Failed inventions of the 20th century

[Lumpy]

Ok, we've had the Best and the Worst. How about a tribute to those concepts that sounded good but somehow just didn't work out? (Note: don't include things like 8-track tape, that really were good but later became obsolescent).

Commercial nuclear power.
The Mazda rotary engine.
The Hovercraft (ok, a limited success in specialized niches.)
Eugenics
Lobotomy

[BobT]

DDT

The developers of it got a Nobel Prize. Now it's considered one of the most vile substances on earth.

[Arnold Winkelried]

The electric car. What I mean by "failed invention" is that it never really achieved popularity. But maybe it will become a big hit in the 21st century?

------------------
La franchise ne consiste pas à dire tout ce que l'on pense, mais à penser tout ce que l'on dit.
H. de Livry

[Llardball]

What is DDT, Bob T?

[Yarster]

DDT is a diphenyl aliphatic discovered in 1939. The Nobel Prize in question was awarded in 1948 to Dr. Paul Miller of the Geigy Company (now Novartis) because it was hailed as a great insecticide that stopped the spread of malaria and other horendous bug-borne disease. Check out the history of insecticides on About.com for more info.

[BobT]

When I was vacationing, I bought a special replica copy of Time magazine that came out during the Invasion of Normandy. It contained a glowing article about DDT and how it was going to end disease.

Then Rachel Carson came around.

[Oblio]

Elcassette
Quadrophonic 'stereo'

------------------
A point in every direction is like no point at all

[Oblio]

Quadraphonic

[putrid]

cable tv (It certainly hasn't lived up to the claims made for it.)
nuclear power (For whatever reasons, it certainly has not worked out.)

[Gilligan]

Some minor ones:
Disc camera.
Moped.
Shoe store fluoroscopes. (Thanks, Cecil)

[Aibohphobia]

Celery-flavored Jello.

Really. I'm not kidding.

[Gilligan]

Then I guess you wouldn't like Dr. Brown's Cel-Ray soda. Celery soda.

[Alphagene]

It contained a glowing article about DDT and how it was going to end disease.

IIRC, DDT is making a "comeback", as malaria deaths are increasing drastically worldwide. And some feel that its effect on other fauna are not as devastating as once thought. Don't count it out yet.

------------------
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.

[Mazey]

Beta-formatted video recorders (I mean the SONY ones)

[Homer]

The Mazda Rotary engine is showing it's face in Mazda's newest sports entry... I forget it's name.

--Tim

------------------
We are the children of the Eighties. We are not the first "lost generation" nor today's lost generation; in fact, we think we know just where we stand - or are discovering it as we speak.

[ThufferinThuccotash]

Large scale passenger dirigibles, especially those filled with hydrogen (over Lakehurst, New Jersey).

------------------
TT

"Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it." --Andre Gide

[putrid]

I don't think you're meant to make celery jello alone. I think it's intended to be used as a base for a more involved dish. (I explained that badly. I'm no cook.) It's for vegetable or meat dishes, where a fruit flavored gelatin would be out of place, no?

[scr4]

I've often heard of nuclear fusion as "the technology of the future - and it always will be."

Maglev trains is anoter good example. Still very hard to justify, considering conventional trains can go around 300 km/h now.

Passenger airships are debatable - it was practical for a short while. Hindenburg did make many (tens? hundreds?) of trans-atlantic flights. But I agree that it has been listed as one of the "will become popular again any time now" technologies for the past few decades.

I think Cecil mentioned underwater farms and habitats as one of the predictions that never came to be.

Space colonization and artificial intelligence are also very far behind from the '60s predictions.

I'm not so sure about listing nuclear (fission) power though. Some countries like France and Japan seem to consider it to be worth the trouble.

[Sam Stone]

Commercial nuclear power was not a failed invention - it works as advertised. And in many countries it provides the bulk of the power. But the U.S. has regulated the industry out of existance, because of the scare tactics of a small, vocal minority.

As for DDT, the Nobel was well deserved. Widespread use of DDT saved millions of lives. The main reason it's not in use any more because the Western Green movement has a formula that says "Environment > poor brown people."

