20 Failed Inventions That Accidentally Created Something Better

In the 1930s, Kutol Products, a Cincinnati-based manufacturer, sold a soft, non-toxic dough used to clean coal soot from wallpaper. But when postwar houses began using oil heat and washable wallpaper, demand plummeted. In 1954, nursery school teacher Kay Zufall read that children could mold the soft, non-toxic cleaner into art shapes, and tried it out with her own students, who loved it, finding an unanticipated use for Kutol’s failing product. She mentioned this to her brother-in-law, Kutol executive Joe McVicker. The company removed the detergent from its product and added dye and fragrance, introducing Play-Doh in 1956.

James Wright, a chemist for General Electric in New Haven, Connecticut, was searching for a rubber substitute during WWII after Axis forces cut off the Allies’ supply of natural rubber, prompting U.S.-funded research into synthetic substitutes. Wright combined boric acid with silicone oil and created a bouncy, putty-like material that flattened under sustained pressure and failed the military’s specifications for tires and boots. In 1949, Peter Hodgson, a marketing consultant, placed the material in plastic eggs, selling it as Silly Putty. It was later used by the Apollo 8 astronauts to hold tools together in zero gravity.

In the early 1860s, Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer, was making liquid nitroglycerin, a blasting explosive far more powerful than black powder. It could explode if dropped or even from the slightest heat. His factory in Stockholm blew up in 1864, killing five people, including Nobel’s younger brother Emil. Nobel later discovered that when he soaked the liquid into an absorbent mineral called kieselguhr, it became stable and could be molded into sticks, remaining stable until ignited by a blasting cap. He obtained a patent for it and named it dynamite, which was then used in the construction of railways and tunnels throughout the world.

Christopher Latham Sholes, an inventor from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, constructed a mechanical typewriter with an alphabetically ordered keyboard. However, when he typed quickly, the closely spaced keys swung upward simultaneously and became entangled. Taking cues from telegraph operators transcribing Morse code, Sholes rearranged the keys, spreading out the most frequently used pairs of letters to ensure that one typebar could return to its resting position before the second typebar hit the paper. Sholes sold the QWERTY arrangement to a typewriter manufacturer in 1873, and it remains the most popular keyboard layout.

In 1876, Thomas Edison obtained a patent for his Electric Pen, a motor-driven handheld device that used a needle that punched tiny holes into wax paper 50 times per second, thereby making a copyable stencil. The pen didn’t sell because its motor was top-heavy, the batteries often leaked acid, and office workers were more interested in buying a mimeograph machine instead. Samuel O’Reilly, a New York tattoo artist, studied Edison’s failed device and, in 1891, modified it by adding an ink reservoir and a tube to hold the needle, then patented his new machine as the first electric tattoo machine. The basic design is still employed today.

The British engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s SS Great Eastern was the world’s largest ship at its 1858 launch. She had been designed to carry thousands of passengers to Australia without the need to refuel. In the event, she exploded her boilers, ran aground, and accumulated such large fuel bills that the company that owned her went bankrupt. Brunel himself died soon after launch, before he could see the vessel find her true purpose. Her huge passenger accommodation became the ideal hold for telegraph cable, and she was converted into a cable-laying ship. It was the Great Eastern that successfully laid the first lasting transatlantic telegraph line, reducing the time to send a message across the ocean from ten days to minutes.

In the early 1800s, English chemist Sir Humphry Davy demonstrated his arc lamp at London’s Royal Institution, where he passed electricity between two carbon rods wired to a massive battery. The lamp’s light was blindingly bright but not suitable for indoor use. Without any shielding, the glare could easily dazzle anyone standing nearby, the carbon rods would burn out in just a few minutes, and the fumes they released would rapidly fill small enclosed spaces. As a result, arc lamps were typically deployed outdoors, for use in street lighting or lighthouses. Taking these limitations into account, both the British inventor Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison pursued a lower-intensity filament that could be sealed inside a vacuum bulb, and in 1879, Edison successfully produced the first commercially viable light bulb.

Charles Goodyear, a self-taught American inventor, watched as a wave of “rubber fever” swept America in the 1830s. It was disastrous, as manufacturers used raw rubber gum to make waterproof shoes and capes that melted into sludge in the summer and shattered like glass in the winter, leading to many businesses going bust. In 1839, after five years of experimentation, Goodyear accidentally spilled a blend of raw rubber, sulfur, and lead onto a hot stove. When he picked up the solidified compound, he found it had remained elastic under extreme temperatures. This process, called vulcanization, established the foundation for today’s tire industry.

In 1862, Alexander Parkes, an English chemist, presented Parkesine, a substance derived from cellulose, at the International Exhibition in London, claiming it could be used as a substitute for ivory or tortoiseshell but much more cheaply. The firm’s materials were shoddy, and the resulting plastic was prone to cracking, crumbling, and catching fire easily. The company declared bankruptcy in 1868. But an American inventor, John Wesley Hyatt, studied the material closely, discovering that adding camphor rendered it stable and moldable. Hyatt patented his improved formulation in 1870 as Celluloid, which became the first commercially successful plastic.

William Henry Perkin was an 18-year-old chemistry student in London attempting to create a cheap, synthetic version of quinine, an expensive natural drug used to treat malaria. In 1856, he was unsuccessful. All that resulted from his experiment was a vile, dark sludge. But when he rinsed the residue with alcohol, he noticed a brilliant purple solution, which could dye silk and couldn’t be washed off. Perkin had discovered mauveine, the first synthetic dye. He applied for a patent on it and set up a factory to mass-produce it. He thus founded the modern synthetic chemical industry.

