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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
There are some inventions and inventors you just grow up knowing about – Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone, Thomas Edison and the lightbulb (even though he really just improved upon it). But there are a lot of inventions lurking out there that you didn’t learn about in your elementary school history and science books – inventions from geniuses known for other creations and discoveries, and inventions from people you didn’t expect to be inventors at all. Here are a few of them.
Henry David Thoreau, of all people, invented raisin bread when he tossed a handful into the dough he was baking while at Walden Pond. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but the addition of the shriveled little grapes is said to have just stunned and scandalized the housewives of Concord, Massachusetts, who were used to doing their baking in a very particular manner. I bet their minds would be blown by cinnamon raisin bread. Photo from Food Channel.
Marlon Brando: actor, icon… inventor? Yup. Toward the end of his life, Brando received several patents all related to a device that would help musicians tune drumheads. Why? Your guess is as good as mine – the patents all stemmed from 2002-2004, and when he died in 2004, he presumably took the idea with him.
Zeppo Marx owned a company that made industrial clamps and straps that were used quite heavily during WWII – the Marman Clamp was actually used to hold the atomic bombs carried by the Enola Gay. But Marx himself held three patents – one for a “Vapor Delivery Pad for Delivering Moist Heat” and two related to a device that monitored heart rates. And actually, Gummo Marx had a patent too – it was for a “Packaging Rack.”
Sir Isaac Newton was undoubtedly a genius with many discoveries and inventions to his name. Where do you think the cat flap ranks on his list of accomplishments? Rumor has it that Newton invented the cat flap when his beloved pet kept nudging the door to his lab open while he was working on light experiments, ruining hours of work. But he loved his cat and didn’t want to shut her out of his lab – or trap her inside. The solution? He cut a hole in the door, then installed a piece of felt at the stop so the least amount of light possible would seep through. Allegedly, when the cat had kittens, he cut a smaller door for them to go through even though they easily could have gone through the larger door. However, take this story with a grain of salt – at least two Newton biographers have done extensive research on the man’s life that turned up no trace of a pet of any kind. Photo from DIY Happy.
What’s a parent to do when their helpless infant is suffering after a terrible accident? Well, if you’re Roald Dahl, you team up with a couple of other guys to invent a brain shunt to ease the pain. Dahl’s son Theo was happily sitting in his baby carriage when it was hit by a taxi cab, severely injuring the infant and causing water to pool on his brain. The current device that helped drain the fluid was unreliable; it often jammed and was known to cause blindness. So Dahl partnered with a hydraulic engineer and a neurosurgeon to come up with a better solution – the Wade-Dahl-Till valve. His son had recovered by the time the valve was complete, but it served others well. The three men responsible for the valve all agreed that they would never accept payment for the invention.
Mark Twain has three patents to his name, but he was mostly a wannabe inventor. He was fascinated by inventions and gadgets and invested a lot of money in unknown inventors in hopes that his investments would make him quite rich. None of them ever panned out, though, and he eventually declared bankruptcy. But back to Twain’s patents – they were quite diverse. The first was granted in 1871 and was called “Improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments.” The strap tightened shirts up at the waist; the idea was to replace cumbersome suspenders. He also held a somewhat successful patent for a self-pasting scrapbook that ended up earning him about $50,000. And in 1885, he filed a patent for a history trivia game. It should come as no surprise that the author wrote about his ventures – you can read about the creation of the strap here.
Margaret Thatcher – yes, the ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – helped invent soft serve ice cream. I’m not sure if I should be thankful or not. After Maggie graduated from Oxford in 1950, she went to work for J. Lyons and Co., a British restaurant and food manufacturing company. The team she worked on developed a way to whip air into ice cream, leaving it lighter and creamier than existing ice cream. The result? Soft serve. Yum. Photo from Carvel Brentwood.
Engineer Scott Amron has a clever invention. It’s a heat sleeve for a cup that expands when hot liquid poured into is so that the drinker has additional protection from the heat.
Other Amron inventions that we’ve featured at Neatorama include a keyring/key, leather band-aids, and an art exhibit for which Amron plugged non-electrical objects into electrical appliances.
