34 Times Inventors Unknowingly Built Their Own Doom

Most inventors expect fame and fortune to befall them for their scientific efforts. But, as we see from this list, their Frankensteinian inventions sometimes become the reason for their demise. Many of the entries in this list feature unsuccessful attempts at parachutes, makeshift planes or cars, and you might see them as failed inventors.

But failing is an unavoidable part of innovation. Many scientists say that failing is critical to any kind of scientific research. In her 2019 TED Talk, University of Arizona astrophysicist Emily Hamden said: "The reality of my job is that I fail almost all the time and still keep going."

But scientists and innovators don't like talking about failure. Or, rather, people don't really like hearing and reading about it. If there's no sensational death or tragic story behind a failed invention or project, it doesn't get as much attention. As molecular biologist Maryam Zaringhalam wrote in Scientific American, much of science goes unreported.

"Nearly everything that happens in the lab will never make it to print," she explained. "The Journal for the Banal Failures and Self Doubt that Face Day-to-Day Life in the Lab does not exist." But she emphasizes how important it is to report on scientists' failures. "Without failure, we lack a complete picture of science. And, a bigger shame, we lack a complete picture of the scientist beyond the brainy stereotype."

Many young scientists give up precisely because they fail or are not ready for failure. A study published in Higher Education found that almost half of all people working towards an academic science career will drop out after five years. And even more will do so after 10 years. The number of women leaving academic careers is disproportionately higher by one-tenth.

Fellow scientists say that's because young scientists are deterred by failures. "Many students who began science degrees with me switched to other majors the first time a project failed. One failure and they were gone," structural biology graduate student Sara Whitlock wrote in STAT.

Ultimately, scientists need resilience, and Emily Hamden emphasized that in her TED Talk. "Discovery is mostly a process of finding things that don’t work, and failure is inevitable when you’re pushing the limits of knowledge, and that’s what I want to do, and so I’m choosing to keep going," she said, referring to her project FIREBall.

However, not all inventions fail; sometimes, inventors are successful in their efforts, but their creations fail in the marketplace. Author John J. Geoghegan calls them White Elephant Technology or WETech for short. Think tanks that fly, jet-powered trains, and wave-powered boats. Essentially, inventions that nobody asked for and have little practical use in the real world.