new coke
We live in an age that reads to much to be wise, and thinks too much to be beautiful–Oscar Wilde
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])
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 developed*was 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.
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.
Just a quick tangent. 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.
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!”
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
8-tracks
tamagotchi (sp?)
spray on hair
stuffed crust pizza (how much more fat can you get on a food item?)
The Gap