Futility Closet

This is clever — in 1895, Henry Latimer Simmons invented ramp-shaped railroad cars:

“When one train meets or overtakes another train, one train will run up the rails carried by the other train, and will run along the rails and descend onto the rails at the other end of the lower train.”

See? With good design, everybody wins.

Ralph R. Maerz patented this snowball maker in 1989, to produce balls with an “aesthetically pleasing and aerodynamically sound round shape.”

It would have been a doomsday weapon in Edinburgh in 1838, when a snowball fight escalated into a full-scale riot:

On the 10th January some snowballing took place in front of the College, in which the students took part. The warfare between the students and the townspeople was renewed on the 11th, and became more serious. Several shop windows were broken, the shops were closed, and the street traffic suspended. The students, believing that the constables took the side of the mob against them, appeared on the 12th armed with sticks, to defend themselves against the constables’ batons. Then a regular riot took place, sticks and batons being freely used, and matters became so serious that the magistrates found it necessary to send to the Castle for a detachment of soldiers of the 79th Highlanders, which arrived and drew up across the College quadrangle, and peace was restored. [University Snowdrop, 1838]

This may be history’s only instance of military intervention in a snowball fight. Five students were tried; all were acquitted.

“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”

– Editor of the London Daily Express, refusing to see John Logie Baird, inventor of television, 1925

Copenhagen was proud of its new driverless subway until commuters discovered this scene in front of the town hall in 2002.

Everything was fine — it was April Fools’ Day.

From the examination of William Henry Preece, electrician to the British General Post Office, before the House of Commons’ select committee on lighting by electricity, May 2, 1879:

Q: … Do you consider that the telephone will be an instrument of the future which will be largely adopted by the public?

A: I think not.

Q: It will not take the same position in this country as it has already done in America?

A: I fancy that the descriptions we get of its use in America are a little exaggerated; but there are conditions in America which necessitate the use of instruments of this kind more there than here. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.

Henry Ford told a visitor to the Ford Motor Company that there were exactly 4,719 parts in a finished car.

Impressed, the visitor asked the supervising engineer if this were true.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the engineer. “I can’t think of a more useless piece of information.”

Three-legged pantyhose, patented by Annette Pappas in 1998.

The third leg is folded into a pocket until you get a run; then you rotate it in.

Or you can use the whole thing as a bagpipe warmer.

If you die in a fiery air crash, don’t blame Samuel Young. His combination pillow and crash helmet, patented in 1970, provides both comfort and safety.

“Upon being informed of the imminence of a crash landing, the passenger puts this pouch-like device over his head and ties the free ends of the strings together under his chin so that the crash helmet remains in position during the crash landing, despite the violent forces which are likely to be encountered on impact.”

H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free is not his best known, but it’s certainly his most prescient — he predicted nuclear weapons:

She felt torn out of the world. There was nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound. Every other light had gone out about her, and against this glare hung slanting walls, pirouetting pillars, projecting fragments of cornices, and a disorderly flight of huge angular sheets of glass.

The novel imagines an invention that accelerates radioactive decay, producing unthinkably powerful bombs. (Wells even dedicated the novel “to Frederick Soddy’s interpretation of radium.”)

This application was far ahead of the science of the time — physicist Leó Szilárd later said it helped inspire his own conception of a nuclear chain reaction.

If that’s not impressive enough: In Wells’ novel, allies drop an atomic bomb on Germany during a world war in the 1940s!

The guards at Nazi prisoner-of-war camps were accustomed to looking for tunnels — so they never thought to look in the attic at Colditz Castle, where, astonishingly, British prisoners had constructed a 19-foot glider from scavenged materials.

They planned to launch it from the roof, using a pulley system driven by a falling bathtub full of concrete. They hoped this would send two men soaring across the River Mulde 60 meters below.

The American army liberated the camp before the glider could be launched, and it was subsequently lost, so for 55 years its designers could only wonder whether the “Colditz Cock” would really have flown. But in 1999 a British aviation company built a full-size replica, and the POWs reunited to watch the launch. It worked.