20 Inventions Experts Mocked Before They Changed Everyday Life

The Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio, were bicycle mechanics and were attempting to build a flying machine of their own design. On October 9, 1903, The New York Times declared that a working flying machine was 1 to 10 million years away. On December 17, 1903, nine weeks after that newspaper article, the brothers had four successful, controlled, powered flights at Kitty Hawk, N.C. But belief still hadn’t fully caught up with reality. It would take five more years for Wilbur Wright to prove their work when he flew in France to a skeptical public.

Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born teacher of speech, invented the first successful telephone, which he patented in 1876, and offered it to Western Union, the giant telegraph firm in the US. Its president, William Orton, rejected the offer, declaring that there was no commercial use for such an “electric toy.” The British Post Office agreed, saying that Britain already had enough messenger boys, and that it did not need telephones. So, Bell started his own company and established local telephone lines himself.

Thomas Edison’s device, his first successful machine capable of both playing and recording sounds, was presented before the members of the French Academy of Sciences in March 1878. According to reports, Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud, a professor of medicine, believed the presenter was using ventriloquism to trick the audience and grabbed him by the throat in protest. Once the tinfoil cylinder phonograph had been proven genuine, other skeptics were not convinced of its utility, calling it a mere toy for dictating that would never amount to anything worthwhile.

In 1893, a Chicago engineer named Whitcomb Judson debuted his “Clasp Locker” at the Chicago World’s Fair. A hook-and-eye fastener that was designed to be easier to use than bootlaces, the device jammed, popped open unexpectedly, and was ridiculed by tailors who considered it a useless toy. For two decades, his company was close to going bankrupt. It wasn’t until 1913 that a Swedish-American engineer, Gideon Sundback, improved the design by adding small interlocking metal teeth. A decade later, B.F. Goodrich began using the fastener on its rubber boots and coined the name “zipper.”

In 1885, John Kemp Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle, a machine with a chain drive and equal-size front and rear wheels, superseded the treacherous high-wheeled penny-farthing. Suddenly riding the bicycle became fashionable throughout Britain and North America. In response, doctors invented bicycle face, which was supposedly a form of malady characterized by clenched jaws and bulging eyes. Doctors’ diagnoses were publicized in 1895 in The Literary Digest. There was no such thing as bicycle face. It was merely a ploy, usually meant to keep women from cycling.

In 1901, a British civil engineer called Hubert Cecil Booth constructed the first powered suction vacuum cleaner, placing the petrol engine on a horse-drawn carriage. A hose would snake through the windows of buildings for the operator to clean. Dubbed “Puffing Billy,” the device was noisy enough to make cab horses jump, and the police wrote it tickets for blocking the street. In 1902, it sucked the carpet at Westminster Abbey just prior to King Edward VII’s coronation, which pleased the monarch so much that he ordered some for Buckingham Palace.

The electric light bulb that Thomas Edison developed wasn’t the first such device, but it was the first to be strong enough to market. In 1879, a British Parliamentary committee called it “good enough for our transatlantic friends … but unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men.” Professor Henry Morton of the Stevens Institute of Technology described it as “a conspicuous failure.” That year, however, Edison managed to perfect a bamboo filament that burned for more than 13 hours in a vacuum globe.

In 1843, Samuel Morse, an American painter who’d taken up inventing, petitioned Congress for $30,000 to construct an experimental telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. Kentucky congressman John White ridiculed the concept, advising that half the money should be spent on “mesmerism,” or hypnotism research. The bill nevertheless passed by a slim majority, and on May 24, 1844, Morse transmitted his first message along the wires. “What hath God wrought,” he tapped out, demonstrating that instant long-distance communication was real.

Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian inventor, was 21 in 1895 when he started trying to transmit Morse code wirelessly through the air instead of using wires. Other scientists were sure that radio waves moved in straight lines and could not curve around the surface of the Earth. If the waves couldn’t curve, they reasoned, they would just continue on out into space. When Marconi received a signal from Cornwall, England, at his station in Newfoundland on December 12, 1901, the radio waves had bounced back down from the ionosphere, an atmospheric layer unknown to physicists at the time.

Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin printer and inventor, patented his typewriter mechanism in 1868, and E. Remington & Sons began selling it commercially in 1874. But the device struggled to find buyers. Businessmen derided it as a money-draining toy, and many recipients were offended by the notion that someone would think they were incapable of reading handwritten letters. According to Remington’s own sales stories, one man sent a letter back, saying, “I do not expect to be printed to!”

