The history of science is full of happy accidents — most folks have heard that penicillin was discovered in 1928, when a few mold spores landed on some neglected petri dishes in a London lab. But sometimes serendipity's role is a bit less ... mainstream.
Hennig Brand was a German alchemist in the 1660s. I'm not saying he was a gold digger — but he did marry first one rich lady, and then, after her death, a second rich lady. And he used their money to literally try to make gold.
Back then, a lot of people thought you could change worthless materials into precious metals. And Brand was convinced he could distill gold from a golden substance that he encountered every day:
human urine.
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