Sea Monkeys inventor made thousands of dollars from selling fish that never actually existed

The creator of 'Sea Monkeys' also made money off selling a product called the 'invisible goldfish'. Yep, really.

If anything proves that having a terrible product doesn't matter if you have good marketing, then surely the 'Invisible Goldfish' is it.

The creator of this product Harold von Braunhut, who added the 'von' to his name in the 1950s to distance himself from his Jewish family, also invented Sea Monkeys and 'X-Ray Specs'.

For those who don't know, Sea Monkeys are a species of brine shrimp which Braunhut figured out how to easily raise in a tank.

He then marketed this extensively in comic books towards children as a fun 'instant pet' for kids to raise.

Another patent of Braunhut was the 'X-ray specs', which actually just distorted things slightly.

But what about the Invisible Goldfish?

The 'Invisible Goldfish', an empty fishtank (Sea Monkeys)

Well, turns out they were invisible because they didn't actually exist.

It was just an empty tank which contained a fish that you would never actually see, and for some reason people actually bought it.

I suppose they didn't have smartphones back in the day so had to fill the time somehow.

As you may already have twigged by his name change to distance himself from his Jewish family, there was also a deeply unpleasant side to Braunhut.

That's because when he wasn't coming up with weird patents to flog to unwitting kids and their parents, Braunhut was supplying weapons to the Ku Klux Klan.

Not only that, he was a regular attendee at the annual conference of the Aryan Nations.

For those who are lucky enough to not know, Aryan Nations was a neo-nazi hate group founded in the 1970s which was described as a 'terrorist threat' by the FBI in 2001, before merging with other groups in 2009.

Sea Monkeys proved a huge hit (Wikimedia Commons)

Braunhut was featured in a list of 'outstanding Aryan nationalist leaders' in a 1984 Aryan Nations Congress held in Idaho.

The businessman was unapologetic about his beliefs, saying in an interview: "You know what side I'm on. I don't make any bones about it."

A Washington Post article from 1988 called Contrasts of a Private Persona told that Braunhut had some unusual items in his study.

According to the article these included 'a German war poster autographed in 1940 by Hermann Goering, an inscribed photograph of Benito Mussolini and a print of World War II German aircraft signed by the Luftwaffe's top four aces'.

So there you have it, the inventor of Sea Monkeys and the Invisible Goldfish was also an unapologetic racist and neo-nazi.

If you think that's bad just wait until you hear about Austrian glass manufacturing company Swarovski...

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