For my example, I give the car alarm. Seems great, right? If someone tries to steal your car, an alarm goes off, raising the hue and cry for all good citizens to come to your aid and thwart the dastardly thief.
But we all know the problem. When we hear a car alarm, we wish the dumbass car owner would come out and turn the damn thing off because he did something stupid to set it off. I have never in my life heard a car alarm going off and thought that a car was being stolen. Not once, not ever.
Wait a minute. VOW, my dear friend. I love the veg-o-matic. If what you mean is the thing that cuts French fries. They really work. If I see one at a garage sale or flea market, I grab it. The blades are tough as nails but the plastic housing it sits in eventually cracks. But most of the infomercial stuff is crap, I agree.
ETA…when you crossed the prairie you shoulda turned left at Missouri and then you’d be an Arkansan. Like me.
The gripping teeth on the part that mashes downward smash the top portion of the vegetable to goo. And that makes the thing a bitch to clean! Really a difficult chore for the little girl scouring out plates with sand on the prairie!
And when the blades go splodey, you feel like you are being attacked by knives.
Best way to make french fries? Go to McDonald’s.
~VOW
Lots of kitchen gadgets fall into that category. Many of them are single use items, and would only be rarely used anyway. Like an onion dicer. Sure, it does dice quickly, but the time it takes to get it out, assemble, chop, disassemble, clean, is much more than just using a knife and doing it the old fashioned way. There are also the things that people get expecting that they’ll use them a lot, but then never do. Things like juicers, bread makers, dehydrators, etc.
Home intercoms might fall into this category. A popular upgrade to homes in the 70’s and 80’s was a built-in intercom/radio system throughout the house. It seems like it would be a great way to avoid yelling for whoever you needed, but I never saw one actually get used in the homes which had one. Even the radio wasn’t used since it had a crappy speaker and poor sound quality.
I thought the purpose of car alarms isn’t so much to get anyone to run over to rescue, but rather, to scare burglars off. Most crooks don’t want anything that could bring attention, just like how even a poodle that can’t bite for anything can still bark and yap loudly enough to make burglars think “This is too much trouble, I’m bailing out.”
Agree on the kitchen gadgets. As a bachelor only had the basic pots and pans and dinnerware. Disagree on the intercoms though - bought a house with one and fixed it up. Great baby monitors and for spying on your kids. The music capabilities were lacking (I think the speakers ran on three watts or something) but better than nothing.
In Samuel C. Florman’s book Blaming Technology (his follow-up to The Existential Pleasures of Engineering) he mentions two inventions that they had high hopes for, but which went nowhere.
One was Corfam, a new material that was going to replace leather as shoe material. It had been invented in the 1930s by DuPont, and introduced in 1963. They confidently predicted that over a quarter of US shoes would be made of Corfam by 1904. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very comfortable. So Dupont decided to go after the fashion industry. But polyvinyl chloride was shinier and cheaper. By 1971, Dupont threw in the towel and gave up on Corfam
The other was fluidics, a sort of fluid-based analog to electronics. Entire books had been written about fluidics, how to build and use them, and so on. Until the 1990s there was still a pretty neat interactive fluidics exhibit at the Boston Museum of Science.
What happened? Fluidics didn’t work very well when it got too cold and the fluids froze. It came out at the same time that electronic circuits were undergoing a phenomenal series of reductions, the one that produced Moore’s Law. There was no way that fluidics could be as versatile as electronics or could be reduced as far, or function in as extreme conditions. Fluidics was reduced to a laboratory curiosity with no practical use.
Fluidics is now being reconsidered not as an analogue to electronics, but for very specific uses where advantage could be taken of its no-moving-parts nature and freedom from electronic control
Those solar-powered fans that you put in your car window to circulate air when you’re parked. It seems like it would be a great way to keep your car cool, but there’s no way a dinky-fan powered by a few solar cells is going to move enough air to make any sort of significant difference in how hot your car is.
I remember the insane amount of hype before the Segway came out. It was a total secret, just teased as the invention that would change the entire world. And then it was unveiled, and the world said whatever and walked away laughing.
I bought a Kuerig when they had been on the market a short time. Biggest waste of money around here in awhile. I have well water that goes through a bit of a cheap filtration thingy to the sinks. It wasn’t enough to go through the filter packet on the coffee maker. It would make 2 pots of coffee before being not usable. Those replacement filter packets were over $10.00. So I had to buy bottled water. Which slightly helped. And the coffee was cold. Stupid.