Glorious Failure: The Most Spectacular Failed Scientific Experiments

Russia's robot retrieved a Moon sample and they photographed the dark side of the Moon way back in the early 60s. Recent reconstruction of photos from their lander on Venus were pretty spectacular just before Titan landing put on the web by an independent computer graphics researcher. One of the accidents that turned out well was the Apollo 1 pure oxygen fire that claimed three lives.

The Michelson-Morley experiment is being duplicated today built by the Chicago Steel and Bridge Co. on a much larger scale with lasers to see if they can catch a gravity wave in right angle vacuum steel tubes bouncing light back and forth over much larger distances. In 1896/97 J. B. & J. M. Cornell took over the iron foundry at Cold Spring, NY, on the Hudson River. The foundry was known as the West Point Foundry Works. These facilities are discussed in the magazine, The Successful American, Vol. III, No. 4, April 1901, p. 202, which also illustrates the extensive works at this location. They once built bridges and architecture supports across the Hudson River from West Point Military Academy until a fire in 1913 closed the "Bridge Shop". Later contaminated by nickel and cadmium from batteries for Cold War NIKE missiles, in the second cleaning, then by the EPA, our archaeology work uncovered the "Swamp Angel" platform used to fire rifled incendiary shells (with brass "sabots") at the city of Charleston, South Carolina in 1863, during the American Civil War. It was said President Lincoln witnessed the firing of 200 and/or 300 pound shells in the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring, NY. It is where Jules Verne apparently got the name for his Moon launcher in Florida! Glorious Failure: The Most Spectacular Failed Scientific Experiments