by Karl Shaw
Black and Tan
Just in time for St Patrick’s Day 2012, Nike unveiled its new trainer after Ireland’s great export, Guinness. The £57 limited-edition, beer-themed shoe had a black leather and tan upper, a creamy Nike swoosh and an image of a pint of beer on the insole.
Someone should have told Nike that naming the trainer after a violent British paramilitary unit that terrorized the Irish wasn’t such a good move. The Black and Tans conjure bitter memories for the Irish, it being the nickname of a notorious British paramilitary unit, the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, after their distinctive army tunics, who conducted a brutal and often murderous crackdown against the Roman Catholic civilian population in the early 1920s. It was, according to the Los Angeles Times, akin to launching a shoe called “the Al-Qaeda”.
Incubus / Zyklon
At least Nike wasn’t alone in putting its foot in it. In 1995, Reebok named their new women’s running shoe “Incubus”, after a mythical demon that, in mediaeval times, raped young ladies while they were sleeping.
In 2002, Umbro launched a trainer called Zyklon, sharing its name with the lethal cyanide-based gas used in the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Ayds
Despite finding that their range of slimming products shared a name with a modern-day plague, the manufacturer of Ayds decided to tough it out. They didn’t even consider altering their unintentionally unfortunate strap line: “Ayds helps you take off weight and helps you keep it off.” It was only when their sales shrank by over 50 per cent that they had a rethink, and came up with the new name “Diet Ayds”. The company went out of business soon afterwards.
i.Beat.blaxx
In 2007, the German electronics manufacturer TrekStor tried to climb on the bandwagon created by the Apple iPod phenomenon with their own MP3 player. So sticking an “i” in front of their product name was a no-brainer, and “beat” was a word that music lovers could understand in any language. The MP3 player was black, so they called it i.Beat.blaxx. Taken by surprise by the ensuing furore, a TrekStor spokesperson explained that “beat” is “not meant as a verb, but refers to the beats of the music you are listening to”.
Retardex
This is a British brand of toothpaste so you can’t even blame the translation. Recommended by dentists, presumably in a more innocent time when the word “retard” didn’t have such a negative connotation.
“What use would this company make of an electric toy?”
Western Union President Carl Orton, turning down Alexander Graham Bell’s offer to sell him the complete rights to the telephone for $100,000.
You’re Never Alone in a Cancer Ward
The tobacco industry has spent much of the past half century denying a link between smoking and disease. Paradoxically, it has also dedicated a significant amount of time and money to developing a “safe” cigarette.
In August 1988, in reply to a mounting outcry against smoking in general and second-hand smoke in particular, the US tobacco company R. J. Reynolds threw a gala party to launch their new “smokeless” cigarette called Premier. After years of work and a bill of more than $1 billion, it was one of the most expensive consumer product developments in history, promising “a whole new era of smoking enjoyment”. Unfortunately, problems with the new smoke became immediately apparent.
To begin with, there was the difficulty of actually using the product. Although it looked like a conventional cigarette, special instructions were required to teach smokers how to light it. One smoker noted, ‘Inhaling the Premier required vacuumpowered lungs . . . lighting it virtually required a blowtorch.” Once successfully lit, there was an odour issue. “Smells like burning lettuce . . .” was one of the kinder comments. Others described it as “like burning sneaker” and “as if you just opened a grave on a warm day”.
Then there was the taste. One person who “smoked” Premier complained that it “tasted like shit”; and he was R. J. Reynolds’ chief executive. To cap it all, there was a damaging rumour that the smokeless cigarette could be used as a delivery device for crack cocaine. Hardly the kind of brand association R. J. Reynolds had hoped to create. The brand was discontinued within weeks of the launch.
The most infamous British commercial cock-up of all time was the promotion of Strand cigarettes. Unlike Premier, it didn’t taste like shit and you could light it with a match without inducing a hernia. It was launched in 1960 with a massive marketing campaign behind the slogan “You’re never alone with a Strand . . . The cigarette of the Moment”. The TV advertisement depicted a dark, wet, deserted street scene in which a solitary, rain-coated character, played by the actor Terence Brook, puffed reflectively, with just his cigarettes for company. It was accompanied by a catchy jingle known as “The Lonely Man Theme” that made the UK singles charts. The cigarettes, however, stayed on the shelf.
The public had got the message – if you smoked Strand cigarettes, no one would want to know you. The brand was withdrawn just eighteen months later. It was literally the cigarette of the moment.
Least Convincing Tourist Campaigns
Singapore
Once described as “Disneyland with the death penalty”, Singapore has some of the world’s most punitive laws against chewing gum (fine £500), jaywalking (£500), dropping litter (£500), failing to flush the toilet (£75) and drugs (death).
In 2006, the Singapore Government launched an advertising campaign designed to improve the country’s image – especially the welcome given to foreign visitors – which they called Four Million Smiles. The country’s biggest newspaper, the Straits Times, accordingly ran a feature giving their readers the low-down on smiling etiquette. It also provided a list of helpful tips where smiling might not be appropriate – at the scene of a car crash, for example. Even more helpfully, the Straits Times also featured a recruitment call by escort agencies for young, athletic girls between eighteen and twenty to offer themselves for a possible spike in demand for escort services.
