Throw It In / Real Life

• When Neil Armstrong reported landing in simulators during the training for Apollo 11, he always said "Houston, Eagle. We have landed" or some close variation on that. When he actually got to the moon, he realized that something more poetic was necessary for such a historic moment and ad-libbed "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed" which no one else had ever heard. The communications officer in Houston was clearly surprised but responded "Roger, Tranquility." The name is now recognized by the International Astronomical Union.
• Many, many lasting and important inventions were discovered completely by accident. The efficacy of microwaves with regards to heating food was realized when the American engineer Percy Spencer, while working on an active radar set, noticed that a chocolate bar he had on him began to melt.
  • Glass ceramic materials, as used in oven ware, were discovered through two layers of accident: The furnace producing a set of glass samples didn't run as intended, producing the different microstructure. One of the researchers then dropped the sample by accident, and was surprised when it didn't shatter.
• The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, which is the evidential lynchpin in the big bang theory, was discovered unwittingly by the two American astronomers Penzias and Wilson, who did their darndest to get rid of the "background noise" their New Jersey-based radio horn was picking up, going so far as to scrub the entire inside of the horn^note And to get rid of a pair of doves that believed were messing their observations with white dielectric material. Their accidental discovery won them the Nobel Prize, and solidified the foundations of the big bang theory.
• This is the very concept of Serendipity.
• Zapp's Potato Chips invented the "Voodoo" flavor by a guy spilling a few spices. Someone stuck their finger in the resulting mess and declared it delicious.
• Several of the more iconic moments of George Balanchine's ballet Serenade are examples of this. A dancer falling in rehearsal was added to the ballet, as was another's late arrival.
• A lot of extensible, free-as-in-freedom software (some call it Open Source), ends up like this. Prominent examples are Emacs and UNIX (though originally it was proprietary; only with the GNU project has the licensing been cleared up and extensibility preserved). Other examples include the LISP programming language (especially in previous versions, where it was localized in certain areas (e.g. MAClisp (no relation to the Macintosh) in the MIT AI lab) —recently, it's manifested in de-facto standard libraries), probably because of its built-in extensibility (with defmacro)
• The first purpose-built multiplex theater in the US was the result of this trope. When developing a cinema at Ward Parkway Center in Kansas City, Missouri, AMC discovered that the configuration of the center did not allow for one large screen. So they just made two smaller screens instead, and quickly found they could double their revenue by showing two films at once.
• The annual holiday practice of "tracking Santa" at NORAD supposedly got started because of a typo. In 1955, a Sears advertisement that ran in a Colorado Springs newspaper accidentally printed the phone number for the Continental Air Defense Command in place of a talk-to-Santa hotline for kids. Deluged on his private high-security line by children's Christmas Eve calls for St. Nick, Col. Harry Shoup didn't have the heart to disappoint them, so played along and instructed his staff to give such callers reports on Santa's progress throughout the night. A tradition was born, first as a seasonal call-in line to CONAD and its successor, manned by generations of volunteers from the U.S. and Canadian armed forces, and currently as the noradtrackssanta website.^note Other versions of the story stated that the number was printed correctly and a kid just misdialled the number. The call was resolved quickly and no other calls came in, but Shoup saw a public relations opportunity and decided to start the Santa tracking business.
• Theme parks are occasionally subject to something like this. If you ride The Haunted Mansion ride in Disneyland, you may notice a spiderweb with a spider in the Ballroom scene. The Spider is there because, at some point in 1974, somebody shot a bullet into various attractions, of which only the plexiglass used in The Haunted Mansion could not be repaired properly. The "spider" covers the bullet hole; the result mildly adds to the ambiance (it feels like yet another small detail added to make things spookier).
• Much of the late Don Rickles' stand-up material was ad-libbed. Unlike many stand-up comedians, Rickles didn't write his own material beforehand; everything in his act was all made up from the stuff he said or thought up and saved them in his noggin for future reference. That's how good he was.
• When TVR was developing the Chimera sports car, one of the designers brought his dog to the studio. The dog took a bite out of the front bumper of the clay model while no one was looking. When the designers saw what happened, they thought the notch looked rather good. They smoothed it out and made a corresponding notch on the other side.
• Henny Youngman, the Borscht Belt comedian's famous line, "Take my wife...please!" (as heard in Goodfellas) was the result of a misunderstanding. Youngman was directing an usher to take his wife to her seat for the show, but the request was treated as a joke. Since the line fit his style of comedy so perfectly, he turned it into his catchphrase.
• Every Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade has at least one instance of adlibbing, to the point where the 85th anniversary special declared that "some of the parade's best moments happen when the script goes out the window." Ed McMahon, Willard Scott and Al Roker are especially guilty of this trope.
• In 1773, a horse racer named Willoughby Bertie bred a horse whom he named Potatoes. The boy he asked to write the horse's name down thought it was spelt "pot and eight 'o's", and wrote it as "Potoooooooo" on its feed bin, and Bertie found it funny enough to keep that way.
• Frank Kozik created Labbit in the 90s, using the character in his rock music poster art. In 2000, he entered talks to sell the character as a toy with Japanese manufacturer Bounty Hunter. Kozik had intended to call it the Smokin' Rabbit, but the company accidentally called it the Smorkin' Labbit, which Kozik loved so much he made it official.
• The original sound clips used in the London Underground for 'Mind the gap' and various other announcements were recorded by a professional voice actor, who then decided to demand royalties on every single time the clips played. While trying to work out what to do about this, they overhead one of their sound engineers playing with the mics and saying the same phrases himself, and realised his clips were just as good without charging silly amounts of money.
• Windows' usage of Ctrl-Alt-Delete was originally implemented as a programming backdoor to skip lengthy memory tests during development in the IBM PC project. It remained in when shipped, detailed in the technical manual, and when Windows began experiencing the Blue Screen of Death a decade later, it quickly grew famous as a reboot function.
• Evolution works on this concept as every mutation is random. What works is passed on to the next generation and what doesn't is, most of the time, discarded. There are still a few "errors" that simply are not enough of a threat to be actively erased. For example, giraffes have an incredibly long laryngeal nerve running down and back up their neck when it could just be a few centimeters long instead because the nerve evolved from fishes' ones where they needed to do a loop to cover the operculum.
• A popular meme is to claim an obviously staged scene from a film or TV show (e.g. someone's murder) actually happened and the directors just kept it in.
• At the Japanese surrender ceremony that ended World War II, Canadian representative Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrave accidentally signed his name below rather than above the line for Canada on the Instrument of Surrender, on the line for the French, likely the result of Cosgrove was blind in one eye after being injured in World War I. The French then signed in place of the Dutch, the Dutch in place of New Zealand, and New Zealand signing in blank space. When the Japanese pointed this out, U.S. General Richard Sutherland simply took a pen, scratched out the original countries' names, and then hand wrote them next to the appropriate signature. The Japanese still objected until Sutherland initialized each line, and then they accepted it.

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