The history books give penicillin a birthday: September 3, 1928, the morning Alexander Fleming came home from holiday to a cluttered lab and noticed a forgotten dish where green mold had dissolved the bacteria around it. One glance, a miracle, a date. Neat.
The records underneath are quieter. No notebook entry or letter from that week survives. The first mention of the mold in Fleming's lab notes is dated October 30. Fleming himself once placed the morning on September 28. The tidy version was assembled later, after the mold had saved millions, by the man who found it, and the reporters who loved a tidy morning.
What is solid: the dish was real, the mold really killed the staphylococcus around it, and that mold became penicillin. It just took another decade and two more scientists, Florey and Chain, to turn it into medicine, in time for a war.
I like that the miracle's birthday is fuzzy. We want the days that change everything to arrive tidy and timestamped. They almost never do. Usually someone has to look twice at what everyone else called a mess.