I hate unintended consequences. Massive turning points in human history occasioned by accidents, happenstance—any of that random shit—makes me nuts. I’m an empiricist, goddammit! I have, therefore, been nagged for a decade by the unshakable belief that were it not for two uncomfortably random events, American democracy would be unimperiled, a few million preventable deaths would actually have been prevented, and we’d all be a fuckton happier.
The first came at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, when comedian Seth Meyers and President Barack Obama tag-team tormented Donald J. Trump, then host of The Apprentice, the leading proponent of birtherism and, as the odd comedic couple amply demonstrated, a joke. The man with skin so thin you can see his corpuscles probably made up his mind that night to run for president thanks to a 50-50 mix of spite and bile, but we still might have been spared had event number two not happened.
More than anything else, Trump wanted to be an NFL owner; to gain access to what his twisted, sad, insecure soul saw as the most exclusive and desirable club in the world. (For the record, and as a surprise to no one, NFL owners are customarily horrible people. It’s hard to get rich enough to own an NFL team without being a horrible person, or at least doing a bushel of horrible things, which would eventually land you in distinction without a difference territory. That’s why I was so stunned when Redskins/Commanders owner Daniel Snyder was deemed such a bad guy that the fine father figures of football had no choice but to cast him from their billionaire bosom. Admittedly, Snyder fostered a toxic work culture, settled a sexual harassment lawsuit, sued season-ticket holders when they couldn’t pay their bills during the recession, refused to change the team’s racist nickname, and assorted other uber-rich asshole things. But NFL owners are some of the richest, largest assholes in the world, and do shit like that all the time. Arizona Cardinals owner Mike Bidwell is currently being sued for sexual harassment, and while he deserves the presumption of innocence, because I can do math I’m going to assume he’s guilty.)
Back to Trump. In 2014 he was one of the last three bidders for the Buffalo Bills, but lost out mostly because he’d owned a team in the upstart rival USFL in the mid-1980s, and spearheaded an antitrust suit against the NFL, whose team owners remembered that they don’t like being sued. Ironically, their revenge on Trump launched the most comprehensive revenge tour in human history. Had either of these events not happened I am, to my great sadness, convinced that he never would have run for—and therefore never have become—president.
Since those two huge, rotten fish realities will hang in my olfactory range (field of smell?) for eternity, the best I can do is fashion a counterweight of serendipitous events to beat back as much of the ick as possible. Thankfully, history serves up a high roller Vegas-style buffet of happy accidents, though we will not fill up on bread by opening with the penicillin story. Instead, we’ll begin with an appliance I once described as that without which we, as a young family of four, would have starved: our beloved microwave.
We had no magical reheating device when I was a child, and I can only imagine that we must have eaten a lot of poorly-cooked food at sub-optimal temperatures. Oddly, I do recall the lava-hot to medium cool range a microwave can produce in some foods being pre-echoed by Swanson TV dinners, in which out of the oven the still 350-degree juices oozing like molten lava from the fruit cobbler into the somehow-still-frozen block of next-door peas created a truly unique flavor profile.
But we’d all be drinking a lot more cold coffee were it not for Percy Spencer’s sweet tooth. In 1945 the self-taught engineer was working in a Raytheon lab testing magnetrons, the high-powered vacuum tubes inside radars, when he noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket begin to melt. He then harnessed this new power to successfully pop popcorn and explode an egg into the face of a skeptical colleague. Two years later the RadaRange burst on the scene, but at 700 pounds and nearly six feet tall it would be a while before home versions hit the shelves.
While some grownup would have stumbled into it eventually, it’s awfully fitting that an 11-year-old accidentally invented the popsicle. A billion sticky fingers were launched on that oh-so-lucky evening in 1905, when Frank Epperson left a cup of soda powder and water—complete with stirring stick—on his San Francisco patio. Record overnight cold froze the concoction, and Frank, being a curious lad, popped it out of the cup and into status as a summer icon. Frank may have sold a few of his inventive icy treats to neighbors for a while, but his breakout didn’t come until 1923 when his Eppsicles were a hit at the Neptune Beach amusement park, known as the “Coney Island of the West.” Next thing you know he’s patented them, with strict instructions including favored types of wood for sticks, and after what amounted to probably six seconds of cajoling from his kids, changed the name to Popsicle.
A few months before Pearl Harbor, in the blissfully neutral Swiss Alps, George de Mestrel returned from a hunting trip with his pants and dog covered in burrs from a burdock plant. Mestrel, who’d earned his first patent at 12 for a toy airplane, was intrigued, and when he examined the interaction under a microscope, he saw thousands of tiny burr hooks latched into thousands of tiny loops in his pants’ fabric. Next thing you know, Velcro! Patented in 1954, it didn’t really catch on until NASA started using it to fasten things down in zero gravity conditions, but by the 1980s parents everywhere were using it to avoid having to teach their kids to tie their shoes.
A few decades later some of those fathers, if they wanted to return to full participation in an activity they probably enjoyed more often before they had kids, may have needed help from another happy accident, this one pharmaceutical. Seems Pfizer was testing sildenafil, which had shown promise in dilating blood vessels which might ease blood pressure and angina-related chest pain. It worked—just 18-24 inches south of its intended target. A nurse noticed that when men returned to the research facility to be examined, they always chose to lie on their stomachs because, as it turns out, they were trying to hide their raging boners. And thus was born the biggest selling (legal) drug of all time.
Speaking of drugs, let’s end this journey of serendipity where we started, only instead of with things Trump hates—being made fun of and losing—with something he and millions of others love—Diet Coke. Dr. J.S. Pemberton, a Georgia pharmacist and morphine dependent thanks to a Civil War saber wound, had developed a successful, tasty, opium-free elixir that mixed coca leaves and cola wines. But in 1886 Atlanta became the first major US city to enact prohibition, and Pemberton went back to the lab, where someone accidentally mixed carbonated water in with his base syrup and okay, it still contained a dangerous drug, but it was delicious and eventually would lead to development of the liquid that fuels both Trump’s narcissism and his sociopathy. Kind of a long way down from “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” though, huh.