[Liberal]

Space colonization and artificial intelligence are also very far behind from the '60s predictions.

I remember in the mid 80s seeing an old Life magazine from the 40s that was all about the future. Naturally, there were all kind of predictions about air cars, Martian colonies, and the like.

But the one that really stuck with me was a caption that appeared under an artist's conception of future fashion. "Women of the 1960s," it said, "will wear helmet shaped hats made of celluloid." LOL!

------------------
"It is lucky for rulers that men do not think." — Adolf Hitler

[metroshane]

new coke

------------------
We live in an age that reads to much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful--Oscar Wilde

[AWB]

I don't know if this was "green movement" hype, but I heard that there is enough DDT in any given person's body that if it was all in their brain, they would die immediately.

(and excuse my use of "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. s/he doesn't cut it. [but that's another topic])

[deus ex machina]

Evidently the value of DDT would make a real GD topic.

As a bird of prey lover, I'd have to say DDT as used when first developedwas an ecological disaster. Nevertheless, it's still needed where malaria is endemic. Ideally, its use should be restricted to the indoor roosting places of mosquitoes, and other stratigic locations.

If you're concerned about the health effects in humans, you're probably horrified that I'd say that it ought to be used indoors. I'm not unaware of evidence that DDT build-up in humans causes health problem -- I take evidence that it acts as a partial estrogen mimic particularly seriously -- but I'm fairly certain that its effects are less serious than chronic or repeated malaria infection.

I may be biased: my brother suffered a life-threatning case of malaria during a Peace Corps stint.

[putrid]

scr4: Good point. I shouldn't have only been thinking about the US.

Hanson: The OP referred to things which didn't work out. As you admitted yourself, it's been regulated away.

Of course, if I had remembered the OP better myself, by the time I posted, I would have realized it had already covered the second thing I mentioned.

So ignore me. :)

I thought by now I'd have thought of some better answers but no. Pooey.

[UncleBeer]

Just a quick tangent. www.junkscience.com (http://www.junkscience.com) has a ton of information concerning DDT.
http://www.junkscience.com/ddtfaq.htm

They also have a UBB powered message board devoted to debunking false or misleading science.

------------------
Dopeler effect:
The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

[KentT]

Hanson: The OP referred to things which didn't work out. As you admitted yourself, it's been regulated away.

WARNING: Statistics ahead.

35% of the electrical power produced in the EU comes from fission reactors. 17% of the world's total production.

France 75%
Sweden, Belgium ~50%
The rest around 30%

30-40 new reactors are under construction throughout the world right now.

I'd hardly call it a failure.



------------------
"No! You can't take my medicine, I need every brain cell blazing to outwit my invisible enemies!"

[robbaba]

The rotary engine made by Mazda is called the Wenkel (sp?) engine I believe. They were used in the Mazda RX7 several years ago.
Great engine and engineering concept. For some reason they never caught on. I believe the biggest problem was that nobody but Mazda knew how to fix them. Unfortunately the marketplace often kills great inventions.

adios.

[John Bredin]

Videophones.

Now I know that videoconferencing is not uncommon in business today. But did it exist even ten years ago to any serious degree? And we certainly don't have a little videophone screen on every worker's desk and every kitchen wall.

But the "videophone on every desk" has been a consistent prediction of both fiction (Jetsons!) and non-fiction from the 1920s with mechanical television almost up to this decade. Heck, I recall seeing an old magazine ad where Herbert Hoover -- BEFORE he was President, when he was merely Secretary of Commerce -- participated in an experimental DC-to-NYC (mechanical) videophone call, with the tagline that this was going to be common in just a few years.

I understand there were "bandwidth" problems, and the "holy grail" the engineers were trying to reach was a full-motion video picture that could fit into the spare bandwidth of the telephone circuit and thus didn't require special wires or the use of two phone circuits for a single call. But still, that it was so consistently predicted and yet consistently never came to fruition!

[NITWATCH2]

The 'burn-anything-flammable' automobile turbine engine. Great concept with plenty of power but it had a nasty tendency to burn the legs off of anyone standing behind it when fired up or do little things like melt the then steel and chrome bumpers of the car behind. They never could develop a good, safe muffler system for it.

