White elephant

For other uses, see White elephant (disambiguation).

A white elephant is a supposedly valuable possession whose upkeep exceeds its usefulness, and it is therefore a liability. The term derives from the sacred white elephants kept by traditional Southeast Asian monarchs in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. To possess a white elephant was regarded (and still is regarded, in Thailand and Burma) as a sign that the monarch was ruling with justice and the kingdom was blessed with peace and prosperity. The tradition derives from tales in the scriptures which associate a white elephant with the birth of Buddha.

P.T. Barnum once sent an agent to buy a white elephant, sight unseen, hoping to use it as a circus attraction. When it arrived in Bridgeport, Connecticut, it was covered with large pinkish splotches and was not white at all. The public was not impressed and Barnum had to keep his "white elephant" hidden from public view in a stable while he tried to decide how to recover some of the high cost. The elephant later died when his stable burned down.

The metaphor was popularized in the United States after New York Giants manager John McGraw told the press that Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Shibe had "bought himself a white elephant" by acquiring the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team in 1901. The Athletics manager Connie Mack subsequently selected the elephant as the team symbol and mascot. The team is occasionally referred to as the White Elephants.

Famous white elephants

Aerospace

• Bristol Brabazon, an airliner built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company (BAC) in 1949 to fly a large number of passengers on transatlantic routes from England to the United States. [1]
• Saro Princess a large Flying boat whose first flight occurred in 1952, after the end of the "Golden Age" of the flying boat. It was intended to serve the British Empire but its design was protracted and the loss of empire and development of land-based aircraft meant that it was obsolete before it first flew. It was intended to be the waterborne equivalent of the Bristol Brabazon.
• Concorde, a supersonic transport built by Aérospatiale and BAC, intended to allow high-speed intercontinental travel. Only fourteen examples saw service, though development costs were to be amortized over hundreds of units. (However, Concorde made a large operating profit for British Airways).[2]The fate of its soviet twin Tu-144 was nearly identical.
• Boeing 2707 supersonic transport project which was cancelled in 1971 over environmental and cost overrun concerns after the expenditure of about $1.5 billion and the creation of a full-scale mockup.
• Hughes H-4 Hercules, or "Spruce Goose," often called Howard Hughes' white elephant before and during Senate War Investigating Committee
• The U.S. Space Shuttle, whose continued funding is debated versus other forms of space transportation, which are thought by some to be more reliable and affordable. See Criticism of the Space Shuttle program.
• Nimrod AEW 3. A failed Airborne Early Warning system. [3]

Artwork

• The Waterloo Vase, a great urn, 15 ft (5 m) high and weighing 20 tons, fashioned from a single piece of Carrara marble. The Emperor Napoleon I of France first saw the massive block of marble when passing through Tuscany. He asked for it to be preserved, perhaps to create an urn on which to commemorate his anticipated victories. Following the French defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, the vase found its way to England and to George IV, who had the vase completed so it could be the focal point of the new Waterloo chamber at Windsor Castle. Unfortunately, no floor could bear the weight of the vase, so it was presented to the National Gallery in 1836. In 1906, the Gallery returned the vase to then sovereign Edward VII who had the vase placed in an outside garden at Buckingham Palace where it remains today.

Nautical

• The Thai aircraft carrier HTMS Chakri Nareubet which has spent little time at sea since being commissioned in 1997 (the year of the Asian Economic Crisis) due to her high operating costs. Fittingly, the Royal Thai Navy ensign actually features a white elephant.
• SS Great Eastern, a ship designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel. She was the largest ship ever built at the time of her launch in 1858, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers around the world without refuelling. However, her hold was later gutted and converted to lay the successful 1865 transatlantic telegraph cable, an impossible task for a smaller vessel.
• The Yamato class of superbattleships were intended to defeat any conceivable adversary. All three vessels, one of which was completed as an aircraft carrier, were constructed at great cost and saw little action. Eventually, they were sunk by U.S. Navy submarines and airpower, which were exactly the means used to doom battleships as a whole.

