Penicillin was pretty big. Amusing discovery too. As penicillin is fundamentally a derivative of the blue-green mold that can appear on decaying matter, the ide

Penicillin was pretty big. Amusing discovery too. As penicillin is fundamentally a derivative of the blue-green mold that can appear on decaying matter, the idea of injecting it into yourself to combat bacterial infections is something that few would believe. It only began to be regularly used some 14 years after its discovery, even the discover rapidly shared and published his findings. On the other hand, maybe these discoveries are a bit different. It seems the big discoveries often come in the form of falsifying previously held beliefs rather than immediately introducing novel 'actionable' discoveries. For instance Mercury's orbit goes off by a pesky 0.01 degree change per century that could not be accounted for by Newtonian planetary mechanics. That falsification is perhaps at least part of the long chain of events that would culminate in the discovery of relativity.