Wednesday would have marked the 163rd birthday of Alexander Graham Bell, were he still alive. While his invention of the telephone has always been subject to controversy, there is no denying that the man was quite a genius. To celebrate the life of this great inventor, let’s take this opportunity to get to know Mr. Bell a little better.
At first, he was just Alexander Bell. When he turned ten though, he begged his parents to give him a middle name like they had given to each of his brothers. It wasn’t until his 11th birthday that the famous “Graham” was added to his name. His father chose the name in honor of a family friend, Alexander Graham, who had boarded with the family.
Of course, his family continued to just call him “Aleck” throughout his life. When he was married to his wife (seen with him in the above image) though, she insisted that he begin calling himself “Alec” and from that point on, he started signing his name as “Alec Bell.”
Alexander’s entire family was tied in with the fields of elocution and speech. His father and grandfather (both of whom were also named Alexander Bell) worked in the field before Alec was born, and his brother also started working in the science. Additionally, both his mother and wife were deaf, which gave him even more reason to be dedicated to easing systems of communication.
Even as a kid, Bell was fascinated with sound and he taught himself both ventriloquism and piano without any training.
He finished his first invention, a dehusking device for a flour mill, when he was only 12. When his best friend, Ben Herdman, told him about the laborious process of dehusking at his parent’s flour mill, Bell quickly threw together a machine that combined rotating paddles with nail brushes. The mill used the machine for years to come and the boy’s father was so impressed that he gave the two boys complete access to a workshop in the mill so they could continue to work on inventions.
When Bell entered the Royal High School, he was known for having bad grades and a history of absenteeism. He excelled at science, but remained indifferent to all other courses. Eventually, he dropped out at only 15 and then moved to London, where he lived with his grandfather, who was able to finally get Bell interested in learning.
It paid off too. Before he invented the phone, Bell was a teacher. He used his father’s teaching system to educate deaf students. One of his most famous students was Hellen Keller, who once said that Bell had dedicated his life to breaking through the “inhuman silence which separates and estranges.”
Later in his life, he earned a series of honorary degrees from quite a few colleges, including Harvard, Dartmouth, the University of Edinburg in Scotland, the University of Würzburg in Bavaria and more.
Bell’s first work with what would later result in the invention of the telephone started when he was hired, along with Elisha Gray, to help find a way to send multiple telegraph messages along the same line. A few years later, he approached the director of the Smithsonian Institute, Joseph Henry, for his advice on an apparatus that would enable the human voice to travel via telegraph. Bell said he was worried he didn’t have the right knowledge to do it though and Henry inspired him by merely replying, “get it!”
At the same time that Bell was working on his idea, the other man hired, on the telegraph project Elisha Gray (seen at left) had also been inspired to find a way to transmit speech through the telegraph. He filed a design for an acoustic telegraph that sent vocal transmissions through water the same day that Bell’s lawyer filed a patent for his telephone device.
Aleck hadn’t actually gotten his phone working before he filed his patent. Three days after he was issued the patent, he used a liquid transmitter –just like the one Gray had designed, to get the device to work. He only used the water design as part of an experiment and never used the liquid transmitter in his demonstrations or commercial products, but he is still, to this day, accused of stealing the phone from Gray.
A man that worked at the patent office later swore in an affidavit that he had shown Gray’s patent to Bell’s attorney in an effort to pay off part of the debt he owed him. He also claimed that he showed the patent to Bell a few days later and that he was given $100 in return. While Alexander admitted that he learned some of the technical details from Gray’s patent, he swore that he had never paid the patent office employee, Zenas Fisk Wilber, any money.
After Bell finished his work on the telephone, he offered to sell the patent for the device to Western Union for $100,000. The president of the company refused, claiming that the telephone was nothing more than a toy. Two years later, he changed his mind, saying he would consider it a bargain if he could buy the patent for $25 million. Of course, by that point, the Bell Telephone Company was not interested in selling the patent.
