Kalsahnikov to the cubicle: 6 inventions that should have stayed in the box

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Tuesday 14 January 2014 18:35 GMT

Mikhail Kalashnikov posing with the first model of his legendary AK-47 - he died on 23 December, 2013 at the age of 94 (Dima Korotayev/AFP/Getty Images)

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Inventions may change the world, but not all count as progress, and several inventors have later come to regret their bright idea.

A letter from Mikhail Kalashnikov published yesterday rues the creation of the world famous AK-47, saying: “If my rifle claimed people’s lives, then can it be that I was to blame for their deaths?”

Mikhail Kalashnikov dies: Five quick-fire facts about the AK-47 inventor (Getty)

Nuclear bomb

The AK-47 is by no means unique as a harbinger of slaughter en masse; upon the explosion of the first nuclear bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer reflected on the enormity of his brainwave, saying: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Pepper spray

To avoid regretting your invention, it's probably best to not invent a weapon. Throughout the 1980s, Kamran Loghman worked for the FBI and helped develop pepper spray. He said: “I have never seen such an inappropriate and improper use of chemical agents.”

Dynamite

Some inventors strive to repair the damage. Alfred Nobel was so ashamed of dynamite he created the Nobel Peace Prize to encourage governments and individuals to follow a different path.

//

There's no need to say "//" out loud ("slash slash"?), but Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, believes it could have been avoided altogether: “Really, if you think about it, [the web] doesn't need the //. I could have designed it not to have the //.”

The cubicle

Robert Propst (1921-2000) is sorry if you work in a cubicle. While he didn't do much more than outline a square, he failed to anticipate how the office cubicle would turn so many office workers into wall-shredding wrecks. Propst came to call it a "monolithic insanity."

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