on 28 March Japan banned carrying swords in public.
- 1876 On the very day Custer died at the Little Bighorn, Bell was showing off the telephone.
- 1877 · 1881 Samurai and cowboys were contemporaries: the samurai's last stand at Shiroyama came in September 1877, the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral just four years later, in 1881.
- 1877 · 1894 An Arizona observatory was built to study Martian canals.
- 1881 Painters of the 18th and 19th centuries used paint made from mummies. 'Mummy brown' was ground from Egyptian mummies; on learning this in 1881, the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones gave his tube a solemn burial.