"Happy accident" redirects here. For other uses, see Happy Accidents.
The photo was intended to be of a black-crowned night heron; the photographer was initially unaware of the pileated woodpecker flashing through.
Serendipity means an unplanned, fortuitous discovery. The term was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. In a letter he wrote to his friend Horace Mann, Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made about a (lost) painting[1] of Bianca Cappello by Giorgio Vasari by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes, he told his correspondent, were "always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of".
The notion of serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of scientific innovation. Examples are Alexander Fleming's accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928, the invention of the microwave oven by Percy Spencer in 1945, and the invention of the Post-it note by Spencer Silver in 1968.
In June 2004, a British translation company voted the word to be one of the ten English words hardest to translate.[2] However, due to its sociological use, the word has since been exported into many other languages.[3]
;){kind=link}