Remember the car/plane? One carried the wings in a trailer along with the tail and prop? It worked remarkably well, but then air flight kind of got complex and not many people wanted to buy such a car. Back then, with so few cars on the roads, it was thought that one could land anywhere. Not any more.

Then the passenger jet which could eject sealed passenger modules in an emergency. They would float down on parachutes and were designed to float in the water. Too expensive. (Killing passengers is cheaper.)

Airplanes made out of magnesium. Remember those? Ricky Nelson's DC-3 was made of the stuff. It has this little tendency to burn and ignites easily. They use it in flares and stuff. During WW2 they ran short on aluminum and used the metal, apparently without considering that if the aircraft crashed and a fire started, it would go up like a road flare.

You can actually light this metal with a cigarette lighter and I used to get magnesium wire as a kid and light the stuff. It burned VERY, VERY bright and HOT! Some of those aircraft are still around. (I heard the new pennies are magnesium coated with copper but have not gotten around to poking any into a blow torch lately to find out.)

------------------
The Night Watch always knows things.

[NITWATCH2]

DDT

I almost forgot. It is illegal to use it in the US of A. BUT it is not illegal to make it, which we still do, but the thousands of tons. We ship it to underdeveloped countries, where they poison themselves as they slather it on their crops, and wipe out various species of their wild life. PLUS IT GETS INTO THE VEGETABLES, which we then buy from them for a song and sell to our citizens at a high profit.

We ship DDT to Mexico and they send it back in the form of Illegals and Tomatoes. See, major business has no problem in continuing to produce a lethal chemical that disrupts the food chain and selling it to other nations and their lobbyists have made sure that Congress does not make it illegal to do so.

What the hell? What's the poisoning of a few hundred thousand people and the wiping out of about 100 different species plus eventually generating birth defects worth when it comes to profit? (Sarcasm here, just so none of you 'intelligent' people will yell at me.)

------------------
The Night Watch always knows things.

[Sam Stone]

Of course, as opposed to the 500 million people saved by the eradication of Malaria as a direct result of DDT spraying. But since those are poor brown people in other countries, they probably don't count, right?

[Sofa King]

How about:

Direct Current power for the home

Push-button automatic transmissions for automobiles

The Habbakuk (a quarter-mile long aircraft carrier designed to protect North Atlantic convoys in WWII and made of... ice)

The autogyro

The Salad Shooter

The Backpack Helicopter.

A fun idea, & it did actually work.

But the range was much too short to be practical.
---------------------------------------------

Food tablets. Yes, they exist, & are used as survival rations. But they are expensive, & I gather they pose certain nutritional problems.
---------------------------------------------
Radium-based Non-Prescription medicines.

No, I'm not kidding. Available in the 1920's.
Torturing their users with cancerous tumors ever since.

------------------
Save The Endangered Jackalope! Send Cash Now! If You Do This, I Will Use The Cash To Save Any Jackalope That I Happen To Find! Send Cash Now! Before It's Too Late! My Bills, I Mean The Jackalope's Bills Are Due The 15th Of The Month!
This has been a message from the Illuminated Committee To Save The Jackalope. Fnord.

dhanson, enough with the "poor brown people" tripe. DDT, while it served a useful purpose at the time, is one of the worst toxins in terms of lingering effects. This is bad for people of all colors and economic classes, not to mention every other living thing. Safer poisons have since been developed. It's kind of like saying "since the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima brought WWII to a quicker end (thus saving countless lives), nuclear war is always a good solution to any military problem."

Oh, and my entries are:
fluorocarbons
cyclamates
Dianetics

Also:
est
TM
group sex
Disco
Andy Kaufman

...and...

The Unification Church
"open" marriage
PCP
The Moral Majority
Gary Coleman

[RoboDude]

I'm surprised nobody mentioned Divx. It was more or less doomed from the start.

Also, didn't some company representative drink DDT to show that it had no harmful effects on humans?

