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If Thomas Edison were alive today, he would be celebrating his 165th birthday. Jeremiah Warren made this quick overview of his life and work, so you’ll know more than just “Edison invented the light bulb.” -Thanks, Jeremiah!
After all the impressive additions they’ve given this world, it’s easy to think of famous inventors as brilliant creators who can simply do no wrong. But the reality is that no one is perfect and just because someone came up with a device that revolutionized the world around them doesn’t mean they didn’t have their share of failures as well. Here are some of the less famous (for good reason) inventions of some of the greatest inventors on Earth.
Edison had over 2000 patents by the time he died, so it’s not really much of a surprise that among his innovations on the phonograph, the light bulb, the kinetoscope and the telephone, he also had some utter failures as well.
Interestingly, one of his worst failures was actually a great idea that was just too far ahead of its time for the current technology. The Edison Doll was the inventor’s attempt to bring the joy of the phonograph to children. While talking dolls are common place these days and widely loved by little girls around the globe, the problems with the Edison Talking Doll were many. For one thing, phonographs of the time still had to be manually cranked at the appropriate speed in order to play correctly. That’s asking a lot for a child to do with her toy. Another problem was that even when cranked at the proper speed, the doll sounded simply terrible because voice recording still wasn’t very good at the time. In fact, Edison himself admitted “the voices of the little monsters were exceedingly unpleasant to hear.” As if those two issues weren’t bad enough, the mini phonograph inside the doll was incredibly fragile –meaning even if a little girl did manage to play the sound at the right speed and not run away from the shrieking abomination, she’d almost certainly destroy the wax record after only a short amount of play time.
Of course, all the new technology didn’t come cheap and the doll would cost between $10 and $25 depending on the outfit she came in. That’s the equivalent of between $240 and $600 these days, which is a whole lot to spend on a doll that terrifies your daughter and breaks without any effort. Of 2,500 made, only 500 were sold and most of the dolls were returned. With all of these failures, it’s no wonder the doll was only sold for a few short weeks in early 1890. Of course, the rarity of the failure has only increased the doll’s value over the last century. These days, an Edison doll in good condition can easily go for over $15,000 –and that’s without the original phonograph, since most of the excess inventory was sold off without a sound device inside.
The terrible toy doll wasn’t Edison’s only failure though. In fact, his best-known failure was in his push for concrete housing complete with concrete furniture, even concrete pianos. Edison believed these cheap creations would be a good way to solve the housing crisis and allow low-income families to enjoy the finer things in life without spending a fortune. In 1917, he and Charles Ingersoll offered 11 concrete homes (that’s them above) up for sale for only $1,200 –a third of the cost of an average home. Even so, they didn’t manage to sell a single one.
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A look back at an ovoidal innovation and other work compiled by Stephen Drew, Improbable Research staff
The name of inventor Hiram S. Dotts is now less well known that it once was. So, too, are his inventions, two of which—perhaps Dotts’s most enduringly influential—are described here.
Detail from the patent for Dotts’s improved egg-opener.
Be it known that I, HIRAM S. DOTTS, a citizen of the United States, residing at Thoburn, in the county of Marion, State of West Virginia, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Egg-Openers, of which the following is a specification.
So begins the text to U.S. patent #696,016, granted March 25, 1902 to Hiram S. Dotts. Mr. Dotts’s description, despite dealing with a subject of great technical complexity, is nearly poetical. Dotts (and/or his lawyer, E.B. Stocking) reduces the device, and its place in the world, to just 41 words:
This invention relates to egg-openers, and to particularly to a construction embodying jaws movable in their relation to each other and toward an egg in order to fracture the shell thereof upon a peripheral line extending in a single horizontal plane.
Detail from the patent for Dotts’s improved cigar-tip-protecting-label technology.
Just over thirteen years later, on December 7, 1915, Dotts received a patent for a device in an almost wholly different field of endeavor. In his words (and/or those of his attorney, E.B. Stocking):
Be it known that I, HIRAM S. DOTTS, a citizen of the United States, residing at Marianna, in the county of Washington and State of Pennsylvania, have invented certain new and useful Improvements in Cigar-Tip-Protecting Labels, of which the following is a specification, reference being had therein to the accompanying drawing.