In 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot. Doctors couldn’t locate the bullet lodged in his body, but Alexander Graham Bell, the man who invented the telephone, built an electromagnetic device that would hum when it came near metal. He brought it to the White House to help them locate the bullet, but the device hummed all over Garfield’s body. What Bell didn’t know at the time was that there were metal coils in Garfield’s mattress, which scrambled the signal. Garfield died of infection in September of that year, but Bell refined his circuitry into a metal detector used by industry and later in mine detectors.

Edison had invested over $5,000,000 of his own money to build an electromagnetic iron-ore plant in New Jersey. But then large, cheap deposits of iron ore were found in Minnesota, the price of ore plummeted, and Edison’s process was no longer viable. Instead of abandoning the plant’s machinery, Edison retooled his rock-crushing rolls and rotary kilns to process limestone and founded a cement company. By extending the length of his cement kiln from 60 to 150 feet, he was able to double output and reduce the cost of producing concrete. Yankee Stadium was built with this very concrete.

In 1826, John Walker, an English chemist in Stockton-on-Tees, invented the first friction match, which was tipped with phosphorus and other chemicals that would catch fire when scraped against a piece of sandpaper. The matches worked, but they were truly dangerous. They showered sparks, burned fiercely, emitted poisonous smoke, and sometimes ignited spontaneously during storage. In 1844, a Swedish chemist named Gustaf Erik Pasch removed the phosphorus from the match heads and put it on a separate strip instead, and this safety match was mass-produced within a decade.

In 1845, Christian Schönbein, a German-Swiss chemist working in Basel, Switzerland, produced guncotton by treating cotton with a mixture of nitric and sulfuric acids. The material burned with far less thick smoke than black powder did, which appeared very promising, but residual acid remaining in the product rendered it dangerously unstable. The explosive detonated unpredictably, blowing up chemical plants and killing workers throughout Europe. Guncotton remained too risky to be used militarily for several more decades. Then Paul Vieille, a French military chemist, “gelatinized” guncotton into a stable paste known as Poudre B, the world’s first practical smokeless gunpowder. Because the powder now produced far less smoke, rifle ranges quadrupled.

In 1870, Alfred Ely Beach, an inventor and editor of Scientific American, secretly built New York’s first underground transit line beneath Broadway, a short tunnel with one car pushed by a giant pneumatic fan. The fan worked fine, and demonstration rides drew crowds. But the line ran into political trouble because Tammany Hall politician William Tweed opposed it, and economic trouble when a financial panic cut off funds, so the line had to close. Still, it showed that it was possible to build tunnels under Manhattan, and the fan technology survived in pneumatic tubes used in post offices and department stores to move mail and goods around.

Sir Francis Pettit Smith, an English marine engineer, had originally patented a long wooden screw of two full turns in 1836. During a trial on London’s Paddington Canal in 1837, the screw hit something beneath the surface and broke off. The shorter propeller made the vessel move faster because the shorter blades allowed the water to clear the screw without creating drag. Smith then modified his patents to incorporate short multi-bladed propellers, which were used to propel the ship SS Archimedes in 1839.

Denis Papin, a French physicist in London, constructed a sealed iron cooking vessel in 1679 that he named the Steam Digester for its capacity to soften bones under pressure. Trapped steam built up dangerously and caused violent explosions during demonstrations, scalding onlookers. Papin’s solution was to design a weighted safety valve that released steam automatically when the pressure reached a certain level. The sight of the valve lifting sparked Papin’s realization that steam might be used to drive a piston. He published this concept, which influenced the development of the first steam engines by subsequent inventors.

In 1860, the Belgian engineer Étienne Lenoir patented the world’s first commercially produced internal combustion engine in Paris. It burned a mixture of coal gas and air with no compression. Hundreds were sold, primarily for use in light industry, but the engine was highly inefficient, converting less than 3% of the energy in its fuel into useful work and frequently overheating. The German engineer Nikolaus Otto took apart one of Lenoir’s engines, figured out that the lack of a compression stroke was the culprit, and patented the four-stroke compressed engine in 1876, which is the design that is still used in car engines today.

Edison’s Phonograph Toy Manufacturing Company, in April 1890, offered 22-inch metal dolls with small phonographs hidden inside. The little records inside, operated by a hand crank, played simple nursery rhymes recorded by girls in Edison’s factories. They broke easily in a child’s hands, required a steady crank speed that a child could not maintain, and sounded shrill because they were recorded by a primitive machine. Out of 2,500 dolls sold, most were returned almost immediately, and the toy production was halted within two months. This failure led inventors like Emile Berliner to make sturdier flat disc records.

Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Samuel Pierpont Langley spent government money and his own Smithsonian funds building the Great Aerodrome A, a tandem-winged flying machine that had no pilot controls whatsoever. It was supposed to remain level by careful balancing of its structure. It was launched by catapult from a houseboat moored on the Potomac River. On two attempts in 1903, the craft caught its launching frame and crashed into the river. On each occasion, test pilot Charles Manly was almost drowned, but managed to escape. The second crash occurred a few days before the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, using controls Langley’s aerodrome would never have.

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