[GasDr]

8-tracks
tamagotchi (sp?)
spray on hair
stuffed crust pizza (how much more fat can you get on a food item?)
The Gap

[Doctordec]

How about stereo AM radio

The wire recorder.
It came before tape recorders and used a roll of fine wire to record audio. My Dad had one and still has dozens of rolls of unhearable sounds.

Fizzies.
We used to eat a couple of packs and then have belching contests. They've disappeared.

The scent disc
Looked like a little CD player that played "smells" like roses or chocolate.

[Sam Stone]

Tennhippie: I don't buy it. The fact is, the people who want it banned have political clout, and the people who's lives are saved don't.

Let me ask you: If a compound came along that miraculously cured cancer and heart disease, and saved millions of Americans a year, do you think we'd ban it because there was some evidence that it caused eggshell thinning in birds?

DDT is but one example of the western green movement's disregard for the lives and comfort of other people in the 3rd world, and of poor people in our own countries.

[putrid]

I would contend that the only reason nuclear plants are still around in the US is because it would be economically unfeasible to shut them down, just as it would be economically unfeasible -- under the current circumstances -- to build more. That is not to say that the situation may not change someday.

I dare say I could come up with figures to show that horses still provided the majority of non-walking land transportation long after people saw they were being replaced. In the case of horses, they had prevailed long enough to not be considered a failure by me.

And when I wrote pooey I meant phooey.

Personal jet packs (Cecil did that one)
3D Movies
Me163 Komet (History's only rocket powered combat aircraft. A literal dead-end technology for a lot of German pilots.)
Cryogenics
Heroin as a cure for Opium addiction
Nanotechnology (might catch on in the next century though)
Neural nets
Smokeless cigarettes
New style education
The League of Nations

[Timothy Campbell]

Mike King: The ME163 Komet was the first rocket powered combat aircraft, and the only one "used in anger" but it was not "history's only" one. The Brits created the Saunders-Roe SR.53 rocket fighter (although admittedly it had a tiny jet engine so they poor pilot didn't have to glide back to base as the Komet pilot did).

But I digress...

More failed inventions:

Aquacars
Home food dehyrdators (who needs these!?)
All those perpetual motion machines that the inventor will let you invest in to "get the last bugs worked out"

[makphisto]

Just a Q:

The Habbakuk (a quarter-mile long aircraft carrier designed to protect North Atlantic convoys in WWII and made of... ice)

Does anyone have any more information about this?

Thanks.

[Beruang]

Doctordec:

I may be mistaken, but I believe the wire recorder was a precursor to the tape recorder. It established a new line of technology, and as that line advanced it was replaced by improved designs. Thus, I wouldn't call it a "failure" per se, but rather "obsolete," like the Model T, the rotary dial, or the Apple computer (troll alert! troll alert! ;)

As for the marketplace killing invention, we were just talking about Beta-format video the other day. The picture quality was allegedly better (though personally I could never tell the difference), but the tapes weren't long enough to record movies, which is what most people wanted in those days. (Still do.)

And if I can add my suggestion to the list:

professional team tennis

[Neidhart]

Polaroid instant movie film (1978). Made obsolete by video as soon as it was introduced, *and* the picture quality was crappy.

Household robots.

[whitetho]

From Doctordec: The wire recorder. It came before tape recorders and used a roll of fine wire to record audio. My Dad had one and still has dozens of rolls of unhearable sounds.

The wire recorder is actually another 19th century invention, generally credited to Valdemar Poulsen of Denmark in 1898, although there had been earlier work by others. See http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~dmorton/mrchrono.html for more details.

Also, the topic of old wire recording recoverability comes up every so often on rec.antiques.radio+phono, and the general concensus is that they usually can be played. See: Life of signal on wire recording? (http://x26.deja.com/viewthread.xp?AN=499965239&search=thread&svcclass=dnyr&ST=PS&recnum=%3cspr.bogus-1107992006470001@pool0308.cvx19-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net%3e%231/1&gro up=rec.antiques.radio%2bphono&frpage=getdoc.xp) for more details.

[KeithB]

Fizzies are not dead!

