Failed technologies fall short of expectations and are often abandoned. Examples include wireless power, airships after the Hindenburg disaster, and cold fusion. Examining failed technologies can inform skepticism towards promising technologies.
A failed technology is a technology that may have seemed promising at one point, but subsequently fell short of its expectations or perhaps even failed altogether. There are technologies that are much more effective than failed ones, as people tend not to spend much time or money on a technology if it is likely to fail. Technologies fail sometimes, however.
An example of a failed technology is wireless power. Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current, once imagined gigantic power plants that would give the earth’s crust such an electrical charge that it could obtain energy simply by connecting to the earth. Tesla spent millions on this vision, building an electric tower so powerful that the fields around it glowed when ignited. Yet this tower ended up being little more than a curiosity. It was dismantled when Tesla went into debt. To this day, there is still no effective means of wireless power transmission, and there may never be.
One technology that has experienced a long period of failure is the airship. Once hailed as the ideal flying machine during the “Golden Age of Airships” between 1900 and 1937, airship construction ceased altogether after the Hindenburg disaster, which occurred when the airship’s flammable skin caught fire . 35 people lost their lives in the disaster and it produced many pictures and radio reports which continue to haunt to this day. From 1937 through the early 2000s, airships were primarily used for limited advertising applications. However, in the early 21st century, airships seem to be making a comeback.
Another classic failed technology is cold fusion. Considered a potentially limitless source of energy, cold fusion attempted to initiate nuclear fusion (the source of energy used by the Sun) without extreme temperatures or pressures, generally thought to be necessary. The extreme temperatures required to initiate fusion have traditionally been a terminal barrier to its use as a cheap energy source. In 1989, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, scientists at the University of Utah, went directly to the media, telling them that they had successfully developed a cold fusion device. If true, it would have provided a virtually unlimited source of energy for all of humanity. Unfortunately, Pons and Fleischmann’s device was a failure and the claimed effects were not reproducible by other scientists. Cold fusion lives on as an archetypal example of a failed technology.
There are a number of other failed technologies, but they obviously tend to get less attention than successful technologies. Taking a look at the history of failed technologies can be helpful because it helps us apply justified skepticism to technologies that look promising today.
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