Unexpected Side Effects

Story #1

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One breakthrough of the 19th century was the clipper sailboat. Larger, faster, and more maneuverable, it reinvented cross-Atlantic trade and revolutionized the economies of entire nations. Until the 1830s, it took five weeks to make the crossing, but the Clipper could do it in 12 days. It was a great innovation, accelerating many good things, but some bad ones as well.

In 1845, the Great Potato Famine began in Ireland, leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of people. It's believed that the potato fungus that destroyed Ireland's crops came from North America. ^[##] One theory is that the famine hadn't occurred sooner because the five-week journey across the Atlantic was long enough for the fungus to die in transit. However, the shorter 12-day itinerary left the fungus alive, so it was only a matter if time before it infested the clipper's destination.There were other major causes, political and economical, but had the innovation of the clipper ship not taken place, the Great Famine might never have happened.

Story #2

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The mosquitoes were effectively eliminated; however roaches, less sensitive to DDT, survived, absorbing the poison. Small lizards happily ate the roaches. Those lizards developed nerve damage from the DDT (providing the widowed roaches with bittersweet glee), who, in their slow, near-drunken stupor, were easily consumed en masse by the local cat population. The cats, more sensitive to the DDT than the lizards, died by the thousands, opening the door for an explosion in the rat population. And the kicker to the whole sordid tale is that the rats brought the threat of the plague to humans