Sometimes, even smart people screw up.
In October of 1920, Thomas Edison announced that he was working on a machine to open communication with “the spirit world.” Translation: dead people. The inventor, an agnostic who admitted he had no idea whether or not a spirit world even existed, told The New York Times that his machine would measure “the life units that scatter through the universe after death.”
Edison corresponded with British inventor Sir William Crookes, who claimed to have captured images on “spirit photographs.” These images encouraged Edison, who worked on his project secretly for several years but was never able to produce any machine which could communicate with the dead.
Participants in a 1941 seance claimed that Edison’s spirit had appeared and told them that three of his assistants possessed the plans for the machine, which was ultimately built but did not work. Later, at another seance, Edison supposedly suggested improvements. Inventor J. Gilbert Wright was present and worked on the machine until his own death in 1959. Attempts by others to utilize Wright’s creation were futile. Bad Idea # 1—The Spirit Phone. Friends don’t let friends talk to the dead.
In 1898, Nikola Tesla conducted an experiment in mechanical resonance in his New York Lab. He was measuring the tendency of something to absorb more energy from a vibration if that vibration matches its own natural frequency. In other words, everything has its own musical pitch that, if matched, will break the object. Sort of like opera singers breaking crystal glasses with just their voices. Except that in this case Tesla’s crystal glasses were buildings.
Tesla put his little vibrator in his pocket and went out to look for a half-erected steel building, locating one in the Wall Street area. He clamped his machine to one of the beams and turned it on. The structure began to creak and weave, bringing the attending crew of panic-stricken steelworkers to the ground. They were sure there had been an earthquake. Tesla pondered the developments for a moment, returned to his apartment and crushed the vibrator with a sledgehammer. Bad Idea #2---The Earthquake Machine. Apparently, there is such a thing as a product that works too well.
You may not have heard of Dr. Yoshiro Nakamatsu, but he’s a legend in Japan. He holds the record for the most patents, some 3,200, which is three times as many as Edison. Nakamatsu had a hand in inventing the floppy disk, DVDs, digital watches and karaoke machines. There is probably something in your very own residence which traces back to Dr. N. But it’s probably not The Love Jet, which Nakamatsu likened to “catnip for vaginas.” Ladies were supposed to spray a few pumps on their erogenous areas and, well….
Dr. N. claims to have tested his invention on 10,000 women. “I’m not doing the sex,” he likes to point out, “just checking the meters.” Nakamatsu contends the Love Jet removes the need for foreplay, which most of us didn’t think was an issue. If you’re interested, too bad, Dr. N. has no intention of exporting his product out of Japan. He can’t afford to. The Love Jet sells for 30,000 yen (about $250) but costs about 80,000 yen to produce, a loss of about $400 a bottle. Why bother? Nakamatsu is worried about the decreasing birth rate in Japan and wants to give it a shot in the arm. Or somewhere. He considers it his civic duty. Bad Idea #3---The Love Jet.
Joseph Von Littrow was a nobleman and esteemed mathematician. In 1819, he became the director of the Vienna Observatory and developed the Littrow projection, the only conformal retroazimuthal map projection (smartypants talk for a map which accurately shows the angular distance between two points). Littrow was also interested in sending radio waves—called “flames” in those days—into deep space, searching for signs of otherworldly life. In order to get the aliens attention, Littrow proposed digging a 30-kilometer-wide circular ditch, filling it with kerosene and setting it on fire. Supposedly, a fire that big could be seen by any interested ETs. We know better today. Today, we realize Littrow’s pyrotechnics might not have been visible from Kenosha, let alone Uranus. Bad Idea #4---The Flaming Intergalactic Communicator.
J. Walter Christie was an American engineer who developed a tank suspension system which gave Russian, British and American tanks a considerable tactical advantage in World War II. Due to Christie’s prowess, Allied tanks were faster, more agile and able to traverse longer distances than their Axis counterparts. Christie was so devoted to tank enhancement that when the government began looking for a new vehicle which could soar over modern battlefields, he immediately thought “Flying tank.” And no, we’re not making this stuff up.
Christie’s idea was to drag the flying tank behind a big plane—make that a really big plane—or stash it in the plane’s belly, then let it drop and glide gently to the ground while raining hellfire on the enemy. Once it touched the ground, it would shed its wings, or maybe not, since a tank with wings might scare the opposition to death. Most generals thought this idea was crazy as hell, but the Russians, who drink a lot, liked it. They thought they’d save on parachute expenses by dropping their boys out of a plane inside the tank. Here’s the problem: the properly-armored winged tanks did not soar. They slammed straight to the ground. The petite little lightweight tanks folded up like papier-mache. Bad Idea #5---The Flying Tank.
