Associative rings & algebras (quaternions)
Hamilton's four-dimensional extension of complex numbers.
Founded: 1843 — Hamilton's discovery of quaternions
The claim
Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), 1892: “Quaternions came from Hamilton after his really good work had been done, and though beautifully ingenious, have been an unmixed evil to those who have touched them in any way.”
Source: Letter to Robert Baldwin Hayward, 1892; standard citation Silvanus Thompson's 1910 biography of Kelvin.
By the 1890s quaternions had genuinely lost ground to Gibbs's and Heaviside's vector calculus.
What happened
3D computer graphics (SLERP) (1985) — Ken Shoemake's quaternion interpolation, SIGGRAPH. Standard in every game engine since.
Gimbal-lock-free attitude control (1985) — Fixes the exact failure Apollo 11's inertial platform hit in 1969.
142 years — founding (1843) to graphics/aerospace adoption (1985)
Verdict: Named dismissal, later applied.
Confidence: high.