1. The Advanced Passenger Train (APT)We might have invented the first one (The Rocket), but we’ve been making up for it ever since, partly by coming up with the worst rail infrastructure in world and then gifting the British people with the Advanced Passenger Train. The APT itself was pretty clever – thanks to a tilting mechanism and some innovative water turbine brakes. Unfortunately early high profile failures ensured that the project was stillborn at launch as the media feasted on stories of brakes freezing in cold weather, and of complaints of motion sickness. The APT – or Accident Prone Train, as it became known – never entered full service.
2. Digital Audio BroadcastingDAB was supposed to have wrested us away from our love of analogue radio by boasting numerous advantages – not least of which was the promise of a wider choice of stations and better sound quality. Unfortunately, since it launched in the late 1990s, a huge number of compromises and failures have become apparent: sound quality has been progressively scaled back – even on ‘quality’ radio stations – to the extent that much of it now sounds worse than analogue; DAB radio still hasn’t replaced analogue versions in cars and we’ve back the wrong horse technologically – we’re stuck with vanilla DAB, while the rest of the world is adopting the much better DAB+ standard.