Big, supposedly intelligent corporations haven’t been immune from folly. The Ford Motor Co. morphed its perky little Thunderbird into a klutzy ark while simultaneously developing the stunningly unsuccessful Edsel. The Coca Cola Co. thought it might be a good idea to get rid of their original Coke before quickly racing back with a Roseanne Roseannadanna-like “Nevermind!” Remember when Blockbuster turned down multiple offers to buy Netflix? Who’s in charge of these suggestion boxes, anyway? There’s folly afoot in the world, plenty of it. But the following may be the piece de resistance, the folly by which all others are historically measured.
The Wall
All of the above are pikers, of course, compared to new American President Donald J. Trump who plans to build a wall across the bottom of the United States to protect us from free-ranging Mexicans. The wall would be 1988.388 miles in length, cost as much as 25 BILLION dollars and take 16 years to build. Remember the original Tea Party, which railed at the unbalanced budget and screamed bloody murder if they discovered some school kid in Pascagoula was getting a free lunch? Where art thou, defenders of the treasury?
When considering The Wall, the American public will, of course, have many probing questions. Can we get a discount if we buy all the building materials at Home Depot? Are we going to put any doors in the wall—because, you know, it would take a long time to go around it if we forgot something on the other side? How thick will the wall be? You don’t want clumsy farmer Jose Jimenez accidentally poking a hole in it with his errant backhoe. It’s a lot to consider. And think of all the things that can happen in sixteen years. The next president might want to stop building the wall, then the one after that could restart it, on and on. It could wind up taking twice as long. By that time, the Mexicans might have little heli-cars to fly right over the thing, giggling and dropping sarcastic notes in the process.
Even the Texas Republican politicians don’t want The Wall. The other day, Congressman Will Hurd, whose district includes more miles of the U.S.-Mexico border than any other, came out in opposition. “Each section of the border faces unique geographical, cultural and technological challenges that would be adddressed with a flexible, sector-by-sector approach that empowers the agents on the ground with the resources they need. Building a wall is the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.”
The Logistics
Of the almost-2000 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border, about 650 miles already has vehicle and pedestrian fencing, according to a 2016 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Would the current structure be adequate to serve as part of the new wall or do we start from scratch? If the latter, then building Trump’s wall may require about 339,000,000 cubic feet of concrete, three times what was used to build the Hoover Dam, an actually useful construction.
To fulfill all of Trump’s basic project requirements, The Wall would have to be made of pre-cast concrete, which is cast in a controlled indoor environment, cured, and then shipped to the construction site for assembly. The design would consist of I-shaped concrete columns spaced at 10 feet on center, with eight-inch-thick wall panels spanning in between them. With such a design, the only concrete that would need to be cast on-site would be for the foundations. The columns would be anchored to the foundations, with the wall panels slipped in place from above. The foundation of The Wall would be 6 feet deep, 18 inch radius. A column would be 4 square feet area by 30 feet tall. The wall panels would be 25 feet tall by 10 feet long by 8 inches thick. Such a wall would be greater in volume than all six pyramids of the Giza Necropolis, but much less pretty.
River flood zones would would complicate matters, forcing The Wall well back from the border in some places. A 1970 boundary treaty governs structures along the Rio Grande and Colorado River at the Mexican border, requiring that structures cannot disrupt the flow of the rivers, which flow across Texas and 24 miles in Arizona and define the U.S.-Mexico border.
In areas where the border is defined on dry land across New Mexico, most of Arizona and California, structures have to be built so the wall doesn’t obstruct natural run-off routes or otherwise induce flooding. Building in those areas can be complicated and costly. In sensitive sand dunes in Southern California, for instance, a “floating fence” had to be built to allow the natural movement of the dunes.
On its way to the Gulf of Mexico, the Rio Grande River cuts through the mountains of Big Bend National Park and rests in reservoirs near the Amistad Dam. Both present nightmare challenges to wall builders. Locals suggest that “if Donald Trump just flew over the whole Texas part of the border, he’d realize a wall is infeasible. The country is too rough.” In order to construct previous border barriers, the United States was forced to sue hundreds of private landowners to obtain title to the properties. Resuming a wall would likely invite more lawsuits. Also, a total of 18 federally protected species may be found along certain sections of the California border and at least 39 federally endangered, threatened or candidate species live along the Arizona border, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
It’s an idea whose time hasn’t come, probably the first of many from President Clodhopper. Frank Zappa once said “Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and THAT is the basic building block of the universe.” Never so much as today, Frank, never so much as today.