They were discontinued because of the sacharine scare, but now they are back with nutrasweet!
www.fizzies.com (http://www.fizzies.com)

(My vote for most annoying web site!)

I just bought some from Ralphs, a local supermarket, not too long ago.

[KissThis]

Did anyone mention:
Delorean automobile,
Edsel,
and was it the chevy chevette? I am not sure (I know it was made by chevrolet,) that had the motor in the back with all the (sp)louvers in the trunk?
GMC Pacer, yeech I was almost run over on the freeway after renting one..it could not get up the on ramp fast enough to join on going traffic

[Oblio]

KissThis

I think you meant Chevy Corvair and AMC Pacer.

------------------
A point in every direction is like no point at all

[KissThis]

Right you are oblio and thanks!

[Sofa King]

Mekphito, here you go with the ice aircraft carrier thing. http://www.skypoint.com/~jbp/furashita/habbak_f.htm

Sorry I left that out.

[Sofa King]

Oh, dear. I misspelled your name and failed to mention that the latter half of the page I cite is fanciful tripe. This critter was never actually built.

[makphisto]

No problemo, King, thanks for the info.

[Gilligan]

That reminds me of the concrete ship in the Delaware Bay. We used to see it when we'd go down the shore when I was a kid. Here's a link, if interested, but not much information on it:
http://www.captainadam.com/capemay/concrete.htm

dhanson: What part don't you "buy"? That it is unnecessarily dangerous? That there are better chemicals available?
The fact is, the makers of this stuff are using their political clout to say, in effect: "Okay, we won't sell it in this country. But surely it's okay to dump it on the poor brown people." I'm surprised you go along with that sort of attitude. Incidentally, DDT is not the only way to fight malaria.

"When your only solution is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

more failed inventions:

Ford Pinto
electroshock therapy
Quaalude
3-D movies
televangelism
transactional analysis
headphones
Riverdance

AzRaek, my age shows here. I call these modern devices headsets or earphones or Walkmans. When I think of headphones, I think of those bulky, ear-muff-shaped contraptions we used to use (in the 60's and 70's) in the privacy of our homes. I used to fall asleep with those accursed things on and wake up with hot ears.

[AzRaek]

Head phones are a failed invention? Go to a gym where everyone has the latest book on tape in their Walkmans. I nearly kill a jogger every week whose wearing them and can't hear my car.
And how can Deloreans be considered a failure, when they saved Marty McFly's existence?


------------------
John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt. That's my name too.
Wait, no it isn't.

[ThufferinThuccotash]

Speaking of concrete ships (the nautical equivalent of a lead balloon), the Palo Alto (http://rainey.blueneptune.com/~blessing/seacliff/paloalto.html) is a fine example, grounded near Santa Cruz, CA

------------------
TT

"Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it." --Andre Gide

Instead of DDT, why not just send people in under-developed countries instect repellant. Yeah, they'd smell bad, but the alternative is quite a bit worse.

Instead of DDT, why not just send people in under-developed countries insect repellant? Yeah, they'd smell bad, but the alternative is quite a bit worse.

[Earl Snake-Hips Tucker]

How about the "Savannah," the world's first (and only) nuclear-powered cargo ship?

Painted white like the white elephant that it was, and anchored for many years in Mt Pleasant, SC as one of the ships in the Patriots' Point naval museum.

[Rysdad]

Timothy Campbell-

I love my food dehydrator. I go camping alot, and dehydrated food makes up a significant part of the food I bring. BTW, homemade beef jerky is damn fine stuff.

[Arken]

You people are not on the fringe enough with this worst invention thing. Now here's a few REALLY failed inventions of the 20th century:

The Edison Cement House - Invented by old Thomas Alva after buying the largest cement plant in the country in the turn of the century, the drab, cold, ugly buildings were poured into place with a set of molds that cost $175,000 in 1905!

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion - A streamlined car in which the driver sat in the centre surrounded by windows with a periscope for rear view and ocean vessel-type steering. It was rear-ended during a test drive in 1933, killed the driver and seriously injured all passengers.