This invention relates to certain new and useful improvements in cigar tip-protecting labels, the object being to provide a combination tip protector and label so constructed that the label will be held in position on the cigar by the tip protector.
However well Dotts was known to the public during his lifetime, his fame is now surpassed by that of other inventors, many of whom knew or know little or nothing firsthand about how to make improvements on egg-openers or cigar-tip-protecting-labels. It is possible that readers of this article will rectify or perpetuate this state of affairs.
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The article above is from the September-October 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!
Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.
The drinking straw was invented by 3000 B.C., as attested by Sumerian artifacts. Until very recently, these straws were tubes from plant stems, such as rye. Besides dissolving in water, these straws often added unwelcome plant flavors to drinks. In 1888, Marvin Chester Stone patented a waxed paper straw that didn’t add a grassy flavor to drinks, and these quickly replaced plant straws. But we would have to wait a few more decades before straws became flexible.
Sometime during the 1930s, tinkerer Joseph B. Friedman watched his young daughter struggle to drink a milkshake from a high counter at a soda shop. There had to be a way to improve the design to make it flexible. Here’s what he did:
Friedman inserted a screw into the straw toward the top (see image). Then he wrapped dental floss around the paper, tracing grooves made by the inserted screw. Finally, he removed the screw, leaving a accordion-like ridge in the middle of the once-straight straw. Voila! he had created a straw that could bend around its grooves to reach a child’s face over the edge of a glass.
The modern bendy straw was born. The plastic would come later. The “crazy” straw — you know, the one that lets you watch the liquid ride a small roller coaster in plastic before reaching your mouth — would come later, too. But the the game-changing invention had been made. In 1939, Friedman founded Flex-Straw Company. By the 1940s, he was manufacturing flex-straws with his own custom-built machines. His first sale didn’t go to a restaurant, but rather to a hospital, where glass tubes still ruled. Nurses realized that bendy straws could help bed-ridden patients drink while lying down.
Link | Photo: Flickr user matsber
Steampunk as a fashion trend might be fading away, but steampunk inspired inventions and designs will never die. Matt Armstrong brings his version of steampunk inspired design to these LEGO brick sculptures, and the resulting inventions/artworks are quite handsome looking indeed. With classic designs, simplistic retro flair, and the look of full functionality, this is how you put the bricks to good use!
Link –via DesignTAXI
Here’s a nifty little gallery of items from Tokyo Design Week 2011, including the glasses shown above, which were made out of sugar crystals which were formed naturally then reproduced in plastic via 3d printer.
Art and innovation collide in these interesting items, and some may even make their way into a store near you. Others, like the tusk inspired headgear or the strange knit yellow suit with duck hat, probably won’t make it out of Japan. Thank your lucky stars!
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I don’t know about you guys, but I’m a sucker for articles with funny patents and this Life article quickly drew me in with these delightful chicken spectacles. There are 40 more for those of you looking for a great laugh at terrible inventions.
Nikola Tesla was born in what is now Croatia on July 10, 1856, which is 155 years ago today. It’s a good day to take a little time and find out more about this extraordinary man.
Few inventors contributed more to advances in science and engineering in the early 20th century than Nikola Tesla. As one of the Fathers of Electricity, Tesla did groundbreaking work on alternating current (AC) power system, electromagnetism, hydroelectric power, radio, and radar to name a few. Many of his inventions (Tesla obtained some 300 patents in his lifetime) became the stuff we take for granted today: when we flip a switch to turn on the light, we owe a lot of that electrical magic to Tesla.
As fate would have it, Tesla, one of the world’s greatest inventors, died penniless and in obscurity. Even today, many people mistakenly attribute many of his inventions to others (Edison, for example, is in the name of many power companies in the United States – ironically, they use the AC system devised by Tesla rather than the more inefficient direct current or DC system espoused by Thomas Edison; Tesla also invented the fundamentals of radio transmissions before Gugliegmo Marconi).
Today, there’s quite a bit of resurgence in Tesla’s popularity, which is helped in part by his mystique as a “mad scientist.” Amongst his more outlandish ideas, Tesla worked on death rays to knock out enemy airplanes out of the skies, pocket-sized resonance machine that could topple buildings, ways to send electricity through the upper atmosphere, force-fields to protect cities, and so on.
