Turns out those endless password requirements annoy their inventor, too.
1. Anna Jarvis regretted inventing Mother's Day so much that she ended up lobbying against it.
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One of thirteen children, Anna Jarvis was appalled by the commercialisation of the day she'd createdafter the death of her own mother in 1905. When what she saw as a homecoming ended up inflating the prices of carnations, she wrote disparagingly of "charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movementsand celebrations."
She went on to spend a lot of her own money to copyright Mother's Day and sue anyone who used it without her permission as a way of stopping marketers from using the term to make money.
2. Ethan Zuckerman straight-up apologised for inventing the pop-up ad.
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“I wrote the code tolaunch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good,” he wrote in an essay about advertising's relationship to the internet. "I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services," he added.
3. Dong Nguyen announced the end of his game Flappy Bird via Tweet (bird pun likely accidental), saying, “I cannot take this anymore.”
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The app, released in 2013, was never expected to amass over 50 million downloads; but by 2014, it had done exactly that. When asked what exactly it was about the app — which The Verge says was pulling in $50k a day at the time — overwhelmed Nguyen so much, he stressed the issue wasn't legal. "I just cannot keep it anymore,” he said.
4. Robert Propst hated the adaptation of office cubicles he invented as a part of his Action Office model, calling the mass introduction of them to the workplace a "monolithic insanity."
NBC
The invention was meant to give office workers some privacy, as well as providing a vertical space for them to pin stuff on to, shelves, and room for a standing and sitting desk. It was also meant to be much bigger than offices tend to provide now. Propst was appalled by how many CEOs ended up applying his theory (namely, by using it to save space and therefore money at the cost fo the worker).
5. Vincent Connare, who invented Comic Sans, "sympathises with the world-wide movement to ban it," The Wall Street Journal writes.
Fox
The font, one result of a Microsoft project, means Connare "cringes at the most improbable manifestations of his Frankenstein's monster font and rarely uses it himself," the publication also said. Connare himself told The Wall Street Journal that "If you love it, you don't know much about typography." But he added, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."
6. Wally Conron really regrets creating the labradoodle in the '80s, as many of them have health issues.
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When he first invented the breed, "nobody wanted Labrador crosses," he told Associated Press. But when he invented the fun name as a "gimmick," he says everyone wanted one — which he regrets. He has long since stopped breeding the dog, saying, "I’ve done a lot of damage. I’ve created a lot of problems.”
“Marvelous thing? My foot,” he added. “There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there.”
7. Emoticon inventor Scott E. Falman feels :( about inventing the :).
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Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Falman wrote that the smiley face (originally :-)) said it was only meant to say "I'm joking." Noting how many, er, interesting applications emoticons have now, he said, "Sometimes I feel likeDr. Frankenstein. My creature started as benign but it's gone places I don't approve of."
Other than The Emoji Movie and 😈, though, I think his worry is misplaced.
8. John Sylvain, who invented the K-cup coffee pod in the '90s, told The Atlantic, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.”
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That's because the original type created a lot of waste, though all K-cups have been recyclable since the end of 2020.
9. Looking back, Sir Tim Berners Lee wishes he hadn't put the // at the start of every web address.
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Speaking to Business Insider, the inventor of HTML said, "Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //." Personally, I quite like it.
10. Victor Gruen, the inventor of the shopping mall, hated what his creation became.
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After opening the first mall (Southdale Centre in Edina, Minnesota) in 1956, Gruen saw his invention become the sprawling commercial sites we know them as now. He had originally meant it to mimic the car-free, walkable plazas of his native Austria. By 1978, he called the country-wide adaptations of his idea “b*stard developments” turned grotesque by “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking”.
11. The Raleigh Chopper was basically BMX before BMX came to be — but its inventor, Tom Karen, wasn't much of a fan.
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The bike was one of Raleigh's best-selling offerings in the '70s, but Karen doesn't seem to have been a huge fan. Speaking to The Telegraph after the make had been discontinued, he said, "The Chopper wasn’t a very good bike. It was terribly heavy so you wouldn’t want to ride it very far. There was some guy who rode it from Land's End to John O’Groats [a 603-mile trip across Britain] for a good cause and by the end he was cursing it."
12. Kamran Loghman really regrets how his invention (pepper spray) has been used.
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After working for the FBI in the '80s, Loghman helped to turn the spray into a weapons-grade material. But after police sprayed college students who The New York Times described as "docile protesters" with it in 2011, Loghman said, "I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents."
13. Philo Farnsworth invented some of the tech that would make TV possible when he was just 14 — and lived to regret it, saying he'd invented a "most painful" machine when contestants of I've Got a Secret tried to guess his identity.
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He essentially lost out on making money from his idea, and seemed to have followed popular American attitudes towards his invention — namely, that TV was rotting the collective national mind. However, the televised moon landing changed his mind, his widow Elma Farnsworth said. She told the Television Academy, "We were watching it, and, when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, Phil turned to me and said, 'Pem, this has made it all worthwhile.' Before then, he wasn't too sure."
14. Hate how hard it is to create a strong password? So does Bill Burr (not the comedian — the inventor of the rules that make it so tricky).
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"It frustrates everybody, me included," he said of the complicated demands of modern passwords, which he helped many sites implement in 2003. "It's probably better to do fairly long passwords that are phrases or something like that that you can remember than to try to get people to do lots of funny characters," he stated, adding, "I think I could have done a better job of figuring out some of the things that we now know, or at least of guessing them." He has since helped to reinvent his own rules.
15. John Larson doesn't stand by the lie detector, which he co-invented.
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Fellow true crime lovers will know how inaccurate polygraphs can be, and after its release Larson himself said it was "a Frankenstein’s monster, which I have spent over 40 years in combating.”
16. Robert Watson-Watt, who invented radar, lived to personally regret his own invention.
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The technology, which has more applications than I can list here, ended up inconveniencing Watt, the man who sculpted his statue claims. The sculptor said that after Watt got caught on a radar speeding camera for speeding, he said, "'My God, if I'd known what they were going to do with it, I'd have never have invented it!'"
