by Karl Shaw
What remained, Brand was disappointed to discover, was not gold. His golden shower, however, did have some very peculiar properties – it glowed in the dark and was highly combustible. Purely by chance, he had discovered the chemical element phosphorous.
Notwithstanding the fact that half the neighbourhood must by now have been aware of Brand and his malodorous lake of ancient piss, he demonstrated his new discovery to a handful of friends, proudly heralding it as one of the best kept secrets of seventeenth-century science. But finding something useful to do with this stinking by-product was another matter, something that completely eluded Brand to his death. The other problem was that he had had to boil nearly 5,500 litres of urine in order to produce only 120 grams of phosphorus.
Eventually, Brand sold his “secret” to a German chemist called Krafft who exhibited phosphorus throughout Europe. Unfortunately, word got out that the substance was made from urine, which was all anyone needed to work out their own means of purifying phosphorus.
In the 1750s, a Swedish chemist worked out how to make phosphorus in bulk without the smell of urine. One of the first uses of the new substance was in the manufacture of matches, resulting in “phossy jaw”, one of the most horrific occupational diseases known to mankind, in which the victims’ jawbones would literally rot and glow in the dark and was only treatable by surgical removal of the jawbone, an agonizing and disfiguring operation.
Worst Follow-Up to a Great Idea
The American Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) was one of the most prolific inventors the world has ever seen. In his eighty-four years, he had 1,093 patents to his name, including the electric light bulb, the gramophone and the motion picture camera, to name but a few. The automotive genius Henry Ford said, “To find a man who has not benefited by Edison and who is not in debt to him it would be necessary to go deep into the jungle.” In 1922, readers of the New York Times voted Edison “the greatest living American”.
For all his creative successes and his prodigious productionline of inventions, Edison was no stranger to complete commercial failure. Or, for that matter, coming up with ideas that were just completely barking mad. Edison’s greatest achievements were all made before he reached the age of forty, but he continued inventing right up until his death at the age of eighty-five at a rate of one invention every ten days. He never knew when to quit – or to resist the temptation of trying to rescue a bad idea with an even worse idea. For example, he first saw the phonograph as a device not for music and entertainment, but for dictation, documenting oral histories, preserving dying languages, teaching elocution, recording speech and telling time for the blind. In May 1928, he said, “Americans require a restful quiet in the moving picture theatre and, for them, talking from the lips of the figures on the screen destroys the illusion . . . the idea is not practical. The stage is the place for the spoken word.” The following year, the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, appeared and was a massive success.
In 1887, he tried to rescue his faltering phonograph works by entering the toy business. It led to one of his greatest flops, the mechanical talking doll – actually, a doll with an Edison phonograph stuffed inside. Despite several years of experimentation and development, the Edison Talking Doll was a disaster and was removed from the shelves after a few short weeks in early 1890.
His worst idea ever, in fact one of the most colossal flops in the history of innovation, came in the late 1880s. Edison proposed a new process for refining low-grade iron ore using magnets and massive crushing rollers. He might have left it at that, but his idea was ridiculed in the press; one newspaper dismissed it as “Edison’s Folly”.
The irked inventor was determined to prove them wrong. He built a huge plant with a separator that could extract iron from unusable, low-grade ores and a town to go with it. In order to finance his project he had to sell all his stock in General Electric. The enterprise cost him more than a decade of wasted effort and several million dollars. Instead of selling the equipment for scrap and calling it a day, Edison decided to use the huge rollers to manufacture high-grade cement, but the cement plant soon become another, even deeper, financial black hole.
If no one wanted Edison’s cement, he would just have to create his own demand with yet another invention – the Edison concrete home. His new concrete houses, he promised, would revolutionize the American way of life. Fireproof, bombproof, insect-proof and easy to clean, the walls could be supplied in attractive concrete tints and need never be repainted. In fact, every fixture and fitting could be pre-cast as a single slab of concrete in a process that took just a few hours. If you needed more living space, you could simply pour another floor. And at only $1,200 apiece, they were cheap enough for anyone to afford.