The Curtiss-Wright Air-Car - Basically a personal hovercraft. It was huge, noisy and next to impossible to steer or brake.

Paper Clothing - Popular in the '60s. I don't think I need to go any farther with this one.

The Baby Bonder - Thought to be a revolutionary idea when it came out in the late '80s, this bib with two baby bottles in it was intended for men to 'share the breast-feeding experience'. Readers of Bloom County will know how ridiculous the baby bonder really was.

Smell-o-Vision - Tried several times over the years with different methods including pumping the scents into the theatre through the air system and with scratch-'n-sniff cards. Its most notorious use was in John Waters' film, Polyesther.

Fallout Shelters - Like anyone would live through nuclear armageddon? Right.

And... I think New Coke was mentioned, but what about Crystal Pepsi? Not only a ridiculous idea in the first place: 'it tastes just like Pepsi, but... IT'S CLEAR!', it didn't even live up to that promise, tasting more like an open Pepsi bottle that had been sitting on the counter for two or three days.

Sony, though, in my opinion, is the true king of failed 20th century inventions. They have invented:

Reel-to-reel video recording (which came out AFTER VHS and Beta, was only compatable with specially-fittend Trinitrons, was a big pain in the ass and only recorded one hour. Of course, my Dad was stupid enough to buy it.)

The Video Discman - A portable CD-Rom machine which played specialized Sony-only CD-Roms. It cost about $600 and had 4 or 5 titles such as a world atlas. Not a big seller.

The Videodisc/Laserdisc (developed with others) - Good idea, except for the limited amount of time per side, but it just never really caught on.

The Digital Audio Tape - This scared them so much, they invented all sorts of evil copy protection, but DATs are now for the most part only used by audio professionals and it's even being phased out there.

There's lots more, but I think you get the point.

On that note...

Is anyone familiar with the steel houses that were available through Sears in the 50s? There were 3 or 4 here in Knoxville, and I lived in one of them for about 5 months. It's gone now. You can imagine how it felt in that metal box...to make matters worse, the floor was concrete. If I did live in one again, I'd be sure to collect refrigerator magnets for the walls.

[psycat90]

Yugo
Automats
Susan B Anthony Dollar
Interbang
Esperanto(sp?)
Smell-o-Vision
Candy Cigarettes

------------------
so you found a girl who thinks really deep thoughts. what's so amazing about really deep thoughts? Tori Amos

[Sunspace]

Esperanto seems to be chugging along at a low level here in North America, but I suspect that it is much more popular overseas.

There was an Reuters article about it in the Saturday (6 December 1999) edition of the Toronto Star which stated that it had three million speakers, which puts it at the level of a sizable minority language.

What is "Interbang"?

As for "Smellovision", they're trying to bring it back again, via an accessory for your computer, a browser plugin, and special markup for web pages. It was in Wired a couple of months ago.
----
"Kiu frenezas? Cxu la mondo aux mi?"

[DAVEW0071]

Automats were not a failed invention. They merely became obsolete. In their day, Horn & Hardart's were immensely popular and economical. And from what I understand the food was downright yummy. As with many other inventions, they were phased out in favor of similar ideas. Fast food restaurants are not that much different from the original automats.

I don't think it's fair to say they were failed inventions. You might as well say that buggy whips were failed inventions because they aren't around anymore. Not true. They just aren't as necessary or as popular.

------------------
The Dave-Guy
"since my daughter's only half-Jewish, can she go in up to her knees?" J.H. Marx

[Studi]

Solar powered flashlights!

Couldn't resist....actually, I probably could.

[Boris B]

Hey, TennHippie (or anyone else who knows) what's est? Is that an acronym for something, or just a word?

------------------
- Boris B, Hellacious Ornithologist

[matt_mcl]

Re Esperanto: Wrong on both counts. Not only is two to six million speakers and a corpus of five hundred thousand works of literature, not to mention serious consideration as an auxiliary language by the EU, not indicative of a failure; it is also not a twentieth century invention, but a nineteenth. Domaghe!

How about the "pop rocks" ..the small pieces of candy containing CO2 gas which was released when the candy was chewed. What fun that was. Taken out of the stores.never to be seen again..at least I haven't seen them in years.

