Americans love innovations. If it is new, inventive, efficient, and effective–then it (e.g., light bulb, horseless carriage, driverless car) is good. Yet there have been innovations and inventions that range from clever to dumb and only occasionally get marketed beyond the family and friends of the inventor. Here are some photos of such innovations. Enjoy!
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Among my favorite innovators is Rube Goldberg. it should be remembered that Hitler’s Nazi Germany gave us the model for a single family home with a garage, driveway, and Volkswagen (people’s car), the superhighway…and also a lampshade made with human skin and the “at scale” extermination of people by means of gas chambers.
I carry these images around in my head and they are among many activiated when people uncritically extoll the virtues of innovation as if the fruits of that kind of labor are inevitably great.
Someimes they are great because they are just plain silly. Some have long lives and many variations but with unintended consequences (e.g., auto traffic accidents, pollution, suburban sprawl, “tick tacky houses” or McMansions galore). Others are purpose-relevant and enlisted as a destructive force if not constrained by regulations, laws, or customs/norms that function as taboos. Think of weaponized tweets and home-made bombs.
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Laura.
I like the lawnmower bicycle thing. I just gave away a lawnmower like that. I have a bike I could have adapted it to. Bummer.
Thanks. Garth, for the comment on “innovation” photos.
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