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Three-year-old Noah Jeffrey wanted a toy so badly that he climbed into a claw machine in a restaurant in Ballarat, Victoria, Australia. We’ve posted stories of children in vending machines before, but Noah took the adventure to a new level when he started handing toys out to other children who gathered around the machine! Then his mother saw him.
“I ran over to check and he was passing toys out and eating some of the lollies,” she said.
But with electrical wires and little oxygen inside Noah was soon sweating as management and his mum worked to free him.
And the escape proved rather more tricky than getting in for Noah.
The toddler had to be coaxed to climb back down the chute and sit there while his mum pulled him around a guard panel blocking his escape.
“We had to tell him that he had to come out to get a toy,” she said.
Noah managed to get out of the machine before the fire brigade arrived to rescue him. Link -via Arbroath
Swap-o-matic is a vending machine that doesn’t use money. Instead, you swap something you have for something you want! It’s also an art project that makes a statement about consumption and recycling, designed by Lina Fenequito with Rick Cassidy and Ray Mancini. It’s a cool idea, but where I live, it would either stay empty or would become filled with old tires and obsolete electronics -things you have to pay to get rid of. Link -via Laughing Squid
Blogging regulations require that we post this notice about how the great state of Florida now requires vending machines to have this self-referential notice.
Kudos to the bureaucrats of Florida, who came up with such ingenious plan to create regulations, seemingly for regulations' sake. On another note, how would people know who to call to report a missing notice, if the phone number is on the notice itself? Link - via The Agitator and Metafilter
Tired of all those junk food in regular ol' vending machines in their building, designer Mette Hornung Rankin of the Bureau of Betterment and Mark Jacobs of 58 Minutes decided to take matters into their own hands: by operating their very own vending machine.
Say hello to the Goodie Monster Vending Machine, which is not only packed with healthy snacks, but also dressed up in a cute monster outfit: Link - via Notcot
Previously on Neatorama: Strange and Wonderful Vending Machines
Ah, the good ol' days. Actually, they're probably called that because the whiskey (or "whisky" for all you purists) made you forget all the bad parts ... The Whisky Vending Machine, which mixes whiskey and soda, above was shown at the Second Automatic Vending Exhibition in London, 1960.
See also: Strange and Wonderful Vending Machines
Craving a warm baguette in the middle of the night? Your nocturnal carb craving is not a problem with this 24-hour automated baguette vending machine by French baker Jean-Louis Hecht!
An adventurous baker didn't see that change as a threat to his business but rather an opportunity. He thought hard about ways to preserve the quality of the bread while dispensing them at customers' convenience. The result? His baguette dispenser has sold 1,600 baguettes the opening month in January, and 4,500 in July.
Jean-Louise Hecht, owner of multiple bakeries in Paris and Hombourg-Haut in northeastern France, first got the idea for baguette vending machine as he dealt with customers who would chase him down at his apartment above the shop for fresh baguettes after hours. With many trials and errors, Hecht built a machine that turns precooked bread into steaming baguettes.
Link - via The Next Web
See also: Strange
and Wonderful Vending Machines
The British creative team called Concept Shed produced this odd but beautiful vending machine to performed automated weddings for Marvin’s Marvellous Mechanical Museum in Detroit. Enter your information on the keyboard, and it spits out a plastic ring, asks you to enter your vows, and prints out a certificate! The eight-foot-tall computerized machine has a beautiful retro look. They’ll make you one to your specifications if you want. See a video of the machine in action at their website. Link -via the Presurfer
“This guy is crazy!” …crazy like a fox. This is apparently a vending machine at a petting zoo from which people can buy treats to feed the animals. But Billy here has figured out how to “tap” into it himself! -via Buzzfeed
Update: purple_phoenix, who works there, tells us this is not a billy goat, but a female sheep! That’ll teach me to go by YouTube titles.
The Polk County Library system in Florida has introduced library vending machines. The machines are placed in areas where there is no local library. People can go to the machine, swipe their library card and check out a book.
The machines are similar to Red Box movie rental machines. One of the machines has DVDs in it, and the other has best selling books.
In a land of high-tech toilet and strange robots, a regular ol’ vending machine just won’t do. So behold, the vending machine in subway stations in Tokyo that uses 47-inch touchscreen panel to sell you drinks:
A 47-inch touchscreen panel dominates the front of this beast,
which shows two tall eyes when in sleep mode and switches to the storefront mode, which displays available drinks (and hides ones that are sold out, so that no ugly red “Sold out” buttons appear). Payment can be made in the traditional hard money method, as well as with a Suica or a FeliCa on a cell phone.What makes this vending machine even more interesting is that there is a camera above the screen that determines the age and gender of a person standing in front of it, which the machine uses to “subtly” offer demographically-targeted drink selections, as well as collect marketing data based on customer’s actual choices – no identifiable images or information are stored.
