by Karl Shaw
The plant-nookie references were all too much for the British scientific community, who dismissed his botanical classification system as “too smutty for English ears” and “unspeakably vulgar”. Worried translators hunted feverishly for less offensive English terms to replace the sexually explicit Linnaean language. William Withering, an English physician who made a name for himself by treating heart problems with extract of foxglove (digitalis), took it upon himself to translate Linnaeus’s sexually explicit terminology into harmless English equivalents. Thanks to his expurgated version, women could now discuss flower arrangements safely without fear of embarrassment. A few Linnaean names however remained; the slipper limpet still answers to the name Crepidula fornicata: It was also all a bit too much for the Pope, of course, who completely banned Linnaeus’s works.
For all his brilliance, Linnaeus was not a likeable man. Arrogant and overbearing, he liked to style himself “Prince of Botanists”. As a rule, it was never wise to question his authority; those who did found they had weeds named after them. There was also much that the godfather of plant and animal classification got wildly wrong. Linnaeus thought there might be around 40,000 species all told: estimates today range from 10 million to 100 million. His system incorporated mythical beasts and “monstrous humans”, including the “wild man” Homo ferus, who walked on all fours, and Homo caudatus – “man with a tail”. He thought that all existing species had survived Noah’s flood by clinging to the slopes of Mount Ararat. He also believed that epilepsy could be caused by washing hair, that leprosy could be cured by eating herring worms and that swallows wintered at the bottom of lakes. One of his more hopeless ventures was a clock based on the opening and closing times of various flowers.
Linnaeus’s most catastrophic error was his attempt to turn Sweden into a giant market garden. He thought that by transplanting the world’s best crops in Sweden he could transform his country’s economy and make it less dependent on foreign imported food. He sent his best students out all over the world on botanical pilgrimages to collect exotic plants and bring them home, confidently anticipating the day when the Swedish countryside would be covered with coffee plantations and paddy fields. Unfortunately, his plan had not taken into account one rather formidable obstacle – the Swedish weather. Linnaeus was untroubled by this minor technicality, saying that he would start off by growing the plants in the warmest, southernmost part of Sweden, then very gradually move them north, small distances at a time, thereby “tricking” them into becoming acclimatized. When some of his brighter students pointed out that his plan was a crock of poo,5 Linnaeus reminded them that there were more than a hundred dissertations supporting his theory. Of course there were – Linnaeus had written them himself.
Sadly, Sweden did not become a major producer of silk, tea, coffee nor rice. Most of the plant samples never survived the rough sea passage north. A large number of the unfortunate students sent out to collect them also perished, mostly as a result of tropical diseases or drownings at sea. The few plants that did survive the journey rarely lasted long. One that did make it, the potato, was a golden opportunity missed. Potatoes, Linnaeus asserted, were related to the deadly nightshade plant and were therefore highly poisonous. They came in useful, however, for making wig powder.
Biggest Business Boob
In 1914, a nineteen-year-old New York socialite, Mary Phelps Jacob, was getting herself ready for a débutante ball when she noticed that the stiff boned corset she was expected to wear was far too bulky for the new, sheer evening gown she had bought especially for the occasion. She got her maid to take two silk handkerchiefs and some pink ribbon and together they knocked together the very first brassière. Family and friends were impressed and asked Jacob to make brassières for them as well. She realized that she was on to something big when she got a letter from a complete stranger offering her $1 for one of her contraptions.
Mary Phelps Jacob set up her own bra business, but with no commercial experience, her venture quickly collapsed, so she sold the patent rights to the Warner Corset Company for a one-off payment of $1,500 – roughly equivalent to $21,000 today.
Over the next thirty years alone, Warner’s made $15 million from the patent.
“Man will not fly for fifty years.”
Wilbur Wright, American aviation pioneer, to brother Orville, two years before their first successful flight in 1903.
Least Credible Self-Improvement Guide
In March 2004, the American business magnate Donald Trump published a book titled How to Get Rich. It was a crowded market; among competing titles on the bookshelf that year were Stay Home and Get Rich by Stewart Kime; How to Get Rich While You Sleep by J. David Huskin; How to Be a Male Go-Go Dancer and Get Rich by Ray Costa; and How to Get Filthy, Stinking Rich and Still Have Time for Great Sex! An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Wealth and Happiness by Lee Milteer.
Just five months later,Trump’s publicly-traded development company Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts filed for bankruptcy for the second time in twelve years.
“I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here . . . We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped.”
Simon Cameron, US Senator, on the Smithsonian Institute, 1901
Worst Business Brain Behind a Global Brand Name
In 1894, a health food fanatic John Harvey Kellogg, superintendent of a sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, was working on a new kind of wheat meal for his patients when he made an accidental discovery. Rolling out wheat dough that had been forgotten overnight, he found that instead of loaves of bread he got thin flakes. Kellogg’s patients liked the new food – corn flakes.
The free-thinking Mr Kellogg, whose dietary advice to his patients was concerned with reducing “sexual stimulation”, was delighted. His creation was the ideal aid to controlling masturbation,6 which, Kellogg taught his patients, led to leprosy, tuberculosis, heart disease, epilepsy, dimness of vision, insanity, idiocy and death.
