From the zany to the dangerous to the just plain dumb, here is TIME's list (in no particular order) of some of the world's bright ideas that just didn't work out.
SEGWAY Give inventor Dean Kamen this: he's a master of buzz. A closely guarded secret that was supposed to change the world upon its release in 2001, the Segway never brought about its promised revolution in transportation. Though the technology is pretty cool — very expensive gyroscopes make the thing nearly impossible to tip over (though George W. Bush found a way) — the Segway's sales far underperformed vs. Kamen's predictions. It lives on as the vehicle of choice for mall cops and lazy tourists, but the Segway's best contribution might be as the vehicle of choice for failed magician Gob Bluth in Arrested Development.
NEW COKE
Marketers should have known — don't mess with consumers' sentimental attachment to a product. Especially when it's 99-year-old Coca-Cola. The "newer, sweeter" version, introduced April 23, 1985, succeeded in blind taste tests but flopped in the real world. Phone calls, letters and rants from Coke die-hards flooded in, and just three months after its debut, New Coke was removed, and the word Classic was added to all Coke cans and bottles to assure consumers they were getting their first love.
CLIPPY
"It looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like help?" No question drew more ire from Microsoft Office users than Clippy's snappy opener. The assumption-prone office assistant made its debut in Microsoft Office 97 as an acrobatic virtual paper clip ready to help complete any task. The only problem was that Clippy had trouble holding its tongue. As soon as the word Dear hit the page, it burst into letter-writing mode, ready to help structure a person's most private thoughts. Clippy no longer stars in a lead role for the word-processing program, mainly because of its obsession with bouncing on users' documents and the fact that, well, nobody seems to write letters anymore.
A potent herbicide used from 1961 to 1971 in the Vietnam War, Agent Orange was designed to cut through Vietnam's thick canopy of foliage to reveal enemy troops beneath. While it succeeded, the price was high: exposure proved deadly to humans, causing cancers, birth defects and a slew of other disorders. Some 21 million gallons of it were dumped on Vietnam, resulting in hundreds of thousands of injuries and birth defects to Vietnamese citizens. U.S. veterans faced exposure too; they received a $180 million settlement from its manufacturers in 1984.
Released at the height of the tech boom in the late 1990s, the CueCat was a massively expensive failure. Millions of the cat-shaped bar-code scanners were produced and shipped for free across the U.S., in hopes that people would use them to scan specially marked bar codes to visit Internet sites. (How this was easier than a typing a link, the company never did answer.) Despite a much ballyhooed launch, with CueCat codes printed in Wired and BusinessWeek, consumers never got into the idea of reading their magazines next to a wired cat-shaped scanner, and the CueCat became little more than a high-tech paperweight.
The flimsy piece of foundation that brought the U.S. economy tumbling into recession, sub-prime mortgages are risky loans given to people with shaky credit histories. When interest rates dipped in 2004, banks began granting mortgages to people who really, really shouldn't have had them. Even worse, many were structured adjustable-rate mortgages, with interest rates that climbed after the first few years. The result was a wave of foreclosures and banks with a lot of bad loans on their books. In short, financial catastrophe.
Worn in combination with the corset, the crinoline was fashion at its most uncomfortable. A relic of the Victorian era, crinolines occasionally measured some six feet across, making simple daily tasks like, you know, walking through doors challenging. Heels look downright practical by comparison.
The Virtual Boy will go down as Nintendo's shortest-lived system, staying on the market for just six months in 1995 before its mercy killing. The system consisted of bulky, bright red headgear that completely obscured a gamer's vision as he tried to play games rendered in rudimentary 3-D graphics. It was expensive (retailing at $180) and came with a limited slate of games (only 14 were ever available in the U.S.) Nintendo decided to focus its efforts on the far more successful and traditional Nintendo 64 system, relegating the Virtual Boy to the recycling bin.
Blast you, Farmville. The most addictive of Facebook games is hardly even a game — it's more a series of mindless chores on a digital farm, requiring the endless clicking of a mouse to plant and harvest crops. And yet Zynga, the evil genius behind this bizarre digital addiction, says more than 10% of Americans have logged in to create online homesteads. How many hours of lost productivity does that translate to? Tough to guess. But for me, personally, at least dozens. Sorry, TIME.
