The person who discovered phosphorus was hoping to find something else.

In Hamburg in 1669, the self-

styled chemist Hennig Brand was, like many of his peers at the time, trying to turn base metals into gold.
Believing that the human body was the key, he boiled large amounts of urine and heated the residue,
eventually producing a white, waxy substance that glowed in the dark. Brand called his discovery
phosphorus, from the Greek for “light-bearer.”