The Accidental Inventions That We’re All Grateful For

To be honest, until I started researching this topic, I had no idea how dry cleaning works. Fortunately, Wikipedia is here to tell me that it refers not to the clothing staying completely dry but to cleaning being done with a solvent other than water. But how does someone come up with a process to clean clothes that doesn’t use water?

Well, if you’re Jean Baptiste Jolly, you wait for your maid’s clumsiness to help you out! As the story goes, she knocked over a lamp that spilled turpentine onto a tablecloth, and he noticed that the area with turpentine on it seemed cleaner. It’s amazing what good can come from an accident!