The health scourge of the 2000s, trans fats were invented for a practical purpose. In the late 1800s, people began adding hydrogen to oils like vegetable oil to increase the shelf life of foods. But modern studies found that the combination, which does not occur naturally, had unforeseen health consequences, contributing to a rise in bad cholesterol and increasing the risk of heart disease. Manufacturers like McDonald's raced to remove trans fats from their foods, and in 2006, food manufacturers in the U.S. were required to label the amount of trans fats included in their products.
Invented in 1959 by Dr. DeForest C. Jarvis, Honegar is exactly what it sounds like: a mix of equal parts honey and apple-cider vinegar. Jarvis drew his inspiration from the drinking habits of rural Vermont farmers, who he believed to be particularly healthy. While the unpalatable recipe failed to catch on (though there are modern-day devotees), the science may not be all bad: both honey and apple-cider vinegar contain a slew of important antioxidants and are folk treatments for ailments like arthritis.
When the Hindenburg was designed in 1931, its makers made the fateful choice to use hydrogen instead of helium to set the blimp aloft. Hydrogen was cheaper and more readily available but had the nasty side effect of being highly flammable. That proved to be a problem in 1937, when the famed blimp caught fire and crashed in just 36 seconds, spelling the end to the hydrogen blimp. Most current blimps, including the famous Goodyear ones, are powered by far less volatile helium.
HAIR IN A CAN
Cheese, Spam, sardines — nothing really good has ever come from a can. Hair is no exception. Hyped breathlessly on off-hour infomercials, spray-on hair is supposed to cover up bald spots. In practice, the can emits a fine powder that ends up looking a little better than if you had used a can of spray paint. If nothing else, it's evidence that there's definitely something to be said for growing old with dignity.
DDT was supposed to be the magic bullet vs. the scourge of insect-borne diseases like malaria. Discovered in 1873, DDT (short for the less catchy dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) wasn't used widely until 1939, when Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller noted its effectiveness as a pesticide during World War II, a discovery that earned him a Nobel Prize in 1948. After the war, use exploded: from 1942 to 1972, some 1.35 billion lb. of DDT were used in the U.S.
It's a technology that can make bad singers sound good and really bad singers (like T-Pain, pictured here) sound like robots. And it gives singers who sound like Kanye West or Cher the misplaced confidence that they too can croon. Thanks a lot, computers.
RED DYE No.2
Among the most ubiquitous food colorings in the 1970s, Red Dye No. 2 was pulled from the market in 1976 after Soviet scientists claimed that tests showed a link between the substance and cancer. Was the panic overblown? Probably — no one ever succumbed to a red-dye disease. But the fact that the scare pulled red M&Ms from bags for a decade is enough for the substance to make this list.
The 1971 model is, hands down, one of the worst cars of all time. That's what happens when an automobile has the nasty tendency to literally explode when involved in a rear-end collision. Adding insult to injury was the infamous memo Ford wrote after learning about the problem, arguing it'd be cheaper to pay settlements to victims than to fix the Pinto.
PARACHUTE JACKET
Honestly, you can probably guess where this is going. Down. Fast. Designed in 1912 by German inventor Franz Reichelt, the parachute jacket had a high-profile unveiling when Reichelt wore one for a jump from the Eiffel Tower. It didn't deploy. Reichelt died.
Betamax wasn't so much a bad product as a lesson in marketing gone awry. The also-ran to VHS in the video-format wars, Betamax was pushed by Sony as a proprietary format in 1975 before it was completely ready, in a race to get manufacturers on board. But while Betamax could record up to an hour of video, VHS could record up to two hours. That slight advantage was enough for VHS to gain a foothold in the market, one it never relinquished. Betamax became a footnote.
In the 1930s, London nannies lacking space for their young ones resorted to the baby cage. It's exactly what it sounds like: a creepy wire contraption, patented in the U.S. in 1922, that lets you claim that space outside your city window for your infant. Risky? Maybe, but so convenient. How sweet, how sick.
