20 Inventions That Solved One Problem And Caused A Worse One

The original thalidomide came from the West German drug company Chemie Grünenthal, which offered it from 1957 under the brand name Contergan, as an OTC tranquilizer and for morning sickness. It was nearly impossible to fatally overdose on it. It was never tested on a developing embryo. If taken early in pregnancy, it prevented the blood vessels in growing limbs from forming. More than 10,000 babies around the world were born without limbs, or with shortened limbs, before it was withdrawn in 1961.

In 1921, a General Motors engineer named Thomas Midgley Jr. discovered that mixing tetraethyl lead into gasoline halted the “knocking” that had been destroying engines. He knew what the risks were. Midgley himself took medical leave in 1923 due to lead poisoning from his work in the laboratory. After workers at a refinery died of lead poisoning, he held a press conference where he poured the additive onto his hands, then inhaled the fumes to demonstrate it was perfectly harmless. It was marketed under the name ethyl, and it pumped lead into the atmosphere for decades.

While living on a Georgia plantation, Massachusetts native Eli Whitney designed a contraption that used a wire screen and spinning teeth to quickly clean cotton by separating the seeds from the fiber, a process that otherwise required hours of manual labor. The machine did not harvest cotton from the field. That task was left to enslaved laborers. It did, however, make the processing of short-staple cotton, which was grown throughout much of the South, a lucrative endeavor. Consequently, cotton planters began to vastly expand their fields, increasing their demand for enslaved workers. The enslaved population in the United States multiplied fivefold in subsequent decades. Whitney himself made little money off of his invention, as other manufacturers failed to honor his patent.

In 1939, Swiss chemist Paul Müller found that DDT was highly effective at killing insects. It then went on to protect military personnel against typhus and malaria before being used widely across farms and homes after WWII. Because DDT does not break down easily, it builds up in animals’ bodies as it passes through the food chain. In some species of birds, including bald eagles and peregrine falcons, a byproduct of DDT interfered with the process by which calcium is deposited into eggshells, causing the eggs to crack and the populations to plummet. This impact remained undetected for several decades until its use on U.S. farms was banned.

Around 1925, William Bailey, a Harvard dropout, started marketing Radithor, which was literally water with radioactive radium in it, as an “energizing” tonic. Industrialist Eben Byers of Pittsburgh was a huge fan, drinking two or three bottles daily for about three years, accumulating well over 1,400 bottles. The human body can’t distinguish between radium and calcium, and the radium accumulated in Byers’ bones, causing them to crumble away, especially in his jawbone, eventually killing him with radiation poisoning. His very public demise spurred federal authorities to close down Bailey’s lab.

The same engineer who invented leaded gas, Thomas Midgley, along with GM executive Charles Kettering, synthesized Freon in 1928 as a substitute for the toxic and flammable gases used in early refrigerators. Those earlier gases leaked and sometimes killed entire families. Freon was truly safe to breathe, and so nobody noticed anything wrong for decades. It drifted, unreacted, into the upper atmosphere, where sunlight broke it apart and released chlorine that destroyed ozone. Scientists eventually figured out the mechanism, and a global treaty banned CFCs years later.

The Thompson submachine gun, or the Tommy gun, was designed by Army officer John Thompson in 1918 to blast its way through enemy trenches with a rapid stream of .45-caliber rounds. The weapon never saw action, and the government didn’t buy it, either. So Thompson’s company, Auto-Ordnance, sold it to the general public through hardware stores and catalogs, with no background check. Al Capone and other gangsters of the Prohibition era purchased them directly off the shelves. Thompson machine guns were used in some of the most notorious crimes of the era, including the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago. Congress eventually passed the nation’s first federal law restricting ownership of fully automatic firearms.

In the early 1900s, physician Sabin von Sochocky developed Undark, a glow-in-the-dark paint made by mixing radium with zinc sulfide. During World War I, when soldiers needed glowing instrument dials, Undark was a huge success. Women workers, many of them young, painted the dials on watches. They were taught to shape the brush-tip between their lips, a practice known as lip-pointing, so that every brushstroke deposited minuscule amounts of radium into their systems. The radium accumulated in their bones over time, causing bone decay and anemia, and it slowly killed them. Von Sochocky ultimately succumbed to radiation exposure himself.

In 1775, Scottish inventor Alexander Cumming invented the S-shaped pipe that made the modern flush toilet practical. It took decades for widespread household adoption to overwhelm cities with no real sewer systems, as homes drained into cesspools and storm drains that emptied straight into rivers. In London, the Thames became so foul in the summer of 1858 that residents called it the “Great Stink.” Even worse, the contaminated water was pumped out of the river to supply the city, spreading cholera at a time when no one knew germs were involved. The answer came from engineer Joseph Bazalgette, who designed London’s first comprehensive closed sewer system.

