19 People Who Invented Something They Would Later Regret Creating
"Some Ragrets" — These inventors' chest tattoos, probably.
Published 4 months ago in Facepalm
We all have our fair share of regrets. Not asking out the hot person in our math class. putting off that trip. Take three shots of tequila with your crush and nearly puking in front of them. Yet some regrets are more than just bygone love and terrible hangovers — just ask the inventors who have come to rue their defining creations.
From the RADAR gun's creator to the guy responsible for those insane password guidelines, here are 19 inventors who came to regret their inventions.
5
The AK-47
In 2012, Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 wrote a letter to the head of Russia’s Orthodox Church pondering his responsibility over the weapon’s global death toll. "I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?" he asked in the letter, one penned less than two years before his death. "The longer I live, the more this question drills itself into my brain and the more I wonder why the Lord allowed man to have the devilish desires of envy, greed and aggression."
8
The Labradoodle
Though they may be cute, Wally Conron, who first bred the labradoodle in the late ‘80s, admitted that the world would be better off without Labrador/poodle hybrids. ‘“I’ve done a lot of damage.,” he said, noting that he had “created a lot of problems. “There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there.””
9
Mother's Day
Though Anna Jarvis first invented Mother’s Day to honor her late mother in the early 1900s, she found herself frustrated with the commercialism surrounding the holiday, dubbing those cashing in on the occasion as “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.”
10
Comic Sans
Not a fan of Comic Sans? You’re not alone. Vincent Connare, who created the font, has also made his feelings clear about the typeface. "f you love it, you don't know much about typography,” he said. “If you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."
12
The USB
“Ajay V. Bhatt, an Indian-born American computer architect who led the Intel team that invented the USB (Universal Serial Bus), regrets not making it reversible. It would have doubled the cost, which was a hard sell at the time, ‘[b]ut in hindsight, we blew it.’ He holds 132 patents and counting.”
13
The Diving Headbutt
“Harley Race, the inventor of the diving headbutt in professional wrestling, has stated that he regrets ever inventing the move, because it appears to cause spinal problems as well as concussions. A chief practitioner, one of the British Bulldogs, has been confined to a wheelchair lately.”
16
Dynamite
“Alfred Nobel invented [dynamite]. And when he was mistakenly declared dead in 1888, newspapers published obituaries that stated that "the merchant of death is dead." Ashamed to leave such a legacy, he left the money he made from dynamites to celebrate humanity; thus created the Nobel Prize.”
18
Pepper Spray
Kamran Loghman, who invented pepper spray, also expressed second thoughts about his creation. “It is becoming more and more fashionable right now, this day and age, to use chemical on people who have an opinion,” he said. “And that to me is a complete lack of leadership both in the police department and other people who cannot really deal with the root of the problem and they want to spray people to quiet them down. And it's really not supposed to be that. It's not a thing that solves any problem nor is it something that quiets people down."
19
Complicated Passswords
You’re not the only one sick of cramming a number, a symbol, three capital letters and your first born into your passwords. Bill Burr, who drafted the guide on crafting appropriate passwords apparently isn’t a fan of his rules either. “Much of what I did I now regret,” he said back in 2017 “In the end, [the list of guidelines] was probably too complicated for a lot of folks to understand very well, and the truth is, it was barking up the wrong tree.”
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