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
Spacecraft attitude representation (1968) — Davenport's quaternion parameterization for attitude determination (NASA TN D-4696, 1968); the Space Shuttle's flight software carried attitude as a quaternion (Yazell, AIAA 2009-43). Apollo's IMU was a mechanical three-gimbal platform, and the spacecraft rotated into gimbal lock once each on Apollo 7 and Apollo 9 (Hoag, MIT/IL E-2411, 1969). Quaternions remove the equivalent singularity in software attitude; they do not fix a physical gimbal.
3D computer graphics (SLERP) (1985) — Ken Shoemake's quaternion interpolation, SIGGRAPH. Standard in computer graphics and most game engines since.
125 years — founding (1843) to Davenport's attitude method (1968)
Verdict: Named dismissal, later applied.
Confidence: high.