Failed Experiments

Cold fusion, N-rays, Biosphere 2 — ambitious ideas that taught us more by failing.

38 stories

• The 12-Foot Weed Thomas Edison Bred to Make Car Tires
• The 3,000-Year-Old Trumpet That Shattered in Rehearsal for Its Worldwide Radio Debut
• The Bronze Age Shield Sliced in Two in Front of Britain's Top Archaeologists
• The Cold Researchers Who Stood Volunteers in a Drafty Hallway in Wet Swimsuits — and Got Two Opposite Answers
• The Docking Target That Showed Up in Orbit Looking Like an Angry Alligator
• The Government Expedition That Tried to Bomb Rain Out of the Texas Sky
• The Navy Tried Everything to Give 100 Sailors the Flu — and Not One Got Sick
• The Scientists' Joke Club That Tried to Drill a Hole to Earth's Mantle
• The Seafloor Slime Hailed as the Simplest Life on Earth — That the Specimen Jar Made Itself
• The Talking Doll Edison Built With a Phonograph in Its Chest — and Pulled From Stores Within Weeks
• The Baby Raised With a Chimpanzee Who Learned to Bark for Oranges
• The Bluestone Bound for Stonehenge That Sank 17 Miles Into a 240-Mile Trip
• The Champagne Party Stephen Hawking Threw for Time Travelers — and Sent the Invitations Out Afterward
• Smell-O-Vision: The Movie That Hissed Perfume at Its Audience and Left Them Sniffing
• The Olympic Marathon That Rationed Water — and Fed the Winner Rat Poison
• The Railway That Ran on Suction — and the Rats Blamed for Eating It
• The Chemist Who Failed to Make Diamonds — and Got the World's Favorite Fake One Named After Him
• The Mars Lander That Carried a Blur Ringtone and a Damien Hirst Painting — and Then Went Quiet for 11 Years
• The Obelisk That Took Three Attempts, Two Countries, and 120 Men to Stand Up
• The Six Macaques Given a Keyboard to Write Shakespeare — Who Typed Five Pages of the Letter 'S'
• The Loose Cable That Made Neutrinos Outrun Light for Five Months
• The Venus Lander That Tested the Hardness of Its Own Lens Cap
• The Corned Beef Sandwich That Got NASA Hauled Before Congress
• The Nuclear Landmine Britain Planned to Keep Warm With Live Chickens
• The Time Australia Sent Machine Guns After 20,000 Emus
• Acoustic Kitty: The CIA Wired a Live Cat for Sound to Spy on the Soviets
• The Rescue Kits That Tried to Revive the Drowning by Blowing Smoke Up Their Backsides
• Biosphere 2: The Sealed World Where the Oxygen Mysteriously Vanished
• Cold Fusion: The Breakthrough That Wasn't
• Kon-Tiki: The Raft That Crossed an Ocean to Prove a Theory That Was Wrong
• Polywater: The New Form of Water That Almost Ate the World
• The Ether-Hunting Machine That Found Nothing — and Broke Physics
• The Genesis Capsule That Crashed Because a Switch Was Installed Backward
• The Mouse Utopia With Endless Food That Went Extinct Anyway
• The Rays 300 Scientists Saw That Were Never There
• The Rocket That Exploded on Live TV and Got Called 'Kaputnik'
• The Student Who Drank Vomit to Prove Yellow Fever Wasn't Contagious
• The Windows That Took the Blame for a Plane Crash They Didn't Cause

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