In 1927, Philo Farnsworth broadcast the world’s first electronic television picture, in a field already crowded with doubters. The previous year, radio pioneer Lee de Forest pronounced that television “is commercially and financially … an impossibility.” And 20 years later, in 1946, Darryl Zanuck, the head of the 20th Century Fox film studio, predicted that “people will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” Within less than 10 years, tens of millions of American homes owned a television set.

In 1810, Peter Durand patented the tin can in London, but he also added directions that it be opened using a hammer and chisel. For 48 years, people hacked them open with a knife, bayonet, or any other thing that was at hand. When Ezra Warner got a patent for the first lever-action can opener in 1858, critics mocked it as a dangerous, unnecessary gadget, since the blade was so sharp that grocery clerks would open the cans for customers right at the counter. The rotating wheel design that we know today wouldn’t come along until 1870.

The 18th-century English merchant Jonas Hanway is believed to be the first man in London to regularly carry his own umbrella in the rain, beginning in the 1750s. At that time, umbrellas were strictly considered women’s accessories for shade. Hackney coachmen, fearing rain coverings would hurt their business, often jeered or threw things at those who carried umbrellas. Hanway endured around three decades of ridicule and trash-throwing for it. By the time he died in 1786, lighter-weight umbrellas had become a common sight for both men and women.

In 1892, John Froelich built the first successful gas-powered tractor, in a world where farmers relied on horse power or coal-fired steam engines that threatened to burn down their own crops. Both his machine and its follow-on Hart-Parr factory models from 1901 were massive, loud, and apt to get mired in the mud. Agricultural publications noted that horses fed and bred themselves, but tractors required mechanics and fuel. Eventually, smaller and lighter steel models, such as the Fordson introduced by Ford in 1917, reduced plowing time from days to hours.

Fred W. Wolf’s 1913 DOMELRE, the first electric home refrigerator, came at a time when most homes had an icebox filled with river ice. The natural ice industry quickly fought back against electric refrigerators, saying they were expensive and potentially lethal since some of the first refrigerants used the highly toxic sulfur dioxide or ammonia gas. One unit could cost more than a new car. It wasn’t until 1928 that chemist Thomas Midgley Jr. synthesized non-toxic Freon, and mass production brought down prices for everyone.

In 1886, Illinois inventor Josephine Cochrane patented a water-jet dishwasher featuring wire racks that fit inside a copper boiler. She was frustrated with her hand-washing fine china and decided to make a machine that would do it for her. Homeowners derided it as an extravagance, and servants said they could wash dishes by hand just as well. Cochrane won a prize for mechanical design at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair but then redirected her sales pitch from households to hotels and restaurants. Eventually, that enterprise became KitchenAid.

American salesman King Camp Gillette wanted to replace the heavy straight razor, which needed constant sharpening, with a thin steel blade that was cheap enough to throw away when it got dull. That seemed impossible to MIT metallurgists and professional cutlers, but Gillette had no such doubts. So he teamed up with an engineer to design a machine that could produce razor blades and, in 1903, his new razor company began selling blades. After a while, sales really took off when the US military gave them out to soldiers.

During the 1860s, about 50% of patients undergoing surgery succumbed to infection. Doctors blamed “bad air” for causing post-surgical deaths. In 1865, Scottish surgeon Joseph Lister began using a carbolic acid spray to clean his tools, his patients’ wounds, and his operating theater. His conservative colleagues scoffed at his methods and griped that the acid cracked their hands and slowed them down. But when he applied his system at Glasgow Royal Infirmary specifically, the death rate for surgery dropped from 45% to 15%.

In 1903, the president of the Michigan Savings Bank reportedly told Rackham, the Detroit lawyer representing Henry Ford, not to invest in Ford Motor Company because the automobile was only a fad compared to the more durable horse. The story comes from a later biography based on Rackham’s own telling of the anecdote. Rackham took the opposite view, borrowing the money to take a small position in the company. Years later, when he sold his shares, he pocketed $12.5 million.

The Hungarian journalist László Bíró received a patent in 1938 for the capillary ballpoint pen, using a tiny rotating ball bearing to replace slow-drying fountain pen ink. When Milton Reynolds, an American businessman, introduced “The Reynolds Rocket” in New York in 1945, it leaked in pockets and blobbed on paper. The press ridiculed it as overpriced trash. But five years later, Marcel Bich, a French manufacturer, employed precision machining techniques from Switzerland to produce the leak-free BIC Cristal, which has since replaced fountain pens all over the world.

This content was created with the help of AI.