Edison’s early prototypes were a disaster. Marketed as “in the style of François I”, they looked more like oversized portable toilets. Clearly, Edison was no architect, as his critics were quick to point out; one noted cruelly, “It is not cheapness that is wanted so much as relief from ugliness, and Mr. Edison’s houses do not achieve that relief.”
Instead of simple moulds, Edison’s pre-fabricated houses also required nickel-plated iron forms containing more than two thousand parts and weighing nearly half a million pounds. Prospective builders were required to invest in at least $175,000 of plant and machinery before they could pour a single house. But there was another problem Edison had not foreseen. No one was keen to live in a house the great man himself had dubbed “the salvation of the slum dweller”.
In spite of these seemingly insurmountable setbacks, Edison wasn’t going to let it go. In 1911, he tried again. This time he had discovered a product line for which he thought concrete was ideally suited – home furnishings. He wanted to make everything from concrete phonograph cabinets and concrete pianos to concrete bedroom sets – “more durable and beautiful than those in the most palatial residence in Paris or along the Rhine” according to his marketing blurb. The New York Times observed drily, “As to concrete dogs to stand warningly in the front yard and concrete cats to purr stonily under a concrete kitchen range, he made no announcement.”
In the face of much ridicule in the press, Edison shipped a pair of concrete phonograph consoles to a much-hyped New York trade show in crates marked “Please Drop and Abuse This package.” The hauliers took him at his word and the indestructible cabinets made it to their destination in several pieces. Edison refused to discuss the subject of concrete furniture ever again. The Edison Portland Cement Company went bankrupt twice, closed for good after its founder’s death, and was the subject of a book with the title The Romance of Cement.
Edison saved his most bizarre pet project yet for last. From the 1920s until his death in 1931, he was busy developing a Spirit Phone that would allow him to communicate with the dead.1 But the well-known workaholic didn’t let death slow him down. He continued his work post mortem and had a breakthrough via his spirit communicator in 1967 – or at least that was what was claimed by a medium called Sigrum Seuterman.
Best Get-Poor-Quick Scheme
Charles Ponzi was fourteen years old when he emigrated to the USA from his native Italy in 1896. By the age of eighteen, he was declared a “financial wizard” after offering a staggering 50 per cent return on investment in forty-five days and 100 per cent return in ninety days. He did it by using “profits” from new investors to pay interest to old ones (taking an estimated $200,000 a day at his peak) from an ever-growing pool of more than 40,000 investors in his Securities Exchange Company in Boston, which claimed to leverage exchange rates through an international postage stamp reply coupon trading system. It became known as a Ponzi or “pyramid” scheme.
As pyramid schemes require an exponential increase in members to keep going, like a nuclear chain reaction, inevitably they end in disaster. Ponzi’s activities were finally curtailed and he was deported back to Italy. After embezzling more funds from the Italian financial sector, Ponzi fled to Brazil, where he died, penniless, in a charity hospital, half-blind
and partially paralysed.
Long after his death, Charles Ponzi’s scheme continues to ruin lives. In 1997, up to 90 per cent of the population of Albania lost their life savings when multiple, large-scale pyramid investment schemes collapsed. It led to uncontained rioting, the government fell and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed.
“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote.”
Grover Cleveland, US President, 1905
Most Expensive Failure to Spot a Lemon
Launched on “E Day” – 4 September 1957 – the Ford Edsel was the most hyped car of its era. Ford had just spent more than $400 million developing it and its launch came on the back of an expensive and finely honed marketing campaign that had everybody talking about it. Months before the car appeared in showrooms, adverts had begun to appear simply showing the teaser slogan: “The Edsel is Coming”.
