3 Horrible Inventions
By: Harry Seitz
Tags: Facebook, Nuclear Weapons, Spam, Inventions, Guns

3 Horrible Inventions

Disclaimer

Originally, I was going to write about five decent people whose inventions inadvertently caused inordinate damage, but I couldn’t find five. There are plenty of lousy people who made at least one positive contribution, but almost every inventor had at least an inkling of the havoc their inventions could wreak upon the world.

Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer was never a stable person. He attempted to poison one of his tutors and stabbed another, and tried to strangle one his friends. His brilliance and the wealth of his family were all that prevented him from being expelled.

He chain smoked, skipped meals, and was described by acquaintances as self destructive. And the more you read about him, the more he appears to fall into the category of people too obsessed with if something could be done to seriously consider whether it should be done.

One could make the argument that nuclear weapons saved thousands of lives by ending WW2, and helped to keep the peace between the US and the former USSR, but for many of us, the psychological stress of growing up under the constant stress of thermonuclear war has left us with a paranoia that persists to this day, and a lot of us wonder why younger generations don’t take this more seriously.

Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are still out there, and all it takes is one to level a city and potentially lead to a literal apocalypse.

Thomas Midgely Jr.

Environmental historian J. R. McNeill wrote that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”

Midgely was responsible for putting lead into gasoline to stop engines from knocking, and invented Freon, the first CFC.

He continued to develop leaded gasoline after he himself suffered from lead poisoning, and later inhaled it in front of a crowd to tout its safeness.

Leaded gasoline kills people, and for those unaware, CFCs are responsible for the hole in the ozone layer. In 1991, the EPA estimated that the cost of replacing CFCs in the US alone would be approximately $3 billion, primarily because of all the freezers and refrigerators that would be rendered obsolete.

Midgely had no way of knowing about the damage that CFCs would cause, as he was strangled and killed by a system of levers and pulleys he had invented to help him get out of bed in the mid 1950’s, 30 years before we were aware that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer.

Gary Thuerk

Thuerk’s invention impacts all of us everyday in the form of lost time, productivity, and scams. It’s estimated that SPAM costs the world between $20 and $50 billion a year, and Thuerk continues to be proud of inventing it.

The problem with SPAM is that it is cost effective, generating approximately 100 times more for the spammers than it costs them to produce. So despite the annoyance and other costs to society in general, it isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

Phishing, an offshoot of SPAM, cost American businesses approximately $1.6 billion in 2016. If you work at a large corporation, you probably have to watch a computer security video along with the sensitivity training video, which are both typically regarded as pointless wastes of time.

Thank you Gary Thuerk, for making my job and the internet even more annoying than they already were.

Conclusion

There are plenty of other devastating inventions, like collateralized debt obligations, Gatling guns, and Facebook. Only Richard Jordan Gatling appears to have been a decent person, with several beneficial inventions to his credit.

His Gatling gun was based on his seed planter. He invented the gun after he noticed that more Civil War soldiers were dying of disease than by gunshot, and reasoned that a weapon with a high rate of fire would “to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.”

Whether this is more rationalization than sound reasoning is up for debate, but should give us pause before releasing anything new into the world. The sad truth is that if it wasn’t Oppenheimer, Midgely, Thuerk, Gatling, or Zuckerberg, it would have inevitably been somebody else. Whether you’re willing to live with the consequences is the question, and if the price is right, the answer is almost always a yes.