AHC: Most influential failed megaproject?

  • Thread starter Deleted member 114175
  • Start date

Deleted member 114175

What could be the largest megaproject whose failure left the groundwork for something else? It can be historical or alternate.

For example, France's initial attempt to build the Panama Canal.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'd say all the projects surrounding the Pontine Marshes. There had been various plans for 2000 years to drain the malarial swamps and it wasn't until the 1950s that the marshes were totally eradicated.
 
ISABELLE, a particle collider at Brookhaven National Lab. It was supposed to find the W and Z bosons through high-luminosity proton-proton collisions, but while the goals of the project were reasonable, the development of the necessary magnets was plagued with problems that weren't fixed until the European SPS had already found the W and Z, leaving ISABELLE with no clear rationale and leading it to be cancelled shortly thereafter in favor of the Superconducting Super Collider.

Of course, SSC was itself a failed megaproject...

(More positively, the civil engineering work done for ISABELLE was reused for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, which has been highly successful, and probably more useful than ISABELLE itself would have been)
 
Top