Kellogg’s younger brother Will, who was obviously the business brain in the family, saw a different route for John’s invention. On February 1906, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake was set up. Will ran the venture and was happy to have his initials on every box. John, the inventor, took a different view. “It is exceedingly distasteful to have my name associated with the food business or with anything commercial. But we sometimes have to swallow bitter pills against our will.” In fact, thanks to John’s reluctance to make money, by the time they had set up their company they had already allowed others to exploit their product and at that time there were forty-two other companies making corn flakes in Battle Creek alone.
Eventually, a feud caused the brothers to split. Will went off to market the cereals and make a fortune, marketing his products as the W. K. Kellogg Company. John Harvey Kellogg’s claim to fame, meanwhile, would rest on his fifty-odd books written to advance his theories about sex and bowel movements. On his wedding night with the lucky Mrs Kellogg, née Ella Eaton, he spent all evening writing a 644-page treatise on the evils of sexual intercourse entitled “Plain Facts for Old and Young”.
John Harvey Kellogg may not have had much of a business brain, but at least he practised what he preached. His marriage with Ella Eaton was never consummated.
Worst Business Brain Behind a Global Brand Name: Runner-Up
In the early 1830s, natural rubber was touted as a new “miracle” product, but not for long. The problem was that gum elastic, as it was known, was not very elastic. It had an unfortunate habit of melting in hot weather and cracking in cold weather.
Charles Goodyear, a thirty-one-year-old from Springfield, Massachusetts, decided to develop an improved, more stable form of rubber. Working doggedly for the best part of a decade, he tried mixing rubber with everything from witch hazel to cream cheese. He even gave up his day job in pursuit of his cause, plunging himself and his wife and children into poverty. Undeterred by pleas from friends and relatives to get a prope
r job and complaints from neighbours about the stink of burning rubber emanating from the Goodyear household, he stubbornly continued in his quest, meanwhile reduced to begging for food and pawning family possessions to finance his experiments. After five futile years, Goodyear had nothing to show for his efforts except mounting debts. He was at rock bottom.
Then one day in 1839, he spilled a drop of rubber and sulphur on his brother’s burning stove and inadvertently discovered that the sample had turned tough and strong – the “vulcanized” rubber which is commonplace today. The rest is history . . . or so it might appear.
Goodyear knew he had made a major breakthrough. He knew now that heat and sulphur miraculously changed rubber, but he didn’t know how much heat, or for how long. He worked feverishly for several more years to try to replicate the formula.
He eventually did find the recipe, but despite his genius for innovation, he was a terrible businessman. Instead of sticking to basic manufacturing interests which might have made him a millionaire, he started experimenting again. He wanted to make everything out of rubber; banknotes, musical instruments, flags, jewellery, ships’ sails, even rubber ships. He had his portrait painted on rubber, had his calling cards engraved on it, his autobiography printed on and bound in it. He even wore rubber hats, vests and ties.
Meanwhile, Goodyear had problems with “patent pirates” and had to pay the cost of fighting thirty-two patents all the way to the Supreme Court. He was particularly slow in filing foreign patent applications. He sent samples of his heat-and-sulphur-treated gum to British rubber companies without revealing any details. But the English rubber pioneer Thomas Hancock, who had been trying for twenty years to make weatherproof rubber, worked out how it was made. By the time Goodyear applied for an English patent, he found that Hancock had “reinvented” vulcanized rubber and had filed the patent a few weeks earlier.
At the Paris World’s Fair in 1855, Goodyear installed a great pavilion built entirely of rubber, but his French patent was cancelled on a technicality and his French royalties stopped before he could pay his bills. He was seized by gendarmes. When Emperor Napoleon III awarded Goodyear the cross of the Legion of Honour, it had to be delivered to him in the debtor’s prison.
Most people naturally assume that Goodyear founded the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, but in fact it was named in the inventor’s honour nearly forty years after his death by Frank and Charles Sabering in 1898. He failed to make any money from his invention and, when he died aged fifty-nine, he was $200,000 in debt.
Ironically, Charles Goodyear never even dreamed of seeing his name on a set of tyres. He died decades before the automobile was invented.
Least Successful Trade Minister
In 1973, Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonso, the minister in charge of Venezuela’s growing oil boom and founder member of OPEC, announced, “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see . . . oil will bring us ruin. Oil is the devil’s excrement.”
Four decades later, despite having the biggest oil reserves in the Americas, 30 per cent of Venezuelans live on less than £1.25 a day and Caracas is the world’s most violent capital. On the upside, Venezuela’s tally of eleven Miss Worlds and Miss Universes is unsurpassed. Although, perhaps in the spirit of señor Alfonso, Venezuela’s President Chávez tried to put an end to that. In 2011, he announced that “monstrous breasts” did not square with his revolutionary policies.
“The Americans are good about making fancy cars and refrigerators, but that doesn’t mean they are any good at making aircraft. They are bluffing. They are excellent at bluffing.”
Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, 1942
The Real Thing
On 8 May 1886, Coca-Cola went on sale for the first time at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta, Georgia, as a headache and hangover remedy. By the 1940s, it was the world’s favourite beverage. By the late 1950s, Coke was outselling its nearest rival, the emerging upstart Pepsi, by a ratio of more than five to one. Time magazine celebrated Coke’s “peaceful nearconquest of the world”.
In the 1960s, however, Coke’s chief rival repositioned itself as a youth brand and managed to narrow the gap. In the 1970s, Pepsi raised the stakes even further by introducing the Pepsi Challenge – testing consumers blind on the difference between its own brand and “the real thing”. To the horror of Coca-Cola’s company president, Robert Woodruff, most of those who participated preferred Pepsi’s sweeter formula. Coke’s number-one status was starting to look vulnerable. By the mid-1980s, the market share had slipped to an all-time low of just under 24 per cent. Something had to be done.
In April 1985, after four years in development, Coca-Cola executives stepped up to a podium and told the world that the 99-year-old Coke formula was being shelved in favour of something called “New Coke”. As the ads said, you were gonna love it. Company Chairman Roberto C. Goizueta said New Coke was “smoother, rounder yet bolder”, as though it was a fine wine.
Customer reaction was immediate, but not one Goizueta was looking for. The company received over 46,000 complaints a day. New Coke was variously described as “sewer water” and tasting like “furniture polish” and, harshly, “two-day-old Pepsi”.
In fact, Pepsi was the first to rub their noses in it. Within weeks of the launch, it ran a TV ad with an old man sitting on a park bench, staring at the can in his hand. “They changed my Coke,” he said, clearly distressed. “I can’t believe it.”
Soon people were hoarding cases of the old stuff. In June 1985, Newsweek reported that black marketeers sold old Coke for $30 a case. A Hollywood producer, giving an old vintage its proper respect, reportedly rented a wine cellar to hold 100 cases of the old Coke.
Staggered by the backlash, within a matter of weeks New Coke was yanked from the store shelves, replaced by old Coke – rebranded “classic” Coke – so everyone knew they were getting the real thing.
Coke could have saved themselves a lot of bother. Pepsi-Cola, bankrupted three times, had been offered for sale to the Coca-Cola Company in 1932; Coke turned down the offer.
Quickest Route to Financial Suicide
During the 1980s, the Ratner name was a fixture on British high streets. Gerald Ratner had built his eponymous business into the world’s biggest brand of cut-price jewellery through a series of well-timed publicity stunts and takeover deals. He destroyed his brand in one sentence.
On 23 April 1991, Ratner was speaking at a business dinner at the Institute of Directors in London and thought he would share a few humorous words among friends: “We also do cutglass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, ‘How can you sell this for such a low price?’ I say, ‘Because it’s total crap.’” He went on to reveal that his store’s earrings were “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long”.
His speech got a laugh but Ratner’s investors and customers didn’t see the funny side. His company’s share price plummeted from £2 to less than 8p; consumer confidence sank without trace, wiping an estimated £500 million from the value of the company. Gerald Ratner and his famous brand were forced to exit the jewellery trade.
He noted later, ruefully, “Someone said he had met comedians who wanted to be millionaires, but I must have been the only millionaire who wanted to be a comedian.”
“With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn’t likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.”
Business Week, 2 August 1968
Least Consumer-Friendly Product
In the Middle Ages, the emperor Charlemagne was thought by some to possess magical powers. He convinced a group of hostile warlords of these powers one day when he pulled a tablecloth from his table, threw it into the fire and then pulled it out, unburned. The cloth was woven from asbestos.
The Ancient Greeks and the Romans also knew all about the flame-proof qualities of asbestos and they eve
n wore clothes made of it – even though they had noticed that people who wore them had a worrying tendency to develop sickness of the lungs and fall prematurely dead. They were quite literally dressed to kill.
But when the industrial age came around, so great was the demand for an indestructible substance that could be spun, woven or turned into a building material, such worries were overlooked. By the 1850s, the rise of the versatile material was unstoppable. Firemen were sporting asbestos helmets and jackets and it was turning up in everything from lagging to gaskets. European factories began making asbestos boards and, in 1896, Ferodo, an English company, began using a mixture of asbestos and resin in brake linings.
Nobody seemed very much bothered when a physician from Vienna pointed out that inhalation of asbestos dust caused terrible lung problems. In the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, the Wicked Witch of the West was equipped with an asbestos broom. During the Second World War, combatants on both sides were using the flame-proof material. By the time health concerns began to re-emerge in the 1960s, schools and hospitals were already packed with the stuff.
Today, we know that the microscopic asbestos fibres, light enough to be carried in the air, remain embedded in the lungs causing mesothelioma, lung cancer and asbestosis, three potentially fatal diseases. The first symptoms may not show up for as long as forty years after the victim’s exposure to asbestos.
By 1999, Britain had banned the import and use of all asbestos, but it is still killing around 3,500 people each year. Ironically, there is today a new thriving asbestos industry . . . safe removal and disposal of this deadly mineral.
Least Successful Branding: the Main Contenders