The worst inventions of all time

To really invent something great, you have to give yourself permission to fail. It’s safe to say there have been a lot of failures out there: spam email, motorcycle perfume, fish training kits, fire-prone hoverboards, and spray-on hair are among the worst inventions on record. Come on, people. You can do better.




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Hair in a can

According to the infomercials, spray-on hair should be all the rage. Simply point and shoot to release a spray of fine powder, which will merge with what’s left of your mop to give the appearance of a fuller head of hair. Sadly, the results wind up looking as fake as Trump’s hairdo. Your friends will wish you’d just go bald with dignity.




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Hydrogen blimps

Blimps are floating airships that get their lift from lighter-than-air gases. Helium is a good option, since it isn’t flammable, but early blimps often used hydrogen. The error of this choice was underlined in fiery, spectacular fashion with the Hindenburg disaster of May 6, 1937. The incident left 36 people dead and earned hydrogen blimps a spot on the list of world’s worst inventions.




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Tanning beds

There’s no such thing as a healthy tan. Any kind of tan is a form of damage to any kind of skin. Due to their use of dangerous ultraviolet light, tanning beds are associated with a high risk of developing skin cancer: people who use a tanning bed before the age of 35 are 75 per cent more likely to contract the disease.

Besides skin cancer, indoor tanning can also put you at risk for eye cancer, cataracts, premature aging, and immune system suppression. There’s nothing healthy about that glow.




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Anti-eating mask

No willpower when it comes to grub? Never met a cookie you could say no to? Well, if you lack discipline around food, strap on an anti-eating mask—designed à la Hannibal Lecter to keep you from noshing on things you shouldn’t. Although patented in 1982, this device has yet to take off.




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Spam

Ah, the joy of unsolicited emails. Whether it’s money offers from Nigerian princes or creams designed to enhance certain parts of the anatomy, they’re an annoyance, at best. At worst, however, they can contain all kinds of dangerous malware. Despite increased legal sanctions and software filtering tools, spam continues its assault on our inboxes.

To learn about the connection between email spam and the lunch meat SPAM, check out this article from Wired.




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Writing in the shower

Now that we’ve recognized the dangers of distracted driving, perhaps it’s time to sound the alarm on distracted showering. AquaNotes markets itself as “a waterproof notepad that allows you to record your great ideas while you’re in the shower. It’s so durable you can even write underwater.” If you really feel the need to write notes underwater, you may want to reconsider your lifestyle choices.




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DDT

Developed as an insecticide in the 1940s, DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was used to fight malaria, typhus, and the other insect-borne diseases. It has been banned for decades in many countries, including the United States, because of its “adverse” environmental effects and its potential human health effects, notably due to its carcinogenic properties.




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Fish training kit

Think your fish is capable of performing tricks such as playing soccer or doing the limbo? Dr. Dean Pomerleau of R2 Fish School believes it is. Order his fish training kit through Amazon to receive a 45-minute DVD along with a feeding wand, training field, base platform, and other paraphernalia. If you don’t find his claims fishy, that is.




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Walking sleeping bag

There appears to be a market for walking sleeping bags in the camping world, but you have to wonder why. Sure, camping generally requires a sleeping bag and a warm set of clothes to walk around in. But even minimal sartorial pride should prevent you from trying to combine the two.

Here’s how one manufacturer describes the origins of its product: “Inspired by the lost Selk’nam natives of Tierra del Fuego, Chile, nomadic people who dressed sparingly despite the cold climate of Patagonia, the Selk’bag was created to keep its wearers warm, whether on the go or at rest.”




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Ford Pinto

The Ford Pinto occupies a special place in the bad car design hall of infamy. The rear-mounted gas tanks of the 1971 to 1976 models were prone to leaking and exploding when struck from behind, even with weak force. Rather than fix the problem, Ford did a cost-benefit analysis and decided it was cheaper to simply pay out severe injury claims.




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Bluetooth Pet Rock

Meet a twenty-first-century take on the 1970s Pet Rock craze, which made its founder a millionaire. The Bluetooth Pet Rock, as the name suggests, is a rock with a Bluetooth connection, and, like the original, it does nothing. It’s a complement to ThinkGeek’s other offering, the USB Pet Rock, which is also useless, except as a novelty item.




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Betamax

In 1975, Sony unveiled the Betamax video recorder. It was revolutionary for its day but was eventually condemned to the dustbin of history when JVC released its VHS machine. The two video recorder formats waged a war for supremacy that VHS eventually won. While the Betamax may have offered sharper images, VHS tapes boasted longer playing times.