Railway

• The fully automated North East Line and Bukit Panjang Light Rail Transport (LRT) Line of the Singapore Mass Rapid Transit. (Debated: North East Line is currently profitable and ridership is growing steadily. More lines are planned including but not limited to the Circle Line)
• The Scarborough RT of Toronto. Since the Intermediate Capacity Transit System technology was brand new when the line opened in 1985, immediate problems with the automatically run trains and their computer system were unexpected. There was also a minor derailment of a train at Kennedy Station. Eventually, just one year after the line opened, the Toronto Transit Commission asked the Ontario Government for $27 million to repair problems with the system. The Scarborough RT is still in service as of 2007, however its future is in doubt, and it could be replaced by light-rail transit.
• The railway line between Lancefield, Victoria and Kilmore, Victoria served almost uninhabited territory, and was shut down in 1914 after only a short life.
• The Las Colinas APT System in Las Colinas, a suburban business development in Dallas, Texas, was opened in 1989 to provide transport around the development, only to be shut down in 1993 due to rising costs and lack of demand. It re-opened in 1996 on a limited basis, and is considered to be connected to the future expansion of the DART light rail.

Roadways and streets

• Interstate 180 in the United States, is a 13 mile (21 kilometre) freeway intended largely to serve an Illinois steel mill that closed soon after the freeway was completed. It has very light traffic for a freeway, roughly 2000 to 2500 vehicles per day even after the steel mill was re-opened almost thirty years after the highway was built. It has about one tenth the traffic of the highway to which it connects and has one of the lowest traffic loads of any Interstate highway in the United States.
• The Cross City Tunnel, a 2.1 kilometre (1.3 mile) pair of tunnels under downtown Sydney, Australia. Eighteen months after opening only 35,000 vehicles used the tunnel each day, less than half the projected 80,000 vehicles per day, and the tunnel's operators entered receivership.

