Name: 17 Things Whose Original Purposes Never Entered Your Mind
Uploaded: 2020-03-16T19:53:18.000Z
Duration: 8 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The second conditional

How would you feel if someday you invented something extraordinary, but then someone

came around and like, ‘Oh, that would make a good coat hanger!’ and everyone used it

I don’t think I’d mind as long as the royalty check had enough zeroes in it.

Ha) Believe it or not, it appears something like that happened regularly in the past,

If you entered a room with walls covered in bubble wrap, you’d probably be left scratching

But when it was first made in 1975, this was the actual purpose of the invention!

Further down the line bubble wrap was proposed as greenhouse insulation, yet it didn’t

Only three years later it was finally noticed as a good wrapping material and found its

It even has a proper name, in fact – a watch pocket.

As time moved on, we adapted this little pocket to fit change, or something equally small,

but at the time when jeans were just invented people used small metal watches on a chain.

This tiny pocket was perfect to fit one right there.

A long time ago, fireplaces were used to heat homes, and wallpapers in rooms inevitably

The play-doh’s ancestor was invented to remove this soot with no harm to wallpapers.

But when easily cleaned vinyl wallpapers emerged on the market, and fireplaces became more

That’s also why play-doh became so colorful in upcoming years.

We like these colorful things because you can stick them anywhere without a second thought

and then just lift --- them away leaving no glue marks.

But the initial idea was just the opposite!

Their inventor tried to make the most adhesive glue ever, but failed dramatically.

Still, further testing of this not-so-sticky glue in addition to small notes showed that

These sources of self-confidence for some and painful discomfort for others were never

meant to attract attention and add height.

In fact, they were even originally made for men to wear while riding a horse.

See for yourself: the shape of heels matches a stirrup like key matches a lock.

Heeled boots helped a horseman to be more stable on horseback and even to steadily aim

There was absolutely no intent to make a microwave at all.

It happened by accident when a group of scientists were testing radar equipment.

Microwaves it emitted melted a chocolate bar!

Guess what was used for further testing of microwaves’ heating potential?

It was the first ever microwaved popcorn.

One of the biggest social networks today didn’t aim that high at the beginning.

In 2004, it had strictly limited membership to students of Harvard, but pretty soon it

became so popular that it was expanded to all the colleges of the Ivy League.

After that it was just a matter of time and lots of funds for Facebook to become what

In 1938, when Teflon was first introduced, nobody even thought of marrying it with kitchenware.

The initial research was aimed at producing a new kind of gas for fridges.

No luck there, sure, but the result was the most slippery stuff ever that could form a

coating able to completely protect anything from high temperatures and corrosion.

Plus, nothing can stick to it and it’s easy to clean – a must for every kitchen.

It was first produced by a naval engineer as a means to suspend naval equipment.

At some point one of the tension springs dropped down to the floor and… slunk away in such

Since then hundreds of millions of these fancy springs were sold all over the world.

Today you may sweat on a treadmill after that burger you’ve eaten recently, but when first

invented it was used as part of correctional works for prisoners.

That treadmill had different shape – more like a set of stairs that never ends.

It had another purpose too, and it’s in the name – it served as a criminal-powered

The first wave of tea’s popularity wasn’t about having a cozy time on a cold winter

Some ads even went as far as to say you could cure anything with 50 cups of tea, which was,

To be fair, though, tea does have some positive effects on your well-being, but with 50 cups

of tea, well, it’ll certainly give your bladder a workout.

People were known to chew on bark or dry natural resin for thousands of years, but the first

time the modern chewing gum was produced, it was as part of continuous efforts to produce

Funny enough, the experiment was in vulcanizing the same kind of natural resin that was already

used as a chewing gum, but it led to nothing.

Instead this resin was used to make a new chewing gum – much more convenient and tastier.

A perfect example of how a small mistake can eventually become a savior of many lives.

The first ever prototype of a pacemaker was made from a heart rhythm recording device,

but with the wrong kind of resistor in its scheme.

When it was turned on, it started to produce signals instead of recording them, and these

signals had the same rhythm as a healthy human heart would have.

Can’t think of an accident happier that that.

14) Braille This language system was initially used as

a means of coding short messages to secure secret information.

It was called night writing and a bonus feature it had was that you didn’t even need to

look at the code to get the message – just touch the writing.

Of course, it was further adapted for blind people to use, but it all started with spy

Subtitles ListPlay Video

17 Things Whose Original Purposes Never Entered Your Mind

stick

rhythm

artificial

wrap