Buzz
Being an inventor has always been seen as an exciting profession; if you're skilled, you'll almost certainly earn praise and secure your place in history. Those who come up with groundbreaking creations that shape our daily lives are often allowed to be quirky in ways that would get the average person fired from a regular office job.
However, being an inventor isn’t always a dream job, particularly if you develop something that you later regret. Here are ten creations that left their inventors questioning their choices.
10. The Atomic Bomb
It's easy to understand why the inventor of a bomb that led to widespread death and devastation might wish he'd kept his idea to himself, and that's exactly how J. Robert Oppenheimer felt in the years that followed. He was part of the team credited with creating nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project. Oppenheimer played a central role, being there from the project's inception in 1942 and quickly becoming recognized as its leader—earning the title 'father of the atomic bomb' in the years that followed. Although his personal politics were left-wing, he agreed to participate because, like other scientists including Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, he believed it was crucial for the U.S. to build an atomic bomb before the Nazis could.
Oppenheimer remained enthusiastic in May 1945 when he described the 'brilliant luminescence' the bomb would create. But it was only when he witnessed the first atomic bomb explosion in July 1945 that he began to question what he had helped bring to life, famously quoting a line from Hindu scripture in response: 'I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.' In October 1945, after departing from the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer told President Truman that he felt the weight of blood on his hands due to his involvement.
9. The Airplane
Everyone knows the Wright brothers were behind the invention of the first successful airplane, but less is known about the regret one of them—Orville Wright—felt in later years. Orville and his brother Wilbur created the Wright Flyer, which became the first powered aircraft to achieve sustained flight on December 17, 1903. Their interest in aviation was sparked by a toy helicopter their father bought them in their youth. After German inventor Otto Lilienthal's death from a glider crash, the Wright brothers decided to carry on his work. Their achievement brought them fame, success, and a place in history, though Wilbur tragically passed away from typhoid fever just nine years after their historic flight in 1903.
Perhaps Orville was the one with the happier fate, as he lived long enough to see the evolution of airplanes over the next three decades, culminating in their use to deliver bombs during World War II. He had initially envisioned airplanes as tools for promoting peace, not as weapons of war. In a 1943 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he expressed his inner conflict: proud of the potential positive impact of his invention but bitter at how it had been turned into a tool of destruction and death.
7. Pop-Up Ads
Everyone shares in the regret of pop-up ads' invention, including the man who created them—Ethan Zuckerman. In the 1990s, while working as a programmer and designer for Tripod.com, he came up with this dreadful idea after the site faced backlash from a car company whose banner ad appeared on a sexually explicit webpage. To avoid this, Tripod developed the concept of ads that wouldn't appear on the original page but would instead 'pop up' in a separate window, helping companies avoid undesirable associations. Zuckerman was the one who wrote the code for it.
In 2014, Zuckerman wrote an article for The Atlantic, effectively apologizing for how this idea had evolved into a mainstream online advertising tactic that irritated millions of Internet users. He explained that the original intention was positive. He also suggested that the best way to eliminate ads on the Internet would be for users to pay for services, ensuring privacy protection in exchange. While his apology might feel like too little, too late, at least it didn’t pop up randomly in the middle of a video.
6. Mother’s Day
Anyone who's ever forgotten to get a card or gift for Mother's Day has regretted its invention, though perhaps not as much as the person who created it. The American version of the holiday was founded by Anna Jarvis in 1908, inspired by her own mother, who had initiated a 'Mother’s Friendship Day' to foster reconciliation after the Civil War. Jarvis's idea quickly gained traction, spreading across nearly all U.S. states within five years and officially becoming a national holiday in 1914.
You might think Jarvis would have been thrilled by the widespread popularity of her idea, but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. While she was pleased that it had become a national event, she soon realized it was being commercially exploited, and by 1920, she was publicly urging people not to buy gifts or cards from stores.
The next three decades of Jarvis's life were spent in a losing battle against this commercialization. She took companies and individuals who used the holiday's name without her permission to court, but ultimately lost all her money. By the time she passed away in 1948, she was living in a sanatorium, penniless and broken by the very dream she had fought so hard to make real.
