Top Worst Inventions - Inventors regretted after invention
Being an inventor has always been considered a great career choice; if you're brilliant at it, you'll almost certainly achieve fame and legendary status.
Inventors are allowed to be eccentric in ways that would get the typical Man fired from his office job.
Being an inventor, on the other hand, isn't necessarily a good thing, especially if you come up with something you later regret you hadn't.
Here are seven innovations that caused their creators to doubt themselves.
1. Atom Bomb
Photo credit: US Department of Energy
We can understand why the creator of a bomb that caused huge death and destruction may wish he had kept his invention to himself, and that is exactly how J. Robert Oppenheimer felt later in life.
He was a member of the Manhattan Project team that is credited with developing nuclear weapons.
Oppenheimer was a key figure in this because he was there from the beginning in 1942 and was widely considered as its leader, earning him the title "father of the atomic bomb" in the decades since.
His personal political views were Marxist, but he decided to participate in the research because he agreed with other scientists, like Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, that developing an atomic bomb before the Nazis was necessary.
He was however enthusiastic in May 1945, when he spoke at a meeting about the bomb's "brilliant luminosity."
When he saw the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945, he began to have doubts about what he had helped to create, reacting with a quote from the Hindu's Bhagavad Gita scripture: "I become death, the destroyer of worlds."
"Oppenheimer told President Truman in October 1945, after leaving the Manhattan Project, that he believed he had blood on his hands as a result of his role in this project."
2. Aeroplane
Everyone knows about the Wright brothers' invention of the first successful airplane, but it's less well-known that one of them, Orville Wright, eventually regretted it.
On December 17, 1903, Orville and his brother Wilbur designed and built the Wright Flyer, the first heavier-than-air, powered plane to complete tasks flight.
Their interest in aeronautics was ignited by a model helicopter that their father bought for them as children, and after the German inventor, Otto Lilienthal died in a glider disaster, they decided to continue where he left off.
This brought them renown, success, and a place in history, despite the fact that Wilbur died from typhoid disease just nine years later.
Orville, on the other hand, may have had a better fate because he lived long enough to see the evolution of airplanes over the next three decades, culminating in their service to carry and deliver bombs during World War II.
He saw the airplane as a tool to help bring about peace, rather than a weapon of war.
In an interview that he gave to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Journal in 1943, the war left him feeling confused about his invention: proud of the potential good it could serve, yet bitter that it was being used for war and destruction instead.
3. Dynamite
Alfred Noble was the inventor of dynamite, but it's unclear that's what he'd want to be remembered for.
He was born in Stockholm in 1833 and inherited his father's interest in explosives, who was also an inventor.
Alfred was sent abroad by his father, and while in Paris, he met Ascanio Sobrero, an Italian chemist who had invented nitroglycerine.
Nobel became fascinated by this very explosive chemical but knew that it would need to be stabilized before it could be used in a functional way.
He achieved this by mixing it with the clay kieselguhr, producing in a paste-like substance that he dubbed "dynamite" and patented in 1867.
Nobel's invention established his place in history, despite the fact that he intended it for mining rather than fighting.
He informed friends like Bertha Von Suttner that he believed the explosive potential of dynamite would prohibit its use as a weapon.
The death of his brother Ludvig in 1888 may have been the genuine turning point for the inventor.
In the false belief that Alfred had died, a French newspaper published an obituary referring to him as the "dealer of death,".
Nobel shocked to know this and prompting him to create the Nobel Peace Prize as an act of repentance.
However, this version of events is controversial, with others claiming that the influence of anti-war activist Suttner was the real reason.
4. AK-47 - Mikhail Kalashnikov
After witnessing severe war casualties and being injured himself, Kalashnikov invented the rifle that bears his name for the Russian army at the end of WWII.
Kalashnikov, who died in 2014, designed the assault rifle to be a simple automatic gun that could be mass-produced cheaply using the mass manufacturing technologies available at the time.
lived long enough to watch his creation be responsible for more killings than any other assault rifle.
"I keep returning to the same issues. Can it be that I..., an Orthodox Christian, am to blame for people's deaths if they were killed by my gun, even if they were my enemies?"
This regret letter was written to the Russian Orthodox Church's leader in 2010.
5. Facebook
Mark Zuckerberg has never expressed any regrets regarding the establishment of Facebook, maybe because his creators neglected to put regret into his database, but others engaged in its development have.
Sean Parker, who was a member of the Facebook team in its early days and has since expressed doubts about it, is one such person.