Ford went to great lengths to keep the car’s features and appearance a secret. Dealers were told to store their Edsels undercover and risked a fine or loss of their franchise if they showed the cars before the release date. It even had its own TV special – The Edsel Show – on 13 October, featuring Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. With unprecedented fanfare and hype, it was no surprise that consumers were eager to see what all the fuss was about.
At first the pre-publicity seemed to work. When the big day arrived, car showrooms were packed with curious visitors seeking their first glance of the car – almost three million in the first week alone. For a couple of days, Ford executives were rubbing their hands together with glee, anticipating sales of at least 200,000 cars in the first year. It was an ambitious target – about 5 per cent of the entire US car market.
But it soon became clear that looking was all the visitors were doing. The car sold just 64,000 units in its first year. In the next year, sales fell to 44,891, and 2,846 the year after that. The awkward Edsel was finally put out of its misery on 19 November 1959, a little over two years after its launch, having sold far less than half of the units Ford projected it needed to sell to break even, losing a reported $1.55 billion.2 From that day on, the Edsel would be known as “the Titanic of the auto industry”, the classic brand failure of all time.
Why did it fail so spectacularly? Some blamed the timing. After a boom period for the US car industry during the mid-1950s, the Edsel was being launched at the start of a recession, just as almost all car models were seeing a drop in sales, some by as much as 50 per cent. Ford had taken a decision to highlight the Edsel’s powerful engine. But the Edsel was fuel thirsty and people were looking for cheaper, more fuel-efficient cars. The Edsel’s high price may have been acceptable if it had been worth paying, but the car quickly gained a reputation for mechanical problems. Edsel now stood for Every Day Something Else Leaks.
Then there was the hype. For months, Ford had been encouraging people to expect something radically new when, in fact, the Edsel shared its engineering with other Ford models.
As well as the disappointing technology and over-hyped advertising, the car also had a stupid name. The company had undergone extensive market surveys, and had even polled their own workforce for suggestions. Eventually, they had a pool of 10,000 names to choose from. It was too many for the company chairman, Ernest Breech, as he scanned through the list. “Why don’t we just call it Edsel?” he suggested. Henry Ford II, the grandson of Henry Ford, agreed; Edsel was the name of his father and the Ford founder’s only son. It could have been a lot worse: at one point, Ford hired the poet Marianne Moore and asked her to find a name which would signify a “visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design”. Her suggestions included Mongoose Civique, Resilient Bullet, Utopian Turtletop and the Varsity Stroke.3
But mostly, people blamed the styling. There was no escaping it – the Edson was ugly. The motor journals variously described it as “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon” and “a Pontiac pushing a toilet seat”. One reviewer said the grille looked like “a vagina with teeth”.
Least Successful Celebrity Endorsement
When the designers of an iconic Victorian coffee brand needed a poster boy to promote their new product in 1885 they could think of no one more fitting than the man of the hour Major-General Hector Macdonald.
Born a Scottish crofter’s son, the legendary “Fighting Mac” rose through the ranks to become one of Britain’s greatest Victorian heroes. His military career was the stuff of legend; while serving in Afghanistan in 1879, he was offered either the Victoria Cross or an officer’s commission. He turned down the VC with the words, “I’ll win the medal later.”
He got his nickname in the first Boer War for hand-to-hand fighting. Having been disarmed by the enemy in the field of battle, he refused to surrender and resorted to fisticuffs until he was again overpowered. He saved the British Army from destruction at the Battle of Omdurman, ending the rule of the mighty Mahdi in the Sudan and the lives of an estimated 14,000 Muslim warriors – the brave “fuzzy wuzzies” of Kipling’s poem.
In 1902, while in command of British troops in Ceylon, Macdonald, scourge of Afghans, Boers and Whirling Dervishes, was accused of a “habitual crime of misdemeanour” with four schoolboys in a railway carriage. It followed more accusations of indecency including an alleged relationship with a Boer prisoner of war and another with a Belgian soldier.