Structures and engineering projects

• Biblioteca Jose Vasconcelos. Built in Mexico City by Vicente Fox government. It was inaugurated in May 18th, 2006. On March 20th, 2007 the Biblioteca Jose Vasconcelos was closed because of several structural failures, safety concerns and lack of books.
• Kansai International Airport. Located on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, south of Osaka, Japan and constructed largely as a matter of pride, this airport, though operating at a fraction of nominal capacity, is being doubled in size. Compounding matters are intense competition from Kobe Airport (14 mi / 23 km away) and Osaka International Airport (27 mi / 43 km away.) Furthermore, the airport is slowly sinking into the ocean at a rate of about 15-20 cm per annum.
• The proposed Maze stadium in Northern Ireland is believed by many to be a white elephant in the making because of its location in a field (on the site of an old disused prison) 3 miles outside Lisburn. It is costing the taxpayer upwards of UK£100 million.
• Miami Arena. The "Pink Elephant", so named for its color, was built by the city of Miami to land NBA & NHL franchises in the early 1980's. Construction delays prevented the opening until 1988 with significant cost overruns. While the original design for the stadium was a factor in Miami receiving an expansion team in basketball, the completed arena's limited seating capacity (under 15,000) and lack of many luxury seats, made the building obsolete for the Miami Heat. Stadium Issues and problems in the surrounding area prevented Arena Football League franchises from staying long and helped push the Florida Panthers to move to Sunrise, Florida. The Miami Heat, under threat of relocation, lead a campaign for a bond issue to build the American Airlines Arena within the city. Major activities ended after the Miami Hurricanes Basketball Team moved to an on campus facility in 2001. Unable to make a deal with the Florida Marlins to turn the site into a baseball field, the arena was sold in 2004 for a loss of $24 million.
• Millennium Dome. Built in Greenwich, London by the British government for the Millennium celebrations. It is the largest single roofed structure in the world, but remained closed to the public (except for occasional special events) from its closure on New Year's Eve 2000 to June 2007, when it reopened as The O₂ arena.
• Montréal-Mirabel International Airport. Opened in 1975, it was at the time the largest airport (in terms of land use) ever opened, with 97,000 acres (392 km²) reserved. Less than 19% of the reserved land was ever used for airport development. The airport never lived up to expectations due to poor location, lack of transportation links, and economic decline. It is now relegated to use by cargo airlines, with cessation of passenger traffic occurring in 2004.
• Montreal Olympic Stadium. Initially built for the 1976 Summer Olympics, its primary use became the home of the Montreal Expos until the team relocated in 2004. Aside from a few trade shows, the stadium sits vacant most of the year due to structural instabilities, its poor interior design, and inconvenient location. The total cost of construction was C$1.47 billion dollars. The first roof was meant to be retractable, but it never could achieve this function. A new kevlar roof was installed in 1998, but it ripped a year later. As a result, the stadium is now closed for 4 winter months every year due to safety concerns. The stadium is planning to install a permanent roof in the next few years.
• New Haven Coliseum. A masterpiece of Brutalist architecture designed by Kevin Roche and opened in 1972, this almost 9,000 seat arena was for many years the premier sports and performance space in New Haven, Connecticut. However, its appearance, with a parking garage above the structure, led many to call it ugly, and the high costs that came with the building led the mayor of New Haven to call the building a White Elephant as early as 1980. The building was finally demolished in 2007, after years of renovations and cost overruns.
• Ryugyong Hotel. Construction of this hotel in Pyongyang consumed 2% of the Gross Domestic Product of North Korea. Originally intended to rival Western bloc greats such as the Sears Tower, the building now sits as an unfinished, windowless concrete shell. As the building is seen as being structurally unsound, it will likely never be completed.
• Superconducting Super Collider (or SSC), a large particle accelerator which was being constructed in Texas. Billions of dollars had been spent on the project by the time of cancellation, and the project termination itself cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
• World Trade Center México, a building complex located in Mexico City, which bankrupted its owners without ever being finished or performing its intended functions.
• World Trade Center, New York. Built amidst controversy, including protest by the 1,600 small businesses evicted from their locations to make way for the complex, and the objections of the New York City government to the undervalued payments in lieu of taxes the state governments of New York and New Jersey were forcing it to accept from the Port Authority of New York, builder and owner of the Trade Center. By 1975 it lay half-empty in spite of the 25,000 New York State employees relocated to the complex by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who had campaigned the project all along. The buildings' fortune improved gradually throughout their lifespan, which was cut short when they were destroyed on September 11, 2001. However, the complex was initially viewed as a monument to the stubbornness of Governor Rockefeller, his brother David Rockefeller of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Port Authority Executive Director Austin J. Tobin, for their insistence upon building it in spite of the declining value of Lower Manhattan commercial real estate at the time. This perception lent the World Trade Center's twin 110-story towers the early nickname "Nelson and David".
• Central Artery/Tunnel Project (or the Big Dig) is a megaproject which rerouted the Central Artery (Interstate 93), the chief controlled-access highway through the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, into a 3.5 mile (5.6km) tunnel under the city. The project also included the construction of the Ted Williams Tunnel (extending Interstate 90 to Logan International Airport), the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge over the Charles River, and the Rose Kennedy Greenway in the space vacated by the previous I-93 elevated roadway. Initially, the Big Dig plan included a rail connection between Boston's two major train terminals - North Station and South Station - North-South Rail Link. The Big Dig is the most expensive highway project in America. Although the project was estimated at $2.8 billion in 1985, over $14.6 billion had been spent in federal and state tax dollars as of 2006. The project has incurred criminal arrests, escalating costs, leaks, poor execution and use of substandard materials. The Massachusetts Attorney General is demanding contractors refund taxpayers $108 million for "shoddy work." The final ramp opened 13 January 2006.

Technology

• The Department of Defense-commissioned Ada programming language came to be known as the "Green Elephant", a play on the phrase White Elephant combined with color code used to keep contract selection unbiased. Ada was designed to be a silver bullet by a DoD assembled committee. However due to the fact that most programmers do not write embedded programs, many find Ada too unwieldy to use and of little benefit. [4]
• The Intel iAPX 432 was a highly advanced and complex microprocessor intended to support object-oriented programming in hardware. A major design goal was to support the Ada programming language. It was so complex that it failed to meet its scheduled delivery and its performance was inadequate. Intel spent large amounts of time, effort, money, and marketing on the processor. Intel did not develop further family members after the first because a market did not materialize.

See also

• White elephant gift exchange
• Boondoggle (project)
• Megaproject
• Megastructure