YSM Issue 96.4

HISTORY OF HYPE AND FAILURE
BY XIMENA LEYVA PERALTA
SCIENCE
IN
IMAGE COURTESY OF FLICKR
It is the late 1910s. Airship travel between German cities has just become a reality.
Newspapers report that a trip across the Atlantic will soon take place. Airships
seem to be the future of transportation.
But during the following decades, airship accidents keep happening. In 1937, one
explodes during its flight from Frankfurt to New Jersey. Thirty-five passengers are
immediately killed, and the era of airship travel abruptly ends.
In his book Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure,
Czech-Canadian policy analyst and scientist Vaclav Smil examines the failures that
arise when a product or process fails to meet expectations. He first distinguishes
between invention (creating new ideas and products) and innovation (introducing,
adopting, and mastering inventions). “There could be plenty of invention without
commensurate innovation,” he explains. In his book, Smil examines three categories
of failures: “unfulfilled promises, disappointments, and eventual rejections.”
The first category comprises inventions that were initially praised but were
eventually viewed with widespread suspicion. One example that Smil cites is
chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), nonflammable hydrocarbons widely adopted as
refrigerants in 1930. Fifty years later, it became clear that CFCs cause substantial
damage to the ozone layer, and international measures were instituted to eliminate
their use. A second example is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). DDT was
introduced as a powerful insecticide in the 1940s and successfully prevented five
hundred million deaths due to malaria, but was eventually linked to adverse effects
on the environment. However, its success in saving lives meant that DDT required
more nuanced regulations.
The second category consists of technical advances that the public immediately
welcomed but that ultimately ended in disappointment. For instance, airships
seemed like they would dominate air travel between the 1910s and 1930s, but their
instability, coupled with the rapid development of airplanes, cut their lives short.
Nuclear fission, the splitting of atoms, is a second example: in the 1970s, there was
widespread scientific agreement about its success, and General Electric predicted
the end of fossil-fueled energy generation by 1990. As of 2022, only ten percent of
world energy is generated by nuclear reactors.
The third category includes inventions that we keep waiting for. The first example
Smil provides is travel in a near vacuum, called a hyperloop, whose origins trace
back to the 1820s. However, as of 2023, there are no operating hyperloop lines.
Another highly anticipated invention he lists is nuclear fusion, the combination
of atomic nuclei. Thought to be the ultimate clean energy source, it is still far from
commercial implementation. Smil notes that mass media has inaccurately labeled
all fusion advancements as breakthroughs instead of proof-of-concept experiments.
Although dense at times, Smil’s data-driven and articulate writing delivers sharp
critical analyses of humankind’s greatest failures. He contrasts positive opinions
about inventions with data supporting their negative repercussions. In the final
chapter, Smil warns readers against the myth of ever-growing innovation. “Success
is only one of the outcomes of our ceaseless quest for invention,” he says. Just as our
past is plagued by disappointment, our future will inevitably be filled with scientific
failures—some of which will hopefully, one day, lead to eventual success. ■
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36 Yale Scientific Magazine December 2023 www.yalescientific.org