Gloucester
In 1994, the world’s media descended on Gloucester, England, following the discovery of several bodies in a “garden of death” belonging to Britain’s then-biggest serial killers, Frederick and Rosemary West. Gloucester city fathers, upset by the negative publicity generated by the murders, decide to launch an advertising campaign to improve their city’s image. The Touchpaper agency emerged with the winning slogan: “Gloucester – easy to get to, hard to leave.”
Hong Kong
SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) was a deadly new strain of pneumonia that started in southern China and quickly moved to Hong Kong before spreading around the world. In 2003, just as the burgeoning SARS epidemic was spreading fear among travellers worldwide, the Hong Kong tourist board commissioned a series of magazine ads telling readers that a visit to the city will “take your breath away”. Unfortunately, shortness of breath is one of the main symptoms of SARS.
“Ours has been the first and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality.”
Lt Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861.
Most Expensive Typo
It is known in the trade as “fat finger syndrome” – the occasional tendency of stressed traders working in fast-moving electronic financial markets to press the wrong button on their keyboard and, in the process, lose their employer a mint.
In 1994, Juan Pablo Davila was working for the Chilean state-owned copper company Codelco, trading commodities, when he accidentally hit the key for “buy” instead of “sell”. After realizing his mistake, he went into a frenzy of buying and selling, but only dug himself into a bigger hole, ultimately losing $206.8 million, or approximately 0.5 per cent of his country’s gross national product.
In Chile, his name has became a verb – “davilar”, meaning “to screw up royally”.
It was not the last embarrassing Chilean typo blunder. In 2010, the general manager of the Chilean mint, Gregorio Iniguez, was dismissed after thousands of coins w
ere issued with the name of the country spelt wrongly. Instead of C-H-I-L-E, the coins had C-H-I-I-E stamped on them. The 50-peso coins – worth about 6p (10 cents) – were issued in 2008 but no one noticed the mistake until two years later.
“Good enough for our transatlantic friends . . . but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.”
British Parliamentary Committee, on Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, 1878
Most Failed Attempts to Turn a Great Idea into a Profitable Business
Nikola Tesla was a legend of nineteenth-century electrical engineering. By rights, he should be at least as well known as his contemporaries Edison and Marconi. He made astonishing contributions to science; he was one of the pioneers of radio, built the first AC power system, took some of the first X-ray photographs and constructed the first radio-controlled robots. His scientific abilities were so great, his work rate so phenomenal and the range of his research so astounding that some people questioned whether he was actually of this world. But Tesla’s name today is usually only associated with pseudoscience, bizarre cults and conspiracy theories. And while the ideas he put forward made others a fortune, he died almost penniless, alone and forgotten.
Tesla was born a Serb in 1856 in a mountain village in Croatia. His first invention, not long after he had learned to talk, was a device for catching frogs. At the age of four, he jumped from the roof of the family barn clutching an umbrella to see if he could fly, a line of research that was abandoned after he spent six weeks in traction. At five, he was working on the design for a tiny windmill powered by beetles, until a friend ate his entire fuel supply, a sight that caused the young inventor to throw up.
Like most prolific inventors, Tesla was an obsessive. This first revealed itself when as a student in Prague he decided to read the complete works of Voltaire. He had no idea at this point that Voltaire’s back catalogue spanned 100 volumes of small, dense print. Although it almost resulted in complete mental breakdown, Tesla refused to quit until he had finished reading the lot.
His childhood was plagued by ill health. He contracted cholera shortly after graduating from high school and was bedridden for nine months and, at one point, his parents thought he would die. He recovered, but claimed from then on that he experienced visions – literally blinding flashes of inspiration that came to him as though he had been struck by a bolt of lightning.
One of these “visions” came to him during an afternoon stroll through a Budapest park with a friend in January 1881. At the time, he was studying to be an engineer at the Graz Polytechnic Institute. Tesla suddenly stopped dead in his tracks, grabbed a stick and began to sketch a diagram in the dirt; it was an induction motor. When Tesla put his design on paper and showed it to several European electrical engineers, they dismissed it as nonsense, so in 1884 he joined the tide of emigration to the United States to look for work at the Edison Machine Works.
According to Tesla’s autobiography, along the way he was robbed of all his luggage and most of his money. He arrived in New York with 4c. in his pocket, a book of his own poems and his latest plans for a flying machine. He also had a personal letter of introduction to the great Thomas Edison himself from a former work colleague in Paris. It read, “I know two great men and you are one of them – the other is this young man.”
As well as being an extraordinarily talented scientist, Tesla was a showman, an attention-seeker with a compulsion for spinning tall tales. Like his blinding “visions”, no one knows for sure whether his story about being robbed on the way to New York was true or not, but he knew the value of a good yarn and that his rags-to-riches story would strike a chord with the great American public. It was all part of the Tesla mythology. He always understood the value of publicity but he lacked the business sense to turn his unlimited scientific curiosity into commercially viable inventions. He was very soon, however, to get his first taste of the harsh realities of commerce from the most ruthless of them all.
