Anyone who has ever patented and marketed an invention knows that, sooner or later, if the invention is profitable enough, someone will steal the idea, make it cheaper, and sell it at a discount.

The world is full of cheap knock-offs (and full of cheaply made products as well.) It is quite unfortunate because some of the ideas are super awesome, but the construction and manufacturing is shoddy as well . . . shall we say a house of cards.

Here is a look at some great ideas that never made their way to the mainstream. For various reasons, as we shall see, these great ideas were cast aside like a cold case, never to be revisited again.

• In the 1980’s, hairdresser and self proclaimed amateur chemist, Maurice Ward developed a product he claimed could be used as an insulator because it was capable of withstanding 10,000 degrees Celsius. It was so heat resistant that it could withstand, in theory, the heat of a nuclear blast. Unfortunately, the plastic product called Starlight, never made it to production. Ward was very secretive about the formula and it died with him in 2011.
  
• In 1970 Tom Ogle invented a carburetor system that enabled cars to get 100mpg. This is NOT a good way to get on the good side of the oil industry (whose main goal is to sell petroleum products) and those who interviewed Ogle asked him if he was afraid of them. Ogle responded that he was not. However, three years after premiering his invention, Ogle died of “mysterious circumstances.” Ogle’s partner, the only other person to know how Ogle’s invention worked at that time, also died an “accidental” death.
  
• Sometimes death isn’t the cause of a lost idea. Sometimes a good idea dies in its tracks for political reasons (imagine that.) In the 1980’s Sony developed DAT (Digital Audio Tape.) Today we have digital music- eliminating even the need for a CD. But, this was the 1980’s. DAT was a digital replacement for the cassette tape and it could reproduce music in CD quality or better. Well, the Recoding Industry Association of America didn’t like the idea and lobbied hard against it and gained some legal restrictions. Today DAT is used in some legal environments for data back up.
  
• And if deaths and lobbying isn’t enough, the good old boy club can influence whether an invention makes it or not. In the 1950’s Ligget Meyers developed what was called the palladium cigarette. The cigarette was manufactured with palladium nitrate and the result was:
  
  ”Project XA, which was headed by James D. Mold, involved adding palladium nitrate to tobacco, which decreased the total tumoricenicity of the smoke without leaving a residual level of palladium in the blood stream when tested on animals.

The palladium additive worked as a catalyst, resulting in more thorough combustion of the byproducts of burned tobacco, much like palladium spark plugs cause more thorough combustion of gasoline in a car engine. The result was smoke that contained fewer tumorigenic substances than a traditional cigarette.”

However, because tobacco companies often lobbied together, threats from other companies to kick Ligget Meyers from the “good old boy club” prompted them to pull the idea from production. The other tobacco companies were afraid that a cigarette marketed as “safer” would imply that an ordinary cigarette was “unsafe.” Oh boy . . .

I hope you enjoyed reading my article. They are fun to write and I always learn things as I go along. I hope you have an awesome day and remember, A dream is an idea that materializes when we put forth the effort!