HolmesHumidifiersSuck.com, in memorium

Alas, HolmesHumidifiersSuck.com went down with my old NeXTcube server, sometime in the late 90's. When I left MIT in 1997, I left the cube running, under my desk, with no keyboard or monitor. Remarkably, it kept running for two or three years, probably until they cleaned the office out (prior to knocking down the wall and making it into a double office for the new Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics).

Fortunately, Google is forever (or so I'm told) so, for posterity, Here's a photo of the underside of our Holmes Humidifier, two weeks after we bought it, and half-an-hour after it burst into flame, three feet away from my (then newborn) daughter's crib.

Holmes' business strategy was particularly nefarious - they offered to fix the $25 humidifier for free if I would send it to them, at my expense, along with a $25 check to cover shipping and handling. This pissed me off, having nearly seen my (then, only) child go up in flames. I created HolmesHumidifiersSuck.com the next weekend, after telling the story in the NIST lunchroom and learning that one of my colleagues, who I'll call Alan, had exactly the same experience with his Holmes humidifier but simply bought another one after learning that it would cost more to get it fixed under warranty than to replace. I thought something needed to be done before someone actually lost a baby. I posted my Email address on the WWW site and collected 100 names from others with similar experiences, all of which I passed on to the nice investigator from the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC).

Eventually, Holmes corporation offered to refund my entire $25, but only after I had already sold the burned out unit to the CPSC. I hope they fixed the design.