Thomas Edison was an inventor of mythic proportions, but his greatest talent was claiming other people’s work as his own, including Joseph Swan’s lightbulb, George Bartlett Prescott’s quadruplex telegraph and Edward Muybridge’s kinetoscope. Like the great Isaac Newton, Edison had a sinister, vindictive side to his personality – a killer instinct. Newton did it by standing on the shoulders of giants, but Edison simply thieved, as Tesla was soon to find out.
It quickly became apparent that Edison and Tesla didn’t see eye to eye about the merits of alternating current (AC). Edison thought it was just a pipe dream. Besides which, he’d already invested millions of dollars in designing and promoting a direct current (DC) system. But he was impressed with Tesla’s amazing workrate so he agreed to hire him to make improvements in his DC generation plants. He gave him a two-month deadline and promised a $50,000 bonus if Tesla succeeded.
Working long hours with little sleep, Tesla made twenty-four design improvements to Edison’s original concepts. Edison was delighted with the results, but when Tesla asked him for his bonus money, he told the young Serb that the offer of $50,000 was just a joke. “You don’t understand our American sense of humour,” Edison told him. Tesla resigned in disgust. He and Edison would remain bitter rivals to the grave.
Soon afterwards, Tesla was approached by a group of investors who were interested in a method of arc lighting he had invented. He agreed to go into partnership with them and the group provided him with finance to start the Tesla Electric Light Company. He immediately set to work on creating a beautifully designed, highly efficient new arc lamp. The arc lights sold well and Tesla hoped to make enough money to develop his AC system, but it turned out to be the first of a series of catastrophic business decisions that were to plague his career. Although it earned a lot of money for the investors, he found out that his 50 per cent share did not entitle him to a 50 per cent voting share and he was voted out of his own company. All he was left with was a stack of worthless stock certificates. The destitute Tesla was reduced to digging ditches for $1 a day.
His luck, however, was about to change. The Western Union Company agreed to invest in Tesla’s idea for an AC motor. In a small laboratory only a short distance from Edison’s office, Tesla was able to develop all the components for the system of AC power generation and transmission that is used universally throughout the world today. In 1887, in the space of two months, Tesla filed for seven US patents for AC motors and power transmission. They would turn out to be the most valuable patents since the telephone.
A Pittsburgh industrialist named George Westinghouse heard about Tesla’s AC system and made him an offer. He purchased the patents for just $60,000, plus a generous royalty for every horsepower of electrical capacity sold. Tesla later tore up the contract which would have made him incredibly wealthy and said he was just grateful to Westinghouse for believing in his invention. He still had a lot to learn as a businessman.
The advantages of Tesla’s AC over Edison’s DC were obvious – high-voltage AC carries power with very little electric current. That means that there is very little power loss in the wires, so the power can be sent for long distances using long wires. DC, on the other hand, is not only weaker; it can only be transported for short distances and would require huge electric generating plants in every neighbourhood.
Edison, however, wasn’t going to give up without a fight; and he was always prepared to fight dirty. He launched a smear campaign to frighten the public into believing that AC was highly dangerous. At first, he used his contacts in the press to place wildly exaggerated stories about the hazards and unpredictability of AC power. When that failed to make an impression, he sponsored an electrical engineer called Harold Brown to travel the country electrocuting small animals. Brown gave children a nickel a head to bring him stray dogs and cats, then invited reporters to demonstrations where the animals were placed on metal sheets and electrocuted with 1,000 volts of AC.
The animal-killing campaign reached a new low in 1903. At Coney Island’s Luna Park, an elephant nam
ed Topsy was to be put to death for killing three people. One of the three was Topsy’s severely abusive handler. Edison set up a public execution of the animal wherein 6,600 volts of alternating current were slammed through the elephant’s body, killing it in seconds. Edison personally supervised the filming of the event and released it later that year as Electrocuting an Elephant. “Is this what your wife should be cooking with?” he asked.
For Edison, even the barbaric electrocution of an elephant wasn’t quite enough. This time, his PR offensive required the death of a human being. In 1890, the first ever state execution by electric chair, of William Kemmler, convicted of the murder of his lover Tillie Ziegler with an axe, was scheduled to take place in Auburn, New York. Edison saw an opportunity to damage the credibility of AC power permanently. If the public saw that AC could kill a human being, they would always associate it with danger.
Without his knowledge or consent, Edison persuaded the authorities to use Westinghouse’s apparatus in the fatal electrocution of Kemmler. Edison told them that AC was so deadly that it would kill instantly, making it the ideal method of execution. Edison even volunteered his services as technical adviser.
On 6 August 1890, Kemmler was strapped into the chair. His execution was a horrifically slow, drawn-out affair. After eight minutes, smoke was coming off his body and a second burst of power was required to finish him off. The stench of burning flesh was so overpowering that several spectators unsuccessfully tried to leave the room. The New York Times reported that the victim “was literally roasted to death”. It was, they reported, “an awful spectacle, far worse than hanging”.