That birth month, Life magazine featured a full page spread of a home birth (ewwww); their newborn had the same name.
This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at the same time as everyone else.
I'm finding that phenomenon to be rather common. Seems like a bunch of other people are reaching the same conclusion...
One of my favorite examples (although there are many) is inline skating/rollerblading. It was all the rage in the early 90s or so. It's rare to see someone rollerblading today. I pick that example because it was somewhat related to tech that it took off. But there's no good reason for it to have pretty much died off.
I suspect there's a few issues
- If your parents don't skate you'll probably never get competent at it
- You need to be actually good to not injure yourself or on a pretty flat area. Rollerblades do not handle holes in pavement nearly as well as bicycles or shoes.
- Bicycles have actual utility like getting to work/places. For Covid a ton of people bought skates [1] but honestly I never saw that many more people skating then compared to before/after.
- They're pretty bulky. A Bicycle can transport and lock itself up but if you skate somewhere you'll need a bag to store them.
[1]: https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29078390/rollerblade-ren...
And, yeah, it isn't an activity that has any real utility. I don't really bike (didn't learn as a kid because didn't have a real place to safely bike--narrow country roads). But might have done so if there was a real practical reason to do so.
Of course, inline skating was a popular activity at one time and it just fell out of fashion.