Back in the 60s, when vinyl records were at an all-time high, many companies came up with the idea of producing portable record players. One of the most famous brands was the Emerson Wondergram, marketed as ‘the world’s smallest record player’, and produced from 1960 to 1965. But this invention had a very obvious problem – LP records aren’t exactly small, and need to be handled with extra care, so they weren’t exactly portable.
Another huge problem was that, in order to play a record, even if it was with the portable player, you had to find a leveled surface to set the player and be extra careful that it didn’t bump into anything. Clearly, not a great quality to have when it comes to anything portable. And so, five short years saw the end of the Wondergram and all of its friends.
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.
The Readamatic Robotic Speed Reader
Invented in 1963, the Readamatic Robot was a device that consisted of a small box with a metal arm and a second metal bar at one end. The metal bar or mechanical plate would slide down the page of a book so it could help the reader maintain a certain pace. The goal of the Readamatic was simple: to help children and adults read faster. Unfortunately, this robotic speed reader created more problems than it solved.
The gadget was very loud, and its metal plate would emit a screeching sound every time it slid across the pages. Obviously, these are not exactly the best conditions for anybody to read in, let alone focus. The Readamatic was short-lived and never to be seen again.
Daylight Motion Pictures
The fact that this idea's slogan was "Witness the shows sitting in a fully lighted auditorium", already made it very questionable. And yes, this was actually a thing back in the 1910s. Apparently, some people thought it would be a fantastic idea to play movies in an auditorium that was completely lit. As movie theaters started opening in the 1900s, many attendees didn't like the fact that the auditorium was completely dark.
One theater owner even said that he preferred the space to be completely lit so people could watch over their loved ones and avoid 'eye fatigue'. And so, 'daylight motion pictures' became a thing all over the U.S. The whole thing was a combination of darker screens, stronger projectors and a lot of hope. But as you probably guessed, this ingenious idea was short-lived because, obviously, lit theaters damaged the quality of the picture. So, moviegoers slowly started to feel safe in dark theaters, and the rest, as they say, is history.