10 Useful Inventions That Went Bad

By Miss Cellania in Weapons & War on Jul 19, 2009 at 8:45 am

Some of the most notorious discoveries and inventions arose by accident, or more commonly, were developed for uses other than what they ended up doing. Listverse looks at ten such products, including trinitrotoluene, a chemical discovered by Joseph Wilbrand in 1863 and meant for use as a yellow dye. With the name shortened to TNT, the explosive was used to wage both world wars. Link -via the Presurfer

Tags: chemistry, History, inventions, War

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Edward
Jul 19th, 2009 at 10:07 am
How can anyone claim that the Gatling gun “went bad”? It performed exactly as it was intended. As for the nerve gases and concentration camps, I think they also perform their originally intended functions.
Kalel
Jul 19th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
The evil isn’t in the tool.
zav
Jul 19th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
I wonder just how exactly Ecstasy went bad with about 50 claimed deaths in the UK per year.

Aspirin has many more deaths per year than that just in America alone.
zav
Jul 19th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
The link to the Presurfer web site is incorrect and brings you to a Jesus site.

Incorrect link:
http://presurfer.blogpot.com/

Correct link:
http://presurfer.blogspot.com/
macygverfan
Jul 19th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
400000 deaths? why did they spray it again?
Mike390430499
Jul 19th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
Anything can be used in ways that society deems ‘good’ or ‘evil’. Why an article-writer would deliberately want to focus on things being ‘evil’ is mysterious..
Mike390430499
Jul 19th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Wow, rockets are evil? What about the jet engine, used to deliver bombs aplenty? Surely that’s evil, right? What about the fork, used to feed all these evil soldiers who do evil things? What about dirt, used to grow that evil food? Or the evil sun, without which the evil humans could not be so evil evil evil evil evil evil
Moon
Jul 19th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Really?? MDMA is Number ONE?? It maybe kills a couple hundred people a year? Cigarettes should be on the list, then. Or booze.

Also, if they aren’t in any particular order, why number them?

A nitpick: it’s Thomas Midgely, JR. and he died badly as a result of ANOTHER invention:

From Wikipedia:
In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio which left him severely disabled. This led him to devise an elaborate system of strings and pulleys to help others lift him from bed. This system was the eventual cause of his ironic death when he was accidentally entangled in the ropes of this device and died of strangulation at the age of 55.[6][7] Midgley died before the effect of CFCs upon the ozone layer became widely known in 1974.

He’s the Wile E. Coyote of inventors. It would be funny if he didn’t kill thousands of people and seriously mess up the environment.
Miss Cellania
Jul 19th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Wow, zav! I had no idea blogpot was a domain! My typoglycemia rises again… fixed now.
zav
Jul 19th, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Heeey, I’m just your surly diligent proofreader. Kudos to the lack of spellingk and grammar’ errors recently. I’m almost out of a job.
AlejoHausner
Jul 21st, 2009 at 6:20 pm
I’m not so sure that Fritz Haber (the Jew who invented a method for making ammonia from atmospheric nitrogen) thought that his invention was purely meant for making fertilizer. I think his main goal was to make a precursor for explosives. Due to the blockade, Germany had little access to nitrates needed to make explosives, so “fixing” nitrogen out of thin air was a big contribution to the war effort.

What is indeed ironic (or perhaps simply sad), however, is that he was a patriotic Jew trying to help his country in the war, and that sentiment in Germany turned so bitterly against Jews twenty years later.

Alejo

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