It's no secret that overexposure to UV rays — either natural sunshine or manufactured — produces negative effects. In fact, about 90% of skin cancer incidents are the direct result of UV radiation. The role of tanning beds remains key. Introduced in the U.S. in the 1970s, they've continued growing in popularity, especially among teens, despite well-publicized risks. An April 2010 study showed for the first time that indoor tanners specifically may form dependencies in the same way that drugs and alcohol do.
It doesn't matter how popular they are, they're pretty ugly. Crocs, introduced in 2002, mostly take the form of rubber clogs but have been transformed into high heels and loafers. Their manufacturing company announced on April 26, 2010, that it would also start making ballet flats. "If we make it a little bit more stylish, then we start to appeal to a larger audience," said the company's CEO. Which means they just might be attractive enough to do your laundry in.
HULA CHAIR
Is it an amusement-park ride or a workout device? The Hula Chair attempts to create the ab-workout sensation of using a hula hoop (actual exercise) while sitting down (generally not considered exercise). Giving your abs a workout while filing papers is a nice idea, but trying to focus while your lower half is throttling around like this is absurd and, more to the point, oddly erotic. Oh, and the chair costs upwards of $250.
When broadcasting your every thought via Facebook and Twitter isn't enough, there's Foursquare, the next generation of creepy social networking. Instead of saying where you are, you can use your phone's GPS to broadcast the address. Just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism, with which you can earn badges for checking into your local Starbucks more than anyone else. While coupons eventually come along as bonus incentive, Foursquare simply builds another layer onto a generation living virtually. Introduced in 2009, the site has only a million users — a drop in the bucket compared with Facebook, expected to soon reach 500 million. But like most social-networking phenomena, its usage is only growing.
Blinking ads, flashing banner ads, singing ads. Escaping advertising was already a hopeless endeavor online in the early 2000s when Web browsers introduced pop-up ads, an almost unavoidable trick by websites to generate revenue. Hundreds of angry Facebook groups have been created to deride pop-up ads. Though pop-up blockers were eventually created, you still never know when you're going to click on a link that will bring a flurry of pop-up ads or freeze the computer screen altogether.
With the iPhone, some people really do mind fingerprints. One Austrian company found a novel solution for this present-day quandary: cover your digits with latex accessories known as Phone Fingers. For less that €10 — a relative bargain, given the euro's latest swoon — consumers could roam the streets with pink, white, blue or black fingers. The only problem for buyers was getting the fingers on and off with any semblance of ease. The company squelched those worries with a printable size chart designed to help buyers estimate their "finger size." Just put your finger on the piece of paper, and presto, you're a large. Yeah, I need my iPhone for, well, everything but this.
Short for chlorofluorocarbons, CFC's are nasty chemical compounds that wreak havoc on the environment. Used in refrigeration units and aerosol cans, CFC's combine with atmospheric ozone, neutralizing the molecular compound and weakening the ozone layer, an important environmental barrier that protects the earth's surface from ultraviolet radiation from the sun. While increased regulation since the 1970s has diminished their use, CFCs can endure in the atmosphere for nearly a century, making this a very long-lived mistake.
Touted as a convenient and cheap alternative to paper bags, plastic grocery bags gained acceptance in the late 1970s and now meet 80% of retailers' bagging needs. They've saved millions of trees but come with equally bad consequences: more than 500 million are used and discarded each year, millions of which never make it to a landfill and fall as litter. And depending on the plastic used in production, those bags may take several hundred years to decompose. The solution? Recycle, or better yet, skip both paper and plastic and bring a reusable bag of your own.
BUMPIT
Hey, ladies. Disappointed because your skull lacks an unnatural ridge? The Bumpit is here to help! Informercials didn't go quite like that, but this "hair-volumizing insert" is about as lame. Likely celebrity practitioners? Snookie from Jersey Shore, and allegedly even Sarah Palin. Judge for yourself.
ELECTRIC FACIAL MASK
For those who want to look like a serial killer and seem younger at the same time. Seriously, just watch this 1999 infomercial. It's terrifying.
SOURCE: Dan Fletcher / MAY 27,2010 (Thursday)
