Mary Belk: Simple things make life a little better

Did you ever hop into an Edsel, pop the top off a Fresca, stick some Bo Didley in the eight-track player and cruise down Route 66? Sometimes I look back like a Sunday morning quarterback and wonder what happened to some sure-fire consumer goods that made a splash, then became flops.

Driving along the Highway of Fizzled-Out Products, I find “smokeless” cigarettes, Dictaphones, Betamax, the crank to start a Model T Ford, and backyard fallout shelters. So what does all this stuff have in common? Once it was everywhere. Now it’s nowhere.

These products all sounded like great ideas, but you never can tell for sure whether a new product will be revolutionary or revolting until you try it out on the consumer. 80 percent of all new products fail from the start, and another 10 percent disappear within five years.

The 1987 “New Coke Fiasco” is a prime example of misreading marketing information. Blind taste tests indicated the New Coke was a big winner. But three months after the 99-year old Coke was discontinued, consumers revolted, and the old Coke was brought back. What went wrong? Seems marketers didn’t understand Coke had become a symbol of the American way of life like baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet.

The marvels of modern technology developed a soda can that will last forever and a $30,000 car that will rust out in three or four years. But let’s not overlook some simple products that have lasted and made life better.

PAPER CLIPS: Invented 100 years ago to solve the age-old problem of corralling flyaway papers by squeezing them between loops of bent wire.

ICE-CREAM CONE: At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, vendors of ice cream and sweet, rolled wafers collaborated in a way that today seems logical and inevitable.

NEON LIGHT: In 1909 neon gas was captured in a glass tube that glowed orange. Soon the “liquid fire” was used to advertise everything from car dealerships to cafes.

ZIPPER: In 1913 an easy-to-use fastener that went “Z-z-zip” when hooking galoshes was patented. B.F. Goodrich coined the name.

BAND-AID: Erle Dickson’s bride kept hurting herself, so he created a small, sterile bandage strip. 100 billion Band-Aids have covered cuts and scrapes since 1921.

PHOTOCOPIER: Picture Monks copying medieval manuscripts. C.F. Carlson used powdered ink and an electrical charge to create photocopies.

BALLPOINT PEN: Invented during World War II. Thirty-thousand pens were manufactured in England so RAF navigators could write in unpressurized cockpits where ink pens failed.

STICKY NOTES: First came the creation of the sticky stuff. But what to do with it? Arthur Fry put it on paper to mark songs in his choir book. Then came the pastel squares.
Some failed inventions were ahead of their time and others were simply heaps of junk. Still, I wonder. Where have all the Edsel’s gone?

Mary Belk lives in Auburn and writes a column for the Opelika-Auburn News.