11 Products That Gained Fame For Being Used Wrong

Ask anyone who has ever attempted to put together furniture or a child’s toy using a spoon as a screwdriver and you can understand how we, as a people, often don’t use tools and other items for the purposes for which they were originally designed or intended. I like to think of this kind of capitalism as the Bob Ross effect.  

The reason I call it the Bob Ross effect is deference to the always cool, calm, and collectively sedated painter that appeared on PBS’s Joy of Painting. Ross never made mistakes, but instead of blaming someone else like a verbose politician, Ross described those instances as “happy accidents”. 

That’s actually the term that we should use to identify these particular items and products. The manufacturer or the inventor or the designer had something totally different in mind when they “stumbled” across the most lucrative use for their discovery.  

In many cases, inventors had no idea what they had invented. It wasn’t until someone else took their invention and misused it did the world gain a valuable product and the inventor recoup a little revenue for all of their hard work and ingenuity.  

Y'all know the microwave oven was invented by accident right? Well if it's good enough to cook a frozen burrito at 2 am in a Shop Rite store then those kinds of accidents are certainly welcome here.  Let’s take a look at 11 common items that are used a lot differently than what their creators intended.