Everybody Makes Mistakes, Right?
Well yeah, but multimillion-dollar, earth-shattering, mind-numbing errors are best avoided. When people look up “Jackass” in the dictionary, you don’t want to see your picture there. Nonetheless, someone has to be the measure of failure, the mother of disinvention, the tops in futility. Someone like these guys:
In July, 1988, during a routine check at the Piper Alpha North Sea oil production platform, inspectors carefully removed and replaced all the safety valves. Well, all except one. Somebody forgot that little varmint. Unaware that the safety valve was missing, a worker pushed the start button and---KABOOM!---leaking gas exploded, killing 167. The total insured loss was about $3.4 billion. At the time of the disaster, the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of all North Sea oil and gas production and the accident was the worst offshore oil catastrophe in terms of lives lost and industry impact. Think about that the next time you take something apart, put it back together and find a part left over. Oops, what’s THIS?
Everybody makes fun of poorly-constructed Russian products. Like cars, for instance. When the Lada was built, the joke in the West was: “How do you double a Lada’s value? Fill up the gas tank.” The Volga, which had an irritating tendency to fill up with gas fumes, was no better. And the Niva, an adaptation of an army jeep, would occasionally burst into flames, ruining everyone’s day. Badly made cars are one thing, however, and shabbily-built nuclear plants are another. The ill-fated Chernobyl plant came a cropper due to a flawed reactor design and operation by inadequately trained personnel. When building your nuclear reactor at home, always remember this helpful hint: make sure there is no way for the coolant to leak out, you might need it sooner or later.
The Chernobyl steam explosion and fires in 1986 released more than 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere and downwind. 30 people were dead within a few weeks of the accident as a result of acute radiation poisoning. The area surrounding Chernobyl was uninhabitable for 25 years, although in 2011 those spunky Soviets declared it a tourist attraction. You might want to hold up a while before visiting, however. The roller coasters aren’t in yet.
Everybody knew the Titanic was unsinkable, all 70,000 tonnes of it. After all, the White Star Line publicity brochure said so. The article described the system of watertight compartments and electronic watertight doors. One compartment might fill with water, but the others were certainly protected. “God himself could not sink this ship!” a company representative said. Well, maybe not God, but how about an iceberg? Ignoring warnings of icebergs in their path, Captain Edward Smith and crew smacked right into one, which gashed the entire right side of the ship, sinking the Titanic and 1517 poor souls with it. The ship had cost $7.5 million to build. Oh oh. Sorry about that.
While we’re in the errant boat captain category, let’s not forget good old Cap’n Joe Hazelwood of the ill-fated Exxon-Valdez. In 1989, Cap’n Joe, not known as a serious teetotaler, was snockered belowdecks while his third mate, Pee Wee Herman, was steering the ship directly into Bligh Reef, neglecting to check his radar. A monstrous 10.8 million gallons of crude oil spread over Alaska’s Prince William Sound over the next several days, causing devastating environmental damage. The oil eventually covered 1,300 miles of coastline and 11,000 square miles of ocean. See, this is what happens when you hire people right off the courthouse square.
On Thanksgiving night, 2009, Tiger Woods, one of the world’s historically great golfers, experienced a single-car accident outside his fancy Windermere, Florida home. Reports had him fleeing his angry wife, Elin Nordgren, who’d recently discovered that Tiger had engaged in multiple illicit sexual affairs. Within a year, Woods agreed to a $750 million divorce settlement. Total cost of the gaffe was much higher when you include lost endorsements from sponsors such as Gatorade and Nike. Business observers put Tiger’s losses in the neighborhood of $12 billion. Most people assumed he would eventually bounce back. He has done virtually nothing of consequence since. One of the fittest golfers ever, Woods has been betrayed by his body on several occasions, enduring three back surgeries in 19 months. When he has played, he has won nothing and rarely been competitive, missing the cut many times. Eight years later, there seems no light at the end of the tunnel and the man who was expected to easily eclipse Jack Nicklaus’ 18 major tournament victories is still stuck on 14. Quite a price to pay for a few rolls in the hay, and a sad apparent finish to a once-great athletic career. The classic case of here today, gone tomorrow. But if Tiger Woods is remembered in relative infamy, he will, at least, not be the Ultimate Sap. He will not be the guy who built The Wall.
That’s all, folks….