5. Dynamite
Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, likely never imagined this would be his lasting legacy. Born in Stockholm in 1833, he inherited a passion for explosives from his inventor father. When sent abroad to study, he crossed paths with Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero, the creator of nitroglycerine. Nobel became captivated by the volatile substance but soon realized that it would need to be stabilized for practical use. He accomplished this by mixing it with kieselguhr clay, forming a paste-like material which he named dynamite and patented in 1867.
Though Nobel’s invention secured his place in history, he had initially intended it for the mining industry, not for warfare. He confided in friends like Bertha Von Suttner that he hoped the destructive power of dynamite would serve as a deterrent against its use as a weapon. The pivotal moment for Nobel might have been the death of his brother Ludvig in 1888. A French newspaper, mistakenly reporting that it was Alfred who had died, published an obituary branding him the 'merchant of death.' This deeply troubled Nobel and is believed to have prompted him to create the Nobel Peace Prize as a form of atonement. However, others argue that anti-war activist Suttner's influence was the true catalyst.
4. Antivirus Software
When a man's most famous accomplishments include creating antivirus software, claiming to have had relations with a humpback whale, and being linked to a murder investigation, you wouldn't expect him to regret the first one. But John McAfee defies expectations. The 73-year-old is such a hardcore libertarian that he makes others seem moderate, but he gained fame with McAfee software, the first antivirus product available for purchase.
The first sign that McAfee might be a bit eccentric came in 1992 when he warned of a computer virus named 'Michelangelo,' claiming it would wipe out millions of computers. This sparked a surge in software sales, but it was later revealed that the actual impact was much less severe. As a result, McAfee left his company in 1994 with $100 million, while other antivirus software eventually surpassed McAfee’s product.
These days, hardly anyone uses McAfee, including the man who created it. McAfee himself has called it 'the worst software on the planet' and is relieved to no longer be associated with it. If he regrets his rise to fame and fortune, it's probably nothing compared to how the whales feel about it.
3. K-Cups
If any of us had invented a product contributing to environmental destruction, we might feel regret about it, and so it is for the creator of the Keurig pod, commonly known as the K-Cup. This person is John Sylvan, who came up with the idea for single-use plastic coffee pods in the early 1990s. The concept turned out to be worth billions, but the problem with these pods is that they are made of plastic that is not biodegradable and can't generally be recycled, leading to waste.
Like many other inventors on this list, Sylvan now says he didn't anticipate his invention becoming so widely popular in the US, with roughly one in three homes owning a machine for the pods—he originally thought they would be used only in offices. However, he also admits that he knew the easy disposability and the addictive appeal of coffee would likely ensure their success, so it seems he could have foreseen the outcome.
2. Blink Tag
If you're going to regret something you invented, it's probably better that it's something relatively trivial, like the blink tag, which was a feature of the Internet for several years. For those too young to remember, it was a nonstandard HTML element that made any text enclosed within it blink on the screen. The creator of this feature was Lou Montulli, who later wrote a blog post in 2009 explaining why he had come up with something so bizarre and irritating, as well as apologizing for it.
Montulli shared that the blink tag came into being in the summer of 1994 while he was working on the Lynx web browser at Netscape. He had jokingly mentioned to colleagues that Lynx could only display text that blinked on the screen. Montulli also added that they were all rather drunk at the time and that it was one of the engineers present who actually turned the blink tag into a reality.
One of the strangest inventions on the Internet, made even more peculiar by the US government's claim that it might not have been entirely harmless but could potentially trigger epilepsy. The blink tag was phased out in 2013, but the classic excuse of 'I was drunk, and someone else did it' will likely remain a part of Internet history.
1. Pepper Spray
Inventors of weapons who later become appalled at how they are used is a recurring theme, and Kamran Loghman is yet another example. In the 1980s, he was working for the FBI, tasked with developing a highly potent pepper spray for use by law enforcement against lawbreakers.
At first glance, it might seem straightforward—Loghman knew from the beginning that the spray he was designing would be used on people, so he shouldn't regret it now. However, this is not the case. In 2011, during the peak of the Occupy Wall Street protests, Loghman gave an interview reflecting on the weapon he had created years before, and he was clearly upset.
Loghman’s issue was that the police were using pepper spray against peaceful protesters, instead of limiting its use to those who were resisting arrest with violence. Not only did he create the spray, but he also worked closely with law enforcement to develop guidelines on when and how it should be used. In his interview, he expressed that the deployment of the spray against nonviolent demonstrators was a direct violation of those rules.