Read the story of Tesla’s life and inventions, along with plenty of photographs, in an excerpt from the book Tesla: Master of Lightning by Margaret Cheney and Robert Uth. Link
Did you ever order Sea Monkeys from an ad in the back of a comic book? The man behind the “Bowlfull of Happiness” was Harold von Braunhut, who’s life was so much more than sea monkeys.
The accounts Von Braunhut gave of his adventures in American kitsch are consistently winning. Granted, he makes some claims that a skeptic is inclined to independently confirm. At some point in the years after he raced motorcycles as The Green Hornet, von Braunhut worked as a talent agent of sorts. He tells Planet X about a stunt performer he used to manage—the article has von Braunhut calling him “a fella by the name of Henry Lamore”—who would dive from a height of 40 feet into a kiddie pool filled with 12 inches of water. I began to lose faith while trying to verify this doozy, but it turns out that the Internet allows you to watch a man named Henri LaMothe still pulling off this feat at 71 years old, as an opening act for Evel Knievel.
As anyone sold by the Sea-Monkey ads could tell you, it was hard to say exactly where von Braunhut was walking on the terrain between truth, embellishment and con. That was his gift. He convinced us to look at the jazz hands and lose sight of the footwork. Von Braunhut’s inventions were not quite what they seemed to be. Neither was he.
Von Braunhut was best known for his Sea Monkeys, but it was only one of his 195 patents. Even more unusual was his association with the Aryan Nation. Link -via Nag on the Lake
Does this remind you of a certain Imperial Walker from the movie The Empire Strikes Back? In 1962, General Electric conceived the Cybernetic Anthropmorophous Machine (CAM), which became known as the Walking Truck.
The Army liked what GE had been testing and awarded a contract for building the experimental vehicle in 1966, a year after America began sending troops to Vietnam. But the same super-sensitive, hand-and-foot-controlled hydraulics that enabled the CAM to casually push aside a jeep, or gently paw a GE light bulb without breaking it, also made it impractical for prolonged battlefield use. Operators found the constant manipulation of the controls very fatiguing, leading the project to be mothballed.
In additional to the fictional AT-AT, this reminds us of BigDog from Boston Dynamics. See more pictures of the CAM at GE Reports. Link
John D. Humphrey patented this device in 1919. It’s an alarm clock. Oh, it doesn’t cook bacon or toss you out of bed, but it’ll get the point across. Assuming that s/he’s correctly positioned, a metal rod slaps the user’s head. Link and Patent Info -via Say Uncle
You think you have weird stuff in your attic, imagine if you were a 130 year old company who is responsible in part for some of the world’s greatest inventions. The company has released a gallery of photographs that illustrate some lost but not forgotten gadgets including a 100 year old car charger and early solar cells.
GE called on photographer Hans Gissinger to shoot items from GE’s archives as well as more modern projects being worked on right now. Most of these items are stored in GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York, near Schenectady, though they plan to head to other manufacturing plants across the country to capture the goodies stored elsewhere.
Since the dawn of time, people have found nifty ways to clean up after the bathroom act. The most common solution was simply to grab what was at hand: coconuts, shells, snow, moss, hay, leaves, grass, corncobs, sheep’s wool—and, later, thanks to the printing press—newspapers, magazines, and pages of books. The ancient Greeks used clay and stone. The Romans, sponges and salt water. But the idea of a commercial product designed solely to wipe one’s bum? That started about 150 years ago, right here in the U.S.A. In less than a century, Uncle Sam’s marketing genius turned something disposable into something indispensable.
How Toilet Paper Got on a Roll
The first products designed specifically to wipe one’s nethers were aloe-infused sheets of manila hemp dispensed from Kleenex-like boxes. They were invented in 1857 by a New York entrepreneur named Joseph Gayetty, who claimed his sheets prevented hemorrhoids. Gayetty was so proud of his therapeutic bathroom paper that he had his name printed on each sheet. But his success was limited. Americans soon grew accustomed to wiping with the Sears Roebuck catalog, and they saw no need to spend money on something that came in the mail for free.
