Introducing the worst inventor in history

This week you have been working hard to identify, structure and categorise problems. In the previous activities you started to explore what can happen when you add solutions to complex problems, especially when you don’t fully understand all the variables. Often, you end up with unintended outcomes.

To help demonstrate why we think it is so important to understand problems in this way, we here introduce a real example of someone who didn’t.

Meet Thomas Midgely: arguably one of the ‘worst’ inventors in history!

Of course, hindsight is a wonderful thing and perhaps Thomas was acting rationally given all the information available to him at the time, or do you think he could have foreseen any of the potential consequences of his actions?