The 50 Worst Inventions - First 10 · 6:03pm Nov 3rd, 2016
TIME - 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. These are the first ten with several more to be added later.
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. AGENT ORANGE
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.
5. CUECAT
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.
6. SUBPRIME MORTGAGES
The flimsy piece of foundation that brought the U.S. economy tumbling into recession, subprime 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.
7. CRINOLINE
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.
8. NINTENDO VIRTUAL BOY
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.
9. FARMVILLE
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.
10. HYDROGENATED OILS
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.