Throughout the years, the Bell company continued to make improvements on the telephone, even buying Edison’s carbon microphone in 1879. Unfortunately, quite a few inventors had started to work on improving the phone by this point and in only 18 years, the company had to fight over 600 lawsuits over legal rights to the patent. Fortunately, the fact that Alec had been working on sound and speech for his entire life gave him the credibility he needed to fight the lawsuits. Even so, the government moved to annul his patent on grounds of fraud and misrepresentation in 1887, but the Supreme Court ruled in the company’s favor and many other suits were dropped as a result.
Through this entire period, the Bell company never lost a case, but the strain put on Alexander from all these court appearances eventually cause him to resign from the company.
While his most famous invention was the phone, Bell continued to invent throughout his life. He worked on optical telecommunications, hydrofoil planes and aeronautics. In 1880, he created the photophone, which he considered to be his most important invention. This creation would allow sound to pass through a beam of light and was the first wireless phone technology ever created.
By the time he died, he had thirty patents. He had one patent for the phonograph, nine for transportation devices and two for selenium cells. He also invented a metal jacket that was supposed to help with breathing problems, a meter to detect hearing problems, a device to locate icebergs and more.
He invented the first metal detectors, which he used in an attempt to uncover the bullet in President Garfield’s body. Although it worked perfectly in lab tests, it could not help doctors find the bullet, but that was partially because the president was laying on a bed with a metal frame and metal springs that disturbed the instrument and the surgeons refused to move him to a new location.
While the telephone was Bell’s best known contribution to society, he considered his real work to be as a scientist and he refused to have a telephone in his study for fear it would intrude on his work.
At one point in his career, Bell and his team had considered the idea of pressing a magnetic field onto a record as a way to reproduce sound. While they couldn’t get their idea to work, this same concept was the basic idea behind tapes, hard discs, floppy discs and other media that were invented almost a century later.
Also impressive was Bell’s environmentally-friendly inventions that were developed long before anyone had ever considered the idea of global warming. He worried about the effects of methane gas on the environment and experimented with composting toilets and devices that would capture water from the atmosphere. In an interview shortly before his death, he even mentioned the idea of using solar panels to heat houses.
Alexander Graham Bell died in August of 1922. Every phone in North America was said to be silenced during his funeral in his honor.
Sources: AlexanderGrahamBell.org, Idea Finder, Biography.com, The Franklin Institute, American Heritage and Answers.com
A new “anti-rape” condom could protect women in dangerous areas from being attacked. The device is a female condom filled with sharp, microscopic barbs that will attach themselves to flesh. The theory is that while the attacker is stunned and doubled-over with pain, the woman will have a chance to flee the scene before the rapist has a chance to do further damage to her. Once it latches on to the skin, the condom can only be removed surgically, which will mean that attackers will have to go to the hospital and risk getting caught.
While I can certainly see value in this device, I can’t help but think of all those situations where things could go wrong. What do you think readers? A great idea or a huge mistake waiting to happen?
Pet rocks are way too old school, but not anymore thanks to ThinkGeek’s new USB powered pet rock. The rock with a glued-on USB cord will only run you around $10.
Link Via Foolish Gadgets
Life Magazine has a hilarious post up featuring what they consider to be the 30 dumbest inventions of all time. When you look through the list, filled with things like the shower hat to the right, you actually start to get an appreciation for things like the Snuggie.
Almost all of the inventions are from the sixties or before, so it’s not too shocking that many of them involve cigarettes, including a method for a couple to share a smoke and one for a person to smoke a whole pack at once -oh joy!
Some of the most notorious discoveries and inventions arose by accident, or more commonly, were developed for uses other than what they ended up doing. Listverse looks at ten such products, including trinitrotoluene, a chemical discovered by Joseph Wilbrand in 1863 and meant for use as a yellow dye. With the name shortened to TNT, the explosive was used to wage both world wars. Link -via the Presurfer
What we now take for granted many people once took for granted could never work.
The lightbulb. The telephone. Email. If you’re a specialist in your field, there are two ways to become a household name: create something new…or claim it can never be done. If you want to be remembered on the Internet, choose the second one. Here are 9 examples of breakthroughs, inventions and innovations the experts were completely wrong about.
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