Akihabara News has the story (and video clip): Link – via Core77
Previously on Neatorama: Strange and Wonderful Vending Machines
We’ve brought you some weird vending machines before, but this takes the cake! When you feel the need to buy gold, but don’t want to drive all the way to the bank or to your broker, just use this handy dandy gold vending machine, from a business called GOLD To Go. The first one was installed earlier this year at the Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi. Of course. Link -via Laughing Squid
We think we live in such modern times, with fabulous inventions that make our lives easier and provide great convenience. But some of those inventions might not be as modern as we think. Take a look at these five inventions that may have been around for thousands of years before we “invented” them.
A jet engine in the first century B.C.? Perhaps. A jet engine in the first century A.D.? Definitely. The aeolipile is a rocket style jet engine that spins when it’s heated and is the first-ever device known to use steam for a rotary motion. Although it was “invented” in 1698 by Thomas Savery, the original may have been invented in the first century B.C. Roman architect Vitruvius’ De architectura, a work on then-modern architecture written around 25 B.C., includes a device called the aeolipile. However, it has never been verified that his aeolipile (which translates to “ball of Aeolus,” who was the god of the wind, so it’s kind of a generic name that could apply to various inventions) was the aeolipile that we know existed in the first century.
That’s the aeolipile that Hero of Alexander wrote about, including a detailed description of how to construct one. The invention credit is usually given to Hero instead of Vitruvius.
That Hero was a pretty smart guy. He also invented the vending machine long before we were prying Kit Kats out of them in our office break rooms. Hero rigged it so that when a coin was dropped into a slot, it fell on a pan, and the weight of it on the pan triggered a lever that opened up a valve that let some holy water flow out to the person who dropped the coin in. The pan kept tilting until the coin fell off of it, and when that happened the valve closed and the water would no longer dispense. The first modern-day vending machine came about in the 1880s, so you could say that Hero was well ahead of his time.
We’ve long thought that the first astronomical clocks didn’t show up until the 14th century in Europe. That all changed in 1900 when a group of divers discovered shipwreck thought to date back to 150-100 BC. A lot of the loot was stuff you might expect from that era – statues, busts, instruments and utensils. But then one of the divers spotted what looked like a gear stuck in a rock, which was eventually found to be just one of many pieces of the same thing. Upon closer inspection and much analysis (decades of analysis, in fact), it was determined that the gear and its 80+ other pieces were part of a complicated mechanism that precisely calculated the position of the sun, moon, planets and other astronomical information. It was capable of predicting an eclipse right down to the hour that it would occur. Astronomer John Seiradakis has called it the “pocket calculator of its time.” Its construction was so perfect and exact that many historians and archaeologists believe that the Antikythera Mechanism was just one of many similar devices – we just haven’t discovered the other ones yet.
Here’s curator Michael Wright with his working replica of the Antikythera Mechanism – it’s pretty interesting stuff. Photo from the Antikythera Mechanism Research Project.
We’re not sure about this one – it’s just a theory. But there is some speculation that the ancient Egyptians may have understood how to harness electricity. The entire argument is based on stone reliefs inside the Dendera Temple complex in Egypt. What the etching appears to depict, to some, are bulbs, filaments and insulators. It also looks like a lotus flower and a snake. The argument could probably stop there – obviously humans are programmed to spot patterns in things and could easily see a now-everyday object in an ancient etching when it’s really not there. But English scientist J.N. Lockyer (he discovered helium) pointed out that the tombs were conspicuously soot-free – if Egyptians were using candles or torches, there would no doubt be some evidence of it on the walls or ceilings. But there is no evidence. A lot of people believe that the Egyptians used a series of mirrors to reflect the sunlight into the temple, but others say that their mirrors were too weak to do any such thing. Thus, the argument continues. What do you think? Photo from Wikipedia user Liftarn.
Along the same line as the Dendera Temple light is the Baghdad Battery. In the mid-1930s, a number of artifacts thought to date back to 200 BC were found in Khuyut Rabbou’a, a village near Baghdad. The combination of objects – a five-inch long clay jar and a copper cylinder that encased an iron rod – led researchers to believe that the ancient artifacts were actually used as batteries. Batteries for what, we still don’t know. Unlike the Dendera light though, there’s some evidence that these really were batteries – replicas have been made that did, in fact, conduct an electric current, sometimes as much as two volts. One theory is that the batteries were hidden inside of idols to give tiny little shocks to people, scaring people who didn’t understand the trick and often forcing them to give up secrets or confess to crimes. Photo from the BBC.
Link via Geekologie
It usually works out for the best, but on the days it doesn’t, you can always vent your frustration with the Ultimate Vending Machine Challenge from Adult Swim.
Samsung debuted these touch screen vending machines at CES. The machine features a large screen that shows animations and interactive menus and is also equipped with WiFi to send a signal to owners when product is running low. The machines should arrive at your local mall in 2010.
– via psfk
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