Bombs, guns and cigarettes: 8 infamous inventions their creators regret inventing

Thursday, June 5th 2014

With the death of Alexander Shulgin, known as the 'godfather of ecstasy', we take a look at some memorable inventions their creators would rather we forgot.

With the nickname the Godfather of ecstasy, it was inevitable that Alexander Shulgin, who died this week, would leave a controversial legacy.?

The Californian chemist synthesised and tested 200 psychedelic drugs during his career, but he will be best remembered for honing MDMA, the purest available form of ecstasy, and trying it out on himself and his wife in 1976.?

But he's not the only inventor who may well be more reviled than revered for their controversial creations. Here are some other examples.

Dynamite

Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel had the rare insight of reading his own obituary which was mistakenly published in a French newspaper when his brother Ludvig died in 1888.?Shocked at being brand 'the merchant of death' for inventing dynamite, he set about establishing a better legacy to leave behind after he died. In 1895 he signed he last will and testament, instructing that the bulk of his estate should be used to fund the Nobel Prize for peace, science and literature.

Atomic Bomb?

His brain child may have helped end bring that war to a speedy conclusion when it was dropped at Hiroshima in August 1945, but the nuclear arms race that followed led to the Cold War between East and West that threatened to cause an apocalypse, with tensions reaching crisis point during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.Eminent Californian physicist Julius Robert Oppenheimer headed up the Manhattan Project that developed the Atomic Bomb for the United States during the Second World War.?

Cigarettes?

Smoking tobacco may date back hundreds of years but many historians point to an American entrepreneur named James Buchanan Duke as the father of the modern cigarette.?

During the 1880s Duke designed a machine that could manufacture cigarettes instead of waiting for workers to hand roll them. Production leapt to 120,000 cigarettes per day, which meant Duke had to create a whole new market for them with a huge advertising campaign and collectable cigarette cards in the packs. He created a monster, with cigarettes estimated to have killed 100million people during the 20th century.

AK-47 Assault Rifle?

The world's most popular assault weapon is better known as the Kalashnikov, named after its Russian inventor Mikhail Kalashnikov who developed it for the Soviet Army during the last year of the Second World War.?

Before he died in December last year Kalashnikov wrote that he regretted designing the gun as he never intended it to become a weapon used by guerrilla troops around the world and questioned whether he was to blame for the deaths of those killed by his invention.

Cotton Gin

When Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin as a revolutionary new way to separate cotton fibres from their seeds in 1794 he surely never imagined the human suffering it would cause.?

His machine became a major factor behind the growth of slavery in the United States and even a contributor to the American Civil War, as it generated a huge demand for cotton and therefore more slaves working on plantations to grow and pick it.

The revolver?

Americans may consider it their constitutional right to bear arms, but to many in the Western world their macabre fascination with handguns remains an alien and terrifying concept.?

Credit, or blame, for the mass-manufactured firearm is often directed at Samuel Colt, who patented a 'revolver' with a rotating cylinder of bullet chambers and a revolving flintlock to fire off more shots without reloading in August 1836. It's success ushered in a whole new era of death.

CFCs?

First was leaded petrol, which stopped the knocking in car engines, but caused huge health problems. The second was CFCs, which were widely used in refrigerators and aerosols, but quickly became one of the most destructive compounds in our atmosphere and a key contributor to global warming.Initially celebrated for his many inventions, the legacy of Thomas Midgley has since been tarnished since his death in 1944 by the environmental consequences of two of his most famous creations.?

Agent Orange?

In 1943 plant biologist Arthur Galston was studying a way to change the growing season for soybeans when he started work with triiodobenzoic acid.?

It didn't work too well as a plant growth hormone as it stripped the leaves from most of his crop, but the US Army soon saw its potential as a way to destroy enemy crops. They developed Agent Orange, which was used in the Vietnam War with awful consequences, killing up to 400,000 people and causing 500,000 children to be born with birth defects.