The Anatomy of a Failure
“Why not come up with a condom that fits the man, rather than vice versa?” a German entrepreneur named Jan Vinzenz Krause once asked. His solution, the spray-on condom, which involves coating a penis with liquid latex, made it to the prototype stage only to encounter a fatal problem: the latex took up to three minutes to fully dry. Pfffffft. This is just one among hundreds of cautionary case studies awaiting visitors to “Flops?!,” an exhibition at Paris’s Musée des Arts et Métiers focussing on the “failure, bust, bomb, fiasco, debacle.” Behold the V-shaped keyboard, the hydrogen helicopter, the roller-skating Barbie that sets the rug on fire.
“We thought it would be interesting to show that which we never show,” Marjolaine Schuch, who co-curated “Flops?!,” explained recently. “All the stuff that gets shoved under the carpet.” The show originated at a design museum in Saint-Étienne; Musée des Arts et Métiers has supplemented it with lemons from its permanent collection, such as the ten-hour decimal-time clock, used during the French Revolution. “This is the Pascaline,” Schuch said, pointing to what looked like a jewelry box covered in brass gears—an early, not entirely dependable, calculating machine conceived by Blaise Pascal. In mounting the show, Schuch and her team committed a gaffe of their own. “We didn’t include the dates of the inventions, and we immediately started getting all kinds of comments,” she confessed. The Pascaline’s label bore evidence of their cleanup job: a rubber-stamped addition reading “1642.”
Nearby, a screen displayed e-mails between the investors Paul Graham and Fred Wilson: “I am not sure they can take on the hotel market,” Wilson writes, deciding against investing in Airbnb. Graham published the exchange on his blog in 2011, as a testament to the fact that even successful people don’t always get it right. That such a blunder might be shrugged off and even celebrated, rather than shamefully shunted away, struck Schuch as a very American notion. (Anyone who has witnessed a French schoolchild’s horror of committing “fautes” will agree.) “In France, we never talk about these steps, this groundwork, these impasses,” Schuch said. “This was an opportunity to demystify and de-dramatize failure, this idea that making a mistake is something rather serious from which one doesn’t necessarily recover.”
Not every downfall has an upside, as early adopters of Tho-Radia, a line of thorium- and radium-based face creams, promoted by Dr. Alfred Curie—no relation to Marie—soon learned. And then there’s London’s “Walkie-Talkie” building: a skyscraper whose convex shape caught the sun like a magnifying glass, melting cars. In addition to such “dangerous flops,” the exhibit features inventions that fizzled because they were expensive and unnecessary (the Juicero juicing machine), poorly designed (the Vasa, a Swedish warship that sunk on its maiden voyage), or simply ahead of their time (La Jamais Contente, a speedy electric car that came out in 1899). “Everybody forgets that electric vehicles were invented at the same time as combustion-powered vehicles,” Schuch said. A case nearby contained an old Michelin guide, listing charging stations in every city.
Of all the categories of fuckups, perhaps the most jaw-dropping is the “faux pas,” demonstrating, according to the museum’s literature, “at best tactlessness, and, at worst, bad intentions.” A crowd gawked at such specimens as a hollow golf club that one can urinate into and the pastel-toned Bic for Her ballpoint pen, designed “to fit comfortably into a woman’s hand” (though perhaps not into her wallet, as the product cost up to seventy per cent more than non-gendered pens). In 2014, Zara released a blue-and-white-striped child’s shirt embellished with a yellow star. It was meant to evoke a sheriff’s uniform, but, for many, it called to mind concentration camps.
Schuch led the way through a room wallpapered with whimsical non-starters dreamed up by the artist Jacques Carelman: a sinuous Ping-Pong table, transparent playing cards. A section devoted to transportation offered such wonders of disappointment as a shuttle bus, proposed for the La Défense district near Paris, that progressed twice as slowly as a person on foot. The food-processing sector proved equally inadequate: Colgate lasagna, anyone? Schuch paused in front of a Tetra Pak carton of Côtes du Rhône, noting that while such packaging had gone over fine in Nordic countries, French consumers had rejected it vehemently. “Wine in a carton,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s impossible, psychologically.”
In the final gallery, a line had formed in front of an arcade-game-shaped kiosk where museumgoers could play something called “Flop or Top?,” voting on the desirability of new inventions. Sixty per cent, so far, were in favor of an invisibility cape made from lenticular lenses. More than ninety thousand people had visited the exhibition, with a month to go. “It’s not a lot for some museums, but it’s enormous for us,” Schuch said. Only somewhat inconveniently, “Flops?!” was a big success. ♦