Toilet paper took its next leap forward in 1890, when two brothers named Clarence and E. Irvin Scott popularized the concept of toilet paper on a roll. The Scotts’ brand became more successful than Gayetty’s medicated wipes, in part because they built a steady trade selling toilet paper to hotels and drugstores. But it was still an uphill battle to get the public to openly buy the product, largely because Americans remained embarrassed by bodily functions. In fact, the Scott brothers were so ashamed of the nature of their work that they didn’t take proper credit for their innovation until 1902.
“No one wanted to ask for it by name,” says Dave Praeger, author of Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product. “It was so taboo that you couldn’t even talk about the product.” By 1930, the German paper company Hakle began using the tag line, “Ask for a roll of Hakle and you won’t have to say toilet paper!”
As time passed, toilet tissues slowly became an American staple. But widespread acceptance of the product didn’t officially occur until a new technology demanded it. At the end of the 19th century, more and more homes were being built with sit-down flush toilets tied to indoor plumbing systems. And because people required a product that could be flushed away with minimal damage to the pipes, corncobs and moss no longer cut it. In no time, toilet paper ads boasted that the product was recommended by both doctors and plumbers.
The Strength of Going Soft
In the early 1900s, toilet paper was still being marketed as a medicinal item. But in 1928, the Hoberg Paper Company tried a different tack. On the advice of its ad men, the company introduced a brand called Charmin and fitted the product with a feminine logo that depicted a beautiful woman. The genius of the campaign was that by evincing softness and femininity, the company could avoid talking about toilet paper’s actual purpose. Charmin was enormously successful, and the tactic helped the brand survive the Great Depression. (It also helped that, in 1932, Charmin began marketing economy-size packs of four rolls.) Decades later, the dainty ladies were replaced with babies and bear cubs—advertising vehicles that still stock the aisles today.
By the 1970s, America could no longer conceive of life without toilet paper. Case in point: In December 1973, Tonight Show host Johnny Carson joked about a toilet paper shortage during his opening monologue. But America didn’t laugh. Instead, TV watchers across the country ran out to their local grocery stores and bought up as much of the stuff as they could. In 1978, a TV Guide poll named Mr. Whipple—the affable grocer who implored customers, “Please don’t squeeze the Charmin”—the third best-known man in America, behind former President Richard Nixon and the Rev. Billy Graham.
Rolling the World
Currently, the United States spends more than $6 billion a year on toilet tissue—more than any other nation in the world. Americans, on average, use 57 squares a day and 50 lbs. a year. Even still, the toilet paper market in the United States has largely plateaued. The real growth in the industry is happening in developing countries. There, it’s booming. Toilet paper revenues in Brazil alone have more than doubled since 2004. The radical upswing in sales is believed to be driven by a combination of changing demographics, social expectations, and disposable income.
“The spread of globalization can kind of be measured by the spread of Western bathroom practices,” says Praeger. When average citizens in a country start buying toilet paper, wealth and consumerism have arrived. It signifies that people not only have extra cash to spend, but they’ve also come under the influence of Western marketing.
America Without Toilet Paper
Even as the markets boom in developing nations, toilet paper manufacturers find themselves needing to charge more per roll to make a profit. That’s because production costs are rising. During the past few years, pulp has become more expensive, energy costs are rising, and even water is becoming scarce. Toilet paper companies may need to keep hiking up their prices. The question is, if toilet paper becomes a luxury item, can Americans live without it?
The truth is that we did live without it, for a very long time. And even now, a lot of people do. In Japan, the Washlet—a toilet that comes equipped with a bidet and an air-blower—is growing increasingly popular. And all over the world, water remains one of the most common methods of self-cleaning. Many places in India, the Middle East, and Asia, for instance, still depend on a bucket and a spigot. But as our economy continues to circle the drain, will Americans part with their beloved toilet paper in order to adopt more money-saving measures? Or will we keep flushing our cash away? Praeger, for one, believes a toilet-paper apocalypse is hardly likely. After all, the American marketing machine is a powerful thing.
