The mere name of this invention doesn’t exactly sound brilliant. But back in the early 1950s, the car-boat was all the rage, and many major car manufacturers saw it as the future of engineering. Technically, a car-boat is simply a boat powered by an automobile chassis or engine, and an earlier version of them were used by Cubans that were trying to emigrate to the U.S. by water.
However, the invention didn’t exactly take, and nowadays, the only boat cars you see belong to collectors and people who simply don’t know what to do with their money. The largest car-boat manufacturer to date is Tim Dutton-Woolley, the English founder of Dutton Amphibious Cars that has been producing them since 1989. Only a little over 250 models have ever been made.
The Bonnet Hair Dryers
Even though this invention wasn't technically a complete fail, since you can still buy bonnet hair dryers on Amazon for $25, it still wasn't a glorious success story. The 1950s was a decade ripe with inventions and crazy ideas, and in 1951, the bonnet hair dryer was one of them. As dolled-up housewives were a huge percent of the consumerist market back then, it only made sense that hair dryers would sell like hot cakes.
The bonnet dryer that was introduced in 1951 consisted of a dryer, that was placed in a small portable box, which was connected to a tube that went into the shape of a bonnet, with holes, that was then placed on a person's head. The trick was that the invention distributed an even amount of heat to the whole head. Hair dryers have evolved a lot through the years, and it's probably safe to say that this 50s tube bonnet model was probably the most impractical of them all.
The Dymaxion Round House
The famous architect and inventor, Buckminster Fuller, created this weird-looking chrome house back in the 1930s. Fuller had the idea to create a house that could be quickly put together by your average person. Named the Dymaxion Round House, this shiny dome prototype could be shipped in a truck and assembled in less than 48 hours. The dome shape made it possible for the house to be assembled quickly while still providing great structure strength.
Unfortunately, as cool as all this sounds, the project eventually failed. Firstly because, it is incredibly hard to customize or expand a dome-shaped house. Secondly, because it is extremely hard to find furniture and appliances that would properly fit a round-walled space. It could've been a nice idea for a futuristic restaurant, though.
Cinerama Movies
Before IMAX dazzled moviegoers, Cinerama was all the rage. However, Cinerama had a much more complicated system, which is probably why it failed so badly. Introduces in the 1950s and marketed by the Cinerama corporation, the process required three separate, perfectly synchronized projectors all working at the same time, aligned with each other.
Remember, this was before the age of digital technology, so this meant that three human projectionists with incredible skills had to sit in the projector boxes and make everything work perfectly, by hand! Needless to say, this was simply not profitable - theaters didn't want to pay the expensive technology upgrade, not to mention the extra money they would have to shell out for the staff needed to play a single movie. Eventually, very few movies were recorded in the Cinerama format, and the invention quickly became a memory.
The Intellivision
The Intellivision was a home video game console released by Mattel Electronics in 1979. The idea was to release a console that could compete with the famous Atari 2600 of the time. Unfortunately, even though 5 million units were sold between 1980 and 1991, the Intellivision was discontinued in 1990, and ended up almost bankrupting the company.
This was Mattel's only video game console until it released the HyperScan sixteen years later, in 2006. In a nutshell, the toy/electronics giant simply could not compete with the wildly popular Atari.