 This car, a Ford ETSL, was one of the greatest technological failures in history. Its failure cost Ford nearly three billion in today's dollars, making the name ETSL, the first name of Henry Ford's son, shorthand for any wildly ill-conceived product that fails. Yet the ETSL had many firsts that now appear in our cars, things like seatbelts and child-proof locks. And this reminds us that although we want to be very pat and trace failure to a single cause, in reality technological things fail in the marketplace for many reasons. So in this series, I take a deeper look at the failure of three famous engineered objects. First, the picture phone, called by some the Bell Systems ETSL, because the company lost half a billion dollars in promoting and developing it. The picture phone highlights what we really should appreciate about failures, how often they fail by being ahead of their time. This device came tantalizingly close to creating a revolutionary technology that we now use today. Next, I'll look at the Dvorak keyboard. And while the Dvorak arrangement of the letters was likely faster than our current QWERTY arrangement, the letter still dominates. And usually we explain this away quickly by noting that the QWERTY keyboard got there first and thus simply become locked in the marketplace. But the important lesson is that to dislodge an existing technology requires a significant change in performance and likely an increase in functionality. And third, I'll look at how the Betamax video cassette recorder was lost to this VHS machine made by JVC. Often the winner is not the better or more powerful competitor, but the one that is just good enough. To explore these three failures, I take a cue from the opening sentence of Tolstoy's great Anna Karanen. All happy families are alike, he wrote. But each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Which means that instead of looking for a simple, uniform explanation for each of these failures, I'll tell you a richer story of their short life and eventual demise. Please join me, I'm Bill Hammack, The Engineer Guy.