A great post from Gizmodo about inventions that were not necessarily the result of years and years of thinking, but of accidental discovery.  The first paragraph is a literally a teaser to get you into the story:

Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon after his WWI stint in the Navy, was known as an electronics genius. In 1945, Spencer was fiddling with a microwave-emitting magnetron—used in the guts of radar arrays—when he felt a strange sensation in his pants.

via Whoops! The 10 Greatest (Accidental) Inventions of All Time.