A French chemist named Paul Vieille developed the first workable smokeless powder in 1884. Black powder was very messy, filling the battlefield with thick smoke that interfered with rifle fire after a few rounds. Smokeless powder was much cleaner but also allowed riflemen and machine-gunners to fire on enemies at long distances without giving away their positions. This, combined with the increased rate of fire of machine guns and artillery, meant that the classic Napoleonic mass assault was suicide. European armies increasingly turned to trenches and fortified positions for protection.

In 1874, Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden received a patent for an effective barbed wire design, offering Great Plains ranchers a cheap way to fence in open range where no timber was available. It worked just fine for keeping cattle in, except when there were brutal winters ten years later. When cattle attempted to drift southward to escape the freezing winds, they hit fences and couldn’t go on. Hundreds of thousands died, trapped by barbed wire, huddled in growing snowdrifts until they froze or suffocated. The open-range ranching era was over.

In 1853, inventor Elisha Otis introduced a safety catch that prevented an elevator car from plummeting to the ground in the event of a broken cable. With the elimination of that fear, as well as the arrival of steel-framing and skyrocketing urban land values, tall buildings became economically viable. They were constructed with flat sides, all the way to the lot line, until the 40-story Equitable Building in Manhattan, which cast whole blocks into shadow. The city’s response was to become the first in the nation to enact a zoning law mandating setbacks for high-rises.

Scottish veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop patented a useful pneumatic rubber tire in 1888, mostly to make his son’s tricycle ride smoother. When cars began using them, they made it possible for drivers to travel quickly over unpaved surfaces. The problem was, instead of rolling smoothly like their non-pneumatic counterparts, the spinning hollow shape of the tires acted as a vacuum, sucking fine topsoil off the ground into the air, coating crops and irritating the lungs and eyes of livestock and people. In response to the “dust menace,” governments around Europe and North America began paving dirt roads with tar.

The German chemist Fritz Haber discovered how to produce ammonia directly out of the air, and the industrial chemist Carl Bosch developed methods for large-scale production. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer broke through the natural limits of soil fertility, and an estimated 48% of people alive today depend on food grown with it. However, when excess fertilizer washes into rivers and oceans, algae overgrow and consume oxygen from the water as they decompose, forming “dead zones” like the one in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive.

In World War I, physician Jacob Lowe invented a machine to look at soldiers’ feet through their boots. It was a great selling point, and thousands of shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were installed in shops throughout North America and Europe, enabling customers to see the bones in their feet as they looked through the wooden viewer. The occasional exposure from a single customer wasn’t harmful. But the store clerks who stood next to the unprotected machine, doing many fittings a day, year after year, received dangerous doses of cumulative radiation, leading to skin lesions and increased cancer risk before the machines were banned.

George Eastman in Rochester, New York, and, separately, John Carbutt, began selling flexible celluloid film in 1889. Now there was enough film for continuous movies. The problem was chemistry. Nitrate film was related to guncotton. When a film jammed and caught fire in a hot projector, it burned with its own oxygen, so you couldn’t douse it with water. Hundreds of theaters burned, including a Paris fire where 126 people were killed. Eventually, film decomposed into dust that exploded.

In 1880, Virginia inventor James Bonsack patented an automatic cigarette-rolling machine that produced cigarettes at a much faster rate than could be done by hand, reducing production costs by more than 80%. Industrialist James Buchanan Duke acquired the exclusive rights to the Bonsack machine and began churning out millions of cigarettes, which he heavily advertised at low prices. The plummeting cost of cigarettes, not changes to the tobacco plants themselves, made smoking a daily habit for many people. The connection to lung cancer and heart disease wouldn’t be officially recognized until years later.

In 1847, Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson announced the discovery of an excellent surgical anesthetic: chloroform, administered by inhalation. Painful surgery was over; no need for speed now. Except there was another problem. It would be many decades before germ theory and antiseptic surgery were generally accepted. Doctors still wore their day clothes, their hands unwashed and their instruments unsterilized. And with painless surgery, they had more time to do more cutting and push bacteria deeper into open wounds. In the 1850s, deaths in major hospitals from infection and hospital gangrene actually climbed.

In the 1880s, asbestos was sprayed and woven into the ships, boilers and buildings across the world as cheap and effective fireproofing. It really did stop fires and explosions. But these microscopic fibers were inhaled by workers and stayed in their lungs forever. Scarring and cancers, including mesothelioma, took decades to develop, long after workers left the jobs. Doctors discovered its risks as early as the 1900s. And internal documents show manufacturers knew about the risks for decades before the diseases and lawsuits reached their peak in the 1970s and ’80s.

It was by the late 1880s that industrialist George Westinghouse and inventor Nikola Tesla had demonstrated the efficiency of high-voltage alternating current for long-distance transmission, and cities everywhere scrambled to switch to the new technology. In order to save money, utilities hung bare high-voltage cables above ground on already-busy wooden poles used for telegraph lines. Storms and routine accidents caused these live cables to snap down onto streets below. In 1889, a lineman named John Feeks was caught up in the web of overhead wires above Broadway in New York City and electrocuted; public pressure compelled city officials to begin moving their power lines underground.

This content was created with the help of AI.