Check out these 15 inventors who, looking back, wish they could undo their creations. Some ideas just didn’t pan out as planned.
1. Flappy Bird
While Flappy Bird may have ruled the viral zeitgeist in the mid 2000s, inventor Dong Nguyen wasn’t always thrilled with the game’s viral success. “I cannot take this anymore,” he tweeted shortly before the game was yanked from various app stores, only to later return on Amazon Fire.
2. Mother’s Day
Though Anna Jarvis first invented Mother’s Day to honor her late mother in the early 1900s, she found herself frustrated with the commercialism surrounding the holiday, dubbing those cashing in on the occasion as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.”
3. Comic Sans
Not a fan of Comic Sans? You’re not alone. Vincent Connare, who created the font, has also made his feelings clear about the typeface. “f you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” he said. “If you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”
4. The K-Cup
While a convenient office staple, K-Cup inventor John Sylvain had second thoughts about creating a product hinging on single-use plastic. = “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it,” he told The Atlantic back in 2015.
5. The AK-47
In 2012, Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 wrote a letter to the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church pondering his responsibility over the weapon’s global death toll. “I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people’s lives, then can it be that I… a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?” he asked in the letter, one penned less than two years before his death. “The longer I live, the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression.”
6. The Electric Television
“Even though Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of electronic television, was disappointed by it for most of his life, he changed his mind the day he saw Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon thanks to his invention, telling his wife ‘this has made it all worthwhile.’”
7. Pop-Up Ads
If you ever rued the existence of pop-up ads, don’t worry — their creator did too. “We ended up creating one of the most hated tools in the advertiser’s toolkit: The pop-up ad,” Ethan Zuckerman wrote in an essay for The Atlantic. “I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”
8. The Labradoodle
Though they may be cute, Wally Conron, who first bred the labradoodle in the late ‘80s, admitted that the world would be better off without Labrador/poodle hybrids. ‘“I’ve done a lot of damage.,” he said, noting that he had “created a lot of problems. “There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there.””
9. The URL’s Double Slash
“The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, has one regret: adding the double slash // to URLs. In retrospect, he says, it was totally unnecessary.”
10. The Cubicle
“Robert Propst, the inventor of the Action Office which evolved into the modern cubicle system, stated that ‘The cubiclizing of people in modern corporations is monolithic insanity.'”
11. The Loudspeaker
“After seeing Hitler and other dictators abuse loudspeakers to spread propaganda, Peter Laurids Jensen regretted inventing the loudspeaker.”
12. The USB
“Ajay V. Bhatt, an Indian-born American computer architect who led the Intel team that invented the USB (Universal Serial Bus), regrets not making it reversible. It would have doubled the cost, which was a hard sell at the time, ‘[b]ut in hindsight, we blew it.’ He holds 132 patents and counting.”
13. The Diving Headbutt
“Harley Race, the inventor of the diving headbutt in professional wrestling, has stated that he regrets ever inventing the move, because it appears to cause spinal problems as well as concussions. A chief practitioner, one of the British Bulldogs, has been confined to a wheelchair lately.”
14. The RADAR Gun
“Sir Roberrt Watson-Watt, the inventor of the RADAR was caught speeding with a RADAR gun. He reportedly said ‘My God, if I’d known what they were going to do with it, I’d have never have invented it!’”
15. The Polygraph
“The inventor of the polygraph, John Larson, hated it so much he called it ‘a Frankenstein’s monster, which I have spent over 40 years in combating.’”
16. Dynamite
“Alfred Nobel invented [dynamite]. And when he was mistakenly declared dead in 1888, newspapers published obituaries that stated that “the merchant of death is dead.” Ashamed to leave such a legacy, he left the money he made from dynamites to celebrate humanity; thus created the Nobel Prize.”
17. The Gender Reveal
“The woman who invented gender reveal parties now regrets it. Her child is gender non-conforming.”
18. Pepper Spray
Kamran Loghman, who invented pepper spray, also expressed second thoughts about his creation. “It is becoming more and more fashionable right now, this day and age, to use chemical on people who have an opinion,” he said. “And that to me is a complete lack of leadership both in the police department and other people who cannot really deal with the root of the problem and they want to spray people to quiet them down. And it’s really not supposed to be that. It’s not a thing that solves any problem nor is it something that quiets people down.”
19. Complicated Passswords
You’re not the only one sick of cramming a number, a symbol, three capital letters and your first born into your passwords. Bill Burr, who drafted the guide on crafting appropriate passwords apparently isn’t a fan of his rules either. “Much of what I did I now regret,” he said back in 2017 “In the end, [the list of guidelines] was probably too complicated for a lot of folks to understand very well, and the truth is, it was barking up the wrong tree.”
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