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Legendary Harley-Davidson eau de toilette

Harley-Davidson manufactures iconic motorcycles, but it’s also got a few side ventures—not all of which have enjoyed the sweet smell of success. In the 1990s, the company delved into the fussy business of boutique perfumes and colognes, offering scents with names such as Black Fire, Destiny, Legendary, Hot Rod, and Territory.

The underlying concept was to make users smell like their bikes. “Woody aromas with hints of tobacco” didn’t stop the product extension from failing even among the faithful.




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Cuecat

In the late 1990s, millions of these cat-shaped bar code scanners were shipped across the United States. The idea was for people to scan specially marked bar codes that took them to various websites. Despite a high-profile launch that included having codes printed in Wired and BusinessWeek magazines, the CueCat went out with a pathetic meow of failure.




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Samsung Galaxy Note 7

This phone launched with great fanfare in 2016. Enthusiasm dimmed, however, when the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 displayed a tendency to catch on fire and even explode, prompting the manufacturer to issue a recall that affected about 2.5 million users.

After a few subsequent replacements proved to have the same failing—one incident even involving the evacuation of a Southwest Airlines flight—Samsung discontinued the phone.




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Google Glass

In 2014, Google Glass was hailed as the first augmented reality device to be made commercially available. According to the Telegraph, “Despite being a revolutionary piece of technology, people thought it was creepy and expensive.” Google stopped production of the glasses the following year and, despite promises, hasn’t launched a new version of the wearable device.




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Plastic grocery bags

Plastic bags became the go-to replacement for paper grocery bags in the 1970s, saving money and trees. More than 500 million are used and thrown away each year, with dire consequences. Discarded bags take forever to degrade, clogging landfills and endangering sea life.




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Hoverboards

Hoverboards were a trendy technology that caught fire in 2015—literally. Supposedly inspired by the hoverboard used by Marty McFly in Back to the Future II, these devices were actually self-balancing scooters and didn’t hover. What they did do was occasionally burst into flames, a tendency that got them banned by several airlines in addition to the U.S. Postal Service.




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Mizar flying car

Convinced that man should be able to fly just as easily as drive a car, inventor Henry Smolinski strapped the wings and tail of a Cessna aircraft to a Ford Pinto. During a 1973 test flight in California, the Pinto broke free from its contraption and plunged to the earth, killing both Smolinski and his passenger. At least the Pinto wasn’t struck from behind.




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Segway

Projected to change how we get around cities, expectations were high when this new-age scooter came out in 2001. Since then, the Segway has segued into obscurity, never really catching on because of its hefty $5,000 price tag. Yes, you may still see a few of them around, but they have largely been reduced to a novelty.




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Tamagotchi

The 1990s inventors of the Tamagotchi don’t appear to have consulted parents during its development. At the peak of its popularity, 15 of these egg-shaped electronic devices, created by Bandai, were sold every minute in Canada and the United States. The Tamagotchi supposedly taught kids to take care of a digital pet they carried in their pocket. If they didn’t, however, the pet could be dead in less than a day, leaving parents with distraught children to console.




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BlackBerry PlayBook

The BlackBerry PlayBook came, saw, and was conquered by its own limitations, in 2011. While Research in Motion boasted about the tablet’s ability to play high-definition videos, critics complained about its small screen size (seven inches) and the fact that it didn’t have email or calendar functionality unless it was tethered by Bluetooth to a BlackBerry phone.




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Smile or else

In 2009, Japan’s Keihin Electric Express Railway Company introduced “smile scanning” software to track how well their employees were grinning. Staff had to smile into a camera hooked up to a computer, which analyzed “the overall quality of their smile on a scale ranging from 0 (suicidal) to 100 (delirious).”

The computer would then provide helpful advice, such as “Lift up your mouth corners,” and even print out a personalized smile for the person to aspire to throughout the day.




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Pop-up ads

In the late 1990s one of the most reviled forms of internet advertising started exploding onto screens everywhere: blinking, flashing, shouting, and just plain demanding pop-up ads.

In the words of the pop-up ad’s inventor, Ethan Zuckerman, who was working for Tripod.com at the time, “It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. . . . I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”




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Newton MessagePad

Apple released the Newton MessagePad in 1993 as a handheld PDA (personal digital assistant). While purporting to launch a whole new class of computing device, the Newton was ultimately undermined by its wonky handwriting recognition program—skewered in newspaper cartoons—and poor performance that evoked Steve Jobs’s wrath.




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