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The article above, written by Linda Rodriguez, is reprinted with permission from the Jul/Aug 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
Inventing is a great way to leave your mark on the world, but in some unfortunate circumstances, inventions have been known to leave the mark of death on their inventors. A few years ago, we wrote a post about five inventors who were killed by their own inventions, but that is not the full extent of these poor creators. Here are five more people whose own inventions resulted in their untimely demise.
Perhaps the most influential inventor on this list is Maria Sklodowska-Curie. Maria co-discovered both radium and polonium and revolutionized modern chemistry when she discovered a method to isolate radioactive isotopes. She was so well-respected that she became the first female professor at the University of Paris. If that weren’t impressive enough, she was not only the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize, she was also the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes. Even the word “radioactive” was her creation.
Unfortunately, being one of the first researchers to work with radioactive particles, she did not understand the dangers they presented to the human body. Most of her work was carried out in a shed without any protective measures whatsoever. Eventually, she died from aplastic anemia caused by extensive exposure to ionized radiation that emanated from her research materials.
Her shed has now been converted to a museum, but her paperwork, even her cookbook, is so radioactive that they are too dangerous to handle without protective gear and are stored in lead-lined boxes.
Horace had a number of careers, serving as a legislator, a lawyer and a confederate marine engineer in his short 40 years, but it was his role as a marine engineer that he will be best remembered for. Horace was the inventor of the first combat submarine. His creation, the H.L. Hunley, was known to be dangerous after five out of nine crew members died on the device’s first run in an attempt to attack the Union blockade in the Charleston Harbor, but that didn’t stop the inventor or the confederacy from investing more time and manpower into the device.
Like any good inventor, Horace knew he couldn’t quit. He kept working on the sub and was so willing to stand by his work that he served on the second run to attack the blockade. Again the sub sank, this time killing all eight crew members, including Horace.
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In theory this sounds like a great idea. Post an idea and you get an idea back. Freedom of the exchange of information, that’s what the internet is for right? However I could see this posing some problems when someone’s brilliant million dollar idea gets posted on TheIdeaSwap.com.
The Idea Swap lets you take those ideas you got that really didn’t come to any use, and exchange them with actual ideas from other people.
Silly Putty was invented by accident when GE engineer James Wright was working to develop new types of rubber for the US military during World War II.
Wright spent over a year experimenting with different combinations of chemical compounds, hoping to produce a synthetic, “hard rubber” silicone that could withstand the high heat of jet engines or the freezing cold of nights on Navy ships. Towards the end of the summer in 1943, he and his team tried adding boron nitride as filler to an experimental silicone compound. But the scientists then learned that the substance they thought was boron nitride was actually a mixture of other chemical compounds, including boric acid. So they tried adding just boric acid.
The rest, as they say, is history. The resulting substance was gooey, not hard. Frustrated, Wright threw the goop onto the floor and to his surprise, it bounced right back up at him. A reporter from the Saturday Evening Post described the scene in a story (which, alas, is not online): “‘Golly,’ the scientist exclaimed as he dropped a ball of silicone putty, ‘look at it bounce!’”
They weren’t sure what to do with the stuff, but they had fun playing with it. Read how this mistake became the classic putty toy we all know and love. Link
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In the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the answer to everything. Engineers were working on nuclear powered planes, automobiles, and trains, and searching for other ways to use the power of the atom. Read about some of the inventions that seem far-fetched today, but were just on the horizon at one time, at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Alexander Graham Bell is best known for his work on the telephone, but that was far from his only interest. The Library of Congress preserved Bell’s handwritten notes and sketchbooks for our perusal. They are filled with ideas and experiments, although the handwriting is, to put it kindly, sometimes hard to decipher. The Atlantic has a gallery of some of the more interesting sketches, like this airplane that resembles a Sierpinski triangle.
Link | The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers -via Metafilter
ShortList Magazine put together a list of foods that didn’t catch on. Do you recall the McLobster? I don’t. I remember EZ Squirt, but I never tried it. Never wanted to.
Last time I checked (lie: I never have) people have always been happy with the colour of ketchup. Tomatoes are red. Ketchup, made from tomatoes, is also red. Move on. Heinz, the people who should really know about these things, decided that it would be necessary to bring out green, purple, blue and ‘mystery’ coloured ketchup turning a popular sauce into a terrifying experiment. Children and the colour-blind were nonplussed. The rest of humanity wept.