Parker started working on Facebook while it was still only a directory for Harvard University students, and Zuckerberg has credited him with helping it grow into the global social media platform it is today.
Parker was able to attract wealthy investors such as Peter Thiel, and as a result of his share on Facebook, he became a billionaire.
However, in 2017, he argued that the site's popularity was due to its use of "vulnerability in human psychology" through the "Like" function, which validates people's thoughts, jokes, images, and other things they put on the site.
It's difficult to disagree with his assessment of how and why the site has become so addictive to so many people.
Parker also indicated that this was not by chance, but rather something that the Facebook founders actively set out to do.
He went on to say that he is now a critic of social media after seeing it swallow so much of the world.
6. Pop-up Ads
We all hate the invention of pop-up advertising, including its creator, Ethan Zuckerman.
He developed this bad notion while working as a programmer and designer for Tripod.com in the 1990s.
When the site was dealing with a large car company that was unhappy because it had paid for a banner advertisement that displayed on a sexually explicit webpage.
Tripod came up with the idea of adverts that would not appear on the main page but would "pop up" on a second one.
It'll allow businesses to avoid undesirable association with NSFW content, and Zuckerman created the code for it.
In 2014, he wrote an article for The Atlantic that amounted to an apology for how this had become a popular approach for companies advertising online.
It caused untold irritation to millions of Internet users, and claimed that the initial goal was good.
He also said that paying for internet services in exchange for privacy protection would be a good approach to get rid of ads on the Internet.
An apology may be too little, too late, but at least it didn't appear out of anywhere in the middle of a video.
7. McAfee Antivirus Cretaor
The first signs that he was odd came in 1992, when he announced that a computer virus called "Michelangelo" would erase the hard drives of millions of computers, resulting in a huge increase in sales for his software and a scandal when the actual number of computers affected turned out to be much smaller.
As a result, McAfee left his own company in 1994 with a $100 million payment, and rival antivirus systems have subsequently left it in the dust.
McAfee is no longer used to safeguard computers by many individuals, including the man who founded it, who has labeled it as "the worst software on the earth" and indicated that he is grateful to no longer be connected with it.
You wouldn't expect the first of a man's three claims to fame, which include creating antivirus software.
He is claiming to have had sex with a humpback whale, and is suspected of killing a person, to be the one he regrets—but John McAfee is anything but a predictable figure.
The 73-year-old is so radical that he makes all other liberals look like Mike Pence, but he rose to popularity as the creator of McAfee, the first commercially available antivirus software. Still, if McAfee regrets his journey to fame and money, it's nothing compared to how the whales feel.
8. Mother's Day
Anyone who has ever failed to buy a card and a gift for Mother's Day has regretted the day it was invented, but not quite as much as the guy who thought it up.
The US version of the day was developed in 1908 by Anna Jarvis, who was inspired by her own mother.
She had created a "Mother's Friendship Day" to promote reconciliation following the Civil War.
Within five years of its inception, Jarvis' proposal developed in popularity and expanded to nearly all US states, eventually becoming an official national holiday in 1914.
We may expect Jarvis to be excited at the tremendous support for her concept, but this could not have been further from the truth.
Although she was excited that it had become a nationally recognized event, she immediately realized that this meant commercial exploitation.
By 1920, she had publicly declared her opposition to the holiday and was actively asking people not to buy the presents or cards available in stores.
Jarvis spent the next three decades of her life fighting a losing battle against this, which saw her suit companies and individuals.
It was who, used the holiday's name without her permission and ultimately in her losing all of her money.
She was living alone and poor in a sanatorium when she died in 1948, having been destroyed by the vision she had tried so hard to make a reality.
9. Pepper Spray
Inventors who develop weapons and then get enraged by how they are used seem to be a common theme.
It is with Kamran Loghman being one of the most recent examples. During the 1980s.
He was hired by the FBI to produce a highly lethal pepper spray that could be used by law enforcement against outlaws.
Loghman knew from the beginning that the spray he was working on would be used on people, so there's no need for him to have any regrets about it now, right?
That is not the case, since in 2011, during the height of the famous Occupy Wall Street protests, Loghman gave an interview.
Where he discussed the weapon he had invented all those years before—and he was not glad.
The issue he had was that the police were using pepper spray on peaceful demonstrators as well as those who aggressively resisted arrest.
In addition to designing the spray, Loghman collaborated with the police at the time to create criteria for when and how it should be used.
He told the interviewer that using it to stop nonviolent protest was a complete violation of those guidelines.