------------------
Here's to those who wish us well...may all the rest go straight to hell

How about "pop candies" ...little bits of candy rocks containing CO2 which was released when the candy was chewed? They were pulled off the shelves never to be seen again.( at least I didn't see them since).

[WhiteNight]

Quadrophonic? You mean, a specific encoding of four-channel sound, or the idea of more than two channels?

If you mean the encoding, then sure, many proposed standards for doing something die. But if you mean the idea of many-channel audio, then it's alive and well. Almost all current sound cards support some sort of many-channel audio, as do DVDs/DVD Players and newer stereos.

Headphones? Not dead, just a niche market. I own them so I can drown out other sounds, so I don't hear a distracting mix. Earphones are for the other end of that, where you want to hear the distractions, and are willing to sacrifice some quality.

DDT vs Insecticide: You think millions of cans of Off! would be better for the environment?

Paper Clothing: An idea a bit before its time. Paper, like throw-away gowns are made of, isn't a nice clothing material, but the idea of garments as cheap as paper, from disposable materials, is getting closer. Imagine that future with custom designed clothing, dispensible in a minute from millions of vending machines... They just tried this before it was practical and they got all the drawbacks without the benefits.

Food dehydrators: Handy gadgets. If you like beef jerky and dried fruit, etc... I love that sort of food. But, I use screen stretched over an over rack, and put the oven on the lowest temperature. Probably wastes a lot of power by comparrision, but it works tolerably.

[pldennison]

skelton, that explains why I saw Pop Rocks all over the place among the impulse items at the register at Target on Thursday evening. So much for that theory, huh?

------------------
"It's my considered opinion you're all a bunch of sissies!"--Paul's Grandfather

[OpalCat]

AzRaek, my age shows here. I call these modern devices headsets or earphones or Walkmans. When I think of headphones, I think of those bulky, ear-muff-shaped contraptions we used to use (in the 60's and 70's) in the privacy of our homes. I used to fall asleep with those accursed things on and wake up with hot ears.

How can you call them a "failed invention"? They are indespensible in the music industry, and many of us still use them at home, too. They give MUCH better sound quality.

------------------
--
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
"Meat flaps, yellow!" - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com (http://www.opalcat.com)

[OpalCat]

pld: I've seen pop rocks all over too. I guess they just don't sell them in Assboink anymore.

------------------
--
Teeming Millions: http://fathom.org/teemingmillions
"Meat flaps, yellow!" - DrainBead, naked co-ed Twister chat
O p a l C a t
www.opalcat.com (http://www.opalcat.com)

[robespierre]

Arken, if your going to list the every other chapter of Rhino's "Forgotten Fads and Fabulous Flops" Then the least you could do is give the proper credit.

Sure LaserDisc is quite dead, But VideoCD's are still very much alive. Huge in Asia, where it is the format of choice, and a very popular choice with bootleggers of all stripe. For some legit ones you could try www.videocds.com (http://www.videocds.com)

In general is it really needed to list models of cars that failed? I would think they don't actually count as "invetions"

------------------
<IMG SRC="http://www.angelfire.com/zine/robespierre/cuervo.gif" width=260 height=66></IMG>
Freelance Ne'er-do-well, Reasonable rates.

The Fiat 128 was an invention that shouldn't have gotten off the drawing board, let alone into my driveway!


------------------
FixedBack

"Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before."~~G.K.Chesterton

[Garfield226]

Mentioned have been New Coke and Crystal Pepsi. How about Pepsi One? Also on TLC's American Drinks: History in a Glass (or something like that) they mentioned MOXIE.

------------------
Well, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge or you are not aware of the power of the presence of a pool table in your community. Ya' got trouble my friends! -
Prof. Harold Hill
Gary Conservatory
Gold Medal Class
'05

[Bluepony]

Hmmm....

-- Popeil's Pocket Fisherman
-- the RMS Titanic
-- Tony Orlando and Dawn
-- The Boston Red Sox

------------------
"...send lawyers, guns, and money..."

Warren Zevon