Read about these and more, and be glad these things are not on your menu today. Link -Thanks, Ben!
Want your child to turn that frown upside down? By any means necessary? This feels like it belongs on Arrested Development, alongside the injury-inducing cornballer, but amazingly enough it’s a real thing. And there’s only a “slight twitch side effect!” Hooray for science!
This new invention just hooks on your child’s ears like glasses while another portion fits snuggly under the chin. Ok so what is the twist? How about electro shock treatment? Yes the portion under the chin sends a constant pulse of electricity through your child’s cheeks.
Set the electro smile unit on high and snap that smile right into place, no more worries about grandma feeling the kids are not happy to see her. The sudden jolt of electricity in the jaw muscles forces the child to smile with complete body excitement giving grandma the appearance the kids have really missed her.
In 1983, Fritz Gall and Friedl Umscheid opened the Nonseum in Herrnbaumgarten, Austria. The Nonseum is a home for inventions that never took off -many of which never made any sense in the first place.
Now, the Nonmuseum has hundreds of useless items on display, and has just celebrated its 100,000th visitor. Among the many eccentric inventions of this unusual museum, you can find a Portable Anonymizer that’s supposed to keep your identity a secret in real life, a foldable snow sled, a guillotine for finger nails, and even a Champagne Cork Catcher – a device that keeps the cork from flying away when you pop open the bottle.
The object shown, housed at the Nonseum, is the foldable sled. Link -via the Presurfer
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In 1934, Clarence Hickman, a Bell Labs engineer, invented an early telephone answering machine. The innovation that led to this machine was a revolutionary form of data storage: magnetic tape. Bell Labs ordered that the project be shelved and Hickman to end his research. Why? At Gizmodo, Tim Wu explains:
AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.
More precisely, in Bell’s imagination, the very knowledge that it was possible to record a conversation would ” greatly restrict the use of the telephone,” with catastrophic consequences for its business. Businessmen, for instance, the theory supposed, might fear the potential use of a recorded conversation to undo a written contract. Tape recorders would also inhibit discussing obscene or ethically dubious matters. In sum, the very possibility of magnetic recording, it was feared, would ” change the whole nature of telephone conversations” and ” render the telephone much less satisfactory and useful in the vast majority of cases in which it is employed.”[...]
Link | Photo by Flickr user Tom Raftery used under Creative Commons license
Every year, the editors of Popular Science compile a list of what they believe to be the 100 greatest technological innovations of the past year. This time, the #1 slot went to the Groasis Waterboxx. It’s a plant incubator that reduces the need for irrigation:
The Waterboxx, shaped more like a doughnut than a box, helps plants survive long enough to make it through that layer of dry soil. Place the tub around a freshly planted seedling, and fill the evaporation-proof basin—just once—with four gallons of water.
The Waterboxx does the rest. At night, its top cools faster than the air, collecting condensation to supplement those initial gallons. The tub drips about three tablespoons of water a day into the soil, sustaining the plant while encouraging its roots to grow deeper in search of more water. Once the plant reaches the moist soil layer, usually after a year, the farmer lifts the box off the plant and reuses it on the next sapling. Each Waterboxx is expected to last 10 years, and, for about a buck or two per tree grown, is cheap enough to use in poor nations.
At the link, you can view the complete list of 100 innovations divided into 11 categories.
Link via First Things | Photo: Popular Science
Selfy the Self-Making Bed
Railroads reduced travel time to days; airplanes to hours. But in today’s fast-paced world, time-savers are measured in minutes and seconds. Behold the arrival of “Selfy,” the bed that makes itself, which reportedly saves you a full 15 seconds a day. That adds up to 105 seconds a week, or 98 minutes a year -precisely the length of time you would need to watch the 1986 film Short Circuit, starring Steve Guttenberg and Ally Sheedy. See how Selfy helps you make the most of your time?
Dust Mop Slippers
Dust mop slippers are booties with cotton fibers on their soles that are designed to pick up any dirt or dust collecting on your floor. (We’re guessing your floors are pretty filthy if you’re the type to buy this sort of thing.) Curiously, getting drunk may actually leave your apartment in better shape.
