So near and yet so far

Homer Simpson once declared to his beloved wife Marge that "trying was just the first step to failure".

Within six months of the vehicle’s launch, the price of the Sinclair C5 had been slashed from £399 to £140, plans to manufacture tens or even hundreds of thousands were down-graded to a few thousand while those early pioneers were driven off the road by a combination of safety concerns and, well, excruciating embarrassment. The Sinclair C5 was the Eddie the Eagle of inventions, a spectacular failure for which only the truest anorak could hold any affection. Collectors are prepared to pay as much as £800 for what the general public once refused to spend a penny on.

And yet 18 years later Sinclair has demonstrated his loyalty to another maxim - "If at first you don’t succeed ... try, try again" - by announcing that a successor to the C5 is in development. All that is known of the C6 is that it has been under construction for "many years" and will be a "new product designed at getting people around town". Whatever form the C6 will finally take, the invention will invariably be compared to the "Segway", a motorised scooter that was unveiled last year and launched earlier this spring which is already being used by postal workers and police across America.

The comparisons will add a twist of irony to the whole affair. When the Segway was finally unveiled after its manufacturers made outlandish claims that it would revolutionise the world in which we live, the crueller critics dismissed it as a glorified C5.

So was the C5 such a screw up or was it simply too far ahead of its time? The original invention was not helped by its low speed, 15mph, its heavy weight, which made pedalling problematic, and an open cock-pit which allowed users to be soaked and splashed. However the idea of a radical new form of personal transportation is as attractive as ever. The idea was sound, it was the form that posed the problems. And the C5 was not the only invention of the 1980s to suffer such a fate. The decade that brought us the Stylophone and the edible shark suit also offered up some clever inventions that, for one reason or another, didn’t quite hit the market in the way they were intended to and petered out well before the New Year bells of 1990 began to peal.

SIX INVENTIONS THE NEVER QUITE MADE IT

1 Betamax video In an ideal world the title VHS would raise a snigger of derision and Betamax would rule supreme. Sony’s home video system was first launched in 1975 and had the technical edge on its rival system, providing a sharper picture, faster rewind and a smaller cassette. For the first few years of the 1980s the two systems battled it out for supremacy of the home video market, but a fundamental error by the Japanese electronics company led to their defeat. While VHS was a system licensed to a variety of manufacturers, Sony insisted that they alone produced Betamax and were eventually out- manoeuvred in terms of advertising and promotion by their myriad competitors. Sales of Betamax peaked in 1984 with 2.3 million sold world-wide. In 2002, by which time sales were restricted to Japan alone, just 2,800 machines were sold and the line was discontinued shortly afterwards. Yet in a gesture of solidarity to its loyal customers it agreed to continue to service these ageing monsters till the end of their life. A symbol of the supremacy of their technology is that Betamax remains the format of choice by the TV industry.

2 The Africar A wooden car, cheap to produce, capable of carrying great weight and traversing the most hostile of landscapes - the Africar appeared too good to be true. And it was. The brain-child of Tony Howarth, a journalist and photographer, the Africar was envisioned as a vehicle that could be built of native materials with little skilled labour and at a low cost. In 1986 a few prototypes were unveiled and a five-hour Channel 4 documentary followed them to the Arctic circle and back to equatorial Africa through Niger and Zaire. The science and the frame behind the Africar were solid, based as it was on wood coated with epoxy resin. The business plan, however, was not. Despite 250 firm orders and plans to launch a factory producing 1,000 cars a year with a staff of 400, Howarth’s ambitions foundered, the company went bankrupt, assets were sold and the Africar sank into the mists of rumour and disbelief.

Before the business went belly-up, Howarth was quoted as saying: "I think we’re doing everyone an economic favour. I also think we’ve built a bloody good motor car."

3 New Coke In the air-conditioned offices of corporate America, the men in the pin-stripe suits still shudder at the mention of "New Coke". An invention, or re-invention if you will, which though backed by categorical evidence of the public’s appetite for a new and tastier drink, was a failure of monumental proportions. In 1984 Coca-Cola were deeply concerned that their sales margin over Pepsi had dropped to just 2.9 per cent and there were genuine fears that their rival was the tastier beverage. A new recipe for Coca-Cola was developed which in tests beat both Pepsi and old Coke and so this "New Coke" was launched as a replacement for Coca-Cola with the advertising line: "The best has been made even better." Within days of the switch the company were receiving upwards of 80,000 calls of complaint each day. They had misjudged their position as an American icon and to consumers the switch was the equivalent of re-writing the Constitution or tarting up the American flag: unthinkable.

Three months later the management of Coca-Cola re-instated the old recipe. "The Real Thing" had returned.

4 The Advanced Passenger Train The saviour of British Rail was to barrel along at 155mph, tilting gently at corners to deposit its passengers at their destination faster and smoother than ever before. The origins of the APT ran back to the 1960s when the technology was thought to be capable of putting Britain back at the forefront of rail networks, yet the whole inglorious dream came to a screeching halt in 1986 after years of cock-ups that saw it re-titled the Accident Prone Train. The brakes came on without warning; the power went off without warning and the tilt either tilted too far or not far enough. On one occasion the train snapped out of a tilt so fast the cups, plates and brief-cases of paying passengers were sent flying. Management indifference, cost-cutting and a design that was deemed too ambitious resulted in the APT trundling into the sidings after an investment of £50 million. Yet, like the Sinclair C5, the APT is enjoying a resurrection with Richard Branson’s Virgin rail having invested £1 billion in new tilting trains.

5 The Rubik’s Cube Launched around the world at Christmas 1979, the Rubik’s Cube defined a generation of children and for a few brief years elevated the maths nerd to schoolyard hero. It was a barometer of class as to whether you possessed a genuine Rubik’s Cube or one of the slew of cheap copies, and as an arbiter of mental intelligence there were few games finer. While many children failed to complete more than three sides, a Vietnamese high school student completed the whole puzzle in just 22.95 seconds. The cube was invented in 1974 by Professor Erno Rubik, a Hungarian scientist, as an exercise to teach students the basics of three-dimensional physics, in the process of which he found himself enjoying the curious status of being the Communist Bloc’s first self-made millionaire. For two or three years the Rubik’s Cube was the world’s most popular game, over 100 million were sold and it attracted an iconic status in the 1980s, along with skateboards and Space Invaders.

Today, however, the Rubik’s Cube is now but a curiosity desired only by collectors of antique toys who’ll pay upwards of £100 for a well-kept example. A few die-hard enthusiasts remain. The first Rubik’s Cube world championship since 1982 was held in Toronto this summer.

6 The Laser-disc The forerunner of today’s DVDs were the size of an old long-playing album and five times as expensive, but were beloved by movie buffs for providing great picture quality and additional extras such as audio commentaries a decade or two before they became standard features with the advent of DVDs. The Laser-disc was first launched in 1982, but faded out due to its prohibitive expense and a lack of films available in this particular format.

A second launch in 1988 - this time offering digital sound - fared only slightly better. Although the machines were unable to record from television, Laser-discs did provide pristine pictures and, of course, a vastly improved sound. Their eventual come-back was when manufacturers began to target not the average viewer but the avid film fan. By the early 1990s there were less than 10,000 players in Britain, compared to tens of millions of videos, but their owners were particularly devoted. In truth, the laser-disc had a snob value that both VHS and Betamax lacked.

Yet it came at a considerable price. British fans were forced to order discs from abroad at prices that reached £70 per film.