Under Victorian military law, homosexuals could be shot. In spite of a personal appeal to King Edward VII, the War Office ordered Macdonald to return to Britain to face a court martial. On his way back to Ceylon, he stopped off in Paris at the Hotel Regina. The following morning, he came down for breakfast and picked up a copy of the Daily Express from the hotel concierge and saw his name in a story under the headline “GRAVE CHARGE” . He went back upstairs to his room, sat on his bed, put a pistol to his head and blew his brains out.
Today, the coffee bottle still bears the likeness of the doughty Victorian Gordon Highlander soldier sitting outside his tent in a far-flung corner of the British empire drinking a cup of coffee. The only difference today, in the interests of political correctness, is that he is no longer being brought his drink by a Sikh manservant; the new label for the old beverage shows the Sikh soldier sitting beside his former boss with a cup and saucer of his own. The brand? Camp.
Least Successful Celebrity Endorsement: Runner-Up
In 1987, the US meat industry was concerned about the growing menace of vegetarianism, so the Beef Industry Council decided to hit back with an advertising campaign. First, they turned to the actress Cybil Shepherd, best known for her role starring alongside Bruce Willis in the TV drama Moonlighting. She signed up to an alleged $1 million deal to become the spokeswoman for American beef with the slogan “Real food for real people”.4 She tried to sex up the hamburger by calling it “something hot and juicy and so utterly simple you can eat it with your hands. I mean, I know some people who don’t eat burgers. But I’m not sure I trust them.”
The campaign was only weeks old when she told a magazine, “I’ve cut down on fatty foods and am trying to stay away from red meat.” Ms Shepherd was dropped from the campaign.
Next, they tried the actor James Garner, star of Maverick and The Rockford Files. Surely Maverick wasn’t a secret vegetarian? Of course he wasn’t; Garner loved a steak as much as the next man. He was shown carving his way through mountains of roasts and grills – which was fine, until they had to rush him to the cardiac unit for emergency quadruple by-pass surgery. A less-than-ideal representative for their arteryclogging product, as it turned out.
At this point, the BIC abandoned their search for a celebrity figurehead and decided to go for a poster campaign instead. Their advertising agency accordingly produced an eye-catching poster of an all-American boy holding the Stars and Stripes. This was surely the image they were looking for . . . which it was, until someone pointed out the poster was almost identical to an old Nazi recruiting poster from the Second World War. After distributing the po
sters to hundreds of supermarkets across the country, a BIC spokesman said the striking resemblance was just a coincidence, adding, “We’re not trying to send out any subliminal Nazi messages.”
Least Credible Economic Growth Plan
When you think of Sweden, a model welfare state may come to mind, but not necessarily paddy fields and tea plantations. In the eighteenth century, however, Swedish priorities were slightly different.
The Swede Carl Linnaeus, a doctor specializing in cures for syphilis, was the great organizer of life. Before Linnaeus, taxonomy – the science of identifying and naming species and putting them into systems of classification – was a shambles. There were few agreed upon names even for the most common plants and no basic principles of classification or description. Plants were given long names, always in Latin. Plant naming got completely out of hand as botanists vied to outdo each other by adding more and more detailed descriptions. Names could go on to ridiculous lengths; the humble tomato, for example, was Solanum caule inermi herbaceo, foliis pinnatis incises – “the solanum with the smooth stem which is herbaceous and has incised pinnate leaves”. The world’s flora and fauna was crying out for someone to make sense of it all.
Carl Linnaeus hit upon the idea of a single, universally applicable scientific language whereby plants were given a family name, shared by all the other members of the group. His Systema Naturae was largely based on the sexual behaviour of plants. Not only do plants have sex, Linnaeus said, they also enjoy it. He gave one species of clam the names “ovula”, “labia”, “pubes”, “anus” and “hymen”. There was no escaping the link between Linnaean botany and sex. And just in case anyone had missed it, he named a whole class of flowers Clitoria.