The Pet Petter
For 20- and 30-somethings, caring for a dog is often a meaningful step toward parenthood. But saddled with long and inflexible work hours, many in this age group just don’t have the time. That’s where the Pet Petter comes in. Developed by Kentuckian Anthony Steffen, the Pet Petter literally lends dog owners a helping hand. As a robotic arm swings back and forth, the contraption will coo sweet nothings into your doggie’s ear.
The Cruzin Cooler
Beer, the muse of lazy technology, must have inspired the Cruzin Cooler, a motorized scooter attached to a cooler. In their mission statement, the inventors claim that the cooler “combines two basic necessities of life: the ability to have cold food or a beverage handy along with the means to get somewhere, without walking.” You might be wondering, wouldn’t a device like this encourage drinking and driving? It’s likely. In June 2008, a man driving a Cruzin Cooler in New York was arrested and charged with DWI.
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The article above, written by Adam Rosen, is reprinted with permission from Scatterbrained section of the Mar/Apr 2009 issue of mental_floss magazine.
Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!
Some of the most important events can slip past us because we don’t know how important they are until much later. You know about Sputnik, Elvis, and Rosa Parks, but did you know that The Pill was developed in the ’50s?
You probably think that – along with Twister and concept albums – the oral contraceptive pill was one of the great inventions of the swinging sixties. In fact, it was a product of the more famously staid and conservative fifties. Developed by a team of biologists led by Gregory Pincus, it was first tested in Puerto Rico April 1956. The Food and Drug Administration did not approve the marketing of the pill until 1960, just in time for it to be a symbol of sixties freedom.
Read about four other events that also turned out to be very newsworthy …much later. Link
Wouldn’t you love to know someone like the inventors in our movies and books -someone who can come up with gadgets, materials, and machines to solve your problems? Of course, in some stories inventors cause the problem themselves! Gizmodo takes a look at these geniuses from movies, TV, and literature and why we love them. My vote goes to Doc Brown from Back to the Future, who invented
The flux capacitor, the core component of a machine that allowed Brown to travel through time. Brown came up with the idea of the capacitor on November 5, 1955, and worked tirelessly for the next 30 years developing it into a working time machine. The capacitor, which requires 1.21 Gigawatts of electrical power to function, was first implemented in a customized DeLorean and later, or maybe earlier?, in a 19th century train.
Yes, this is an image from an actual patent filed by Edward L. Van Halen on 30 July, 1985. Here’s what it’s for:
A supporting device for stringed musical instruments, for example, guitars, banjos, mandolins and the like, is disclosed. The supporting device is constructed and arranged for supporting the musical instrument on the player to permit total freedom of the player’s hands to play the instrument in a completely new way, thus allowing the player to create new techniques and sounds previously unknown to any player. The device, when in its operational position, has a plate which rests upon the player’s leg leaving both hands free to explore the musical instrument as never before. Because the musical instrument is arranged perpendicular to the player’s body, the player has maximum visibility of the instrument’s entire playing surface.
Link via Lowering the Bar | Image: US Patent Office
We can always dream up new products that make life easier, no matter how difficult they would be to actually produce. In 1939, Popular Science predicted that we would one day received newspapers printed at home with data transferred by radio broadcasts. That particular invention never came to be, at least in the sense it was envisioned at the time. Why print out the news when you can just read it on your computer screen? This item is one of nine products that were never developed, although some of the end results came to us by other inventions. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
Australian inventors Brendan Corry and Peter Sargent designed the Wunda Weeder. This fanciful garden gadget is self-propelled, thanks to the solar cells on the roof. A gardener can lay on the cot and weed rows of plants in his/her garden while staying cool in the shade.
Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: Wunda Products
Time magazine has a list of what its editors consider to be the worst inventions of, well, it looks like the last fifty years or so. Among them are crocs:
It doesn’t matter how popular they are, they’re still pretty ugly. The footwear, introduced in 2002, mostly takes the form of rubber clogs, but has seen transformation into high heels and loafers. The company also announced April 26 it would start making ballet flats. “If we make it a little bit more stylish, then we start to appeal to a larger audience,” said the company’s CEO. Which means they just might be attractive enough to do your laundry in.
What would you add to the list?
Link via io9 | Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images
