An inventive idea from Benjamin Franklin:

The Accidents I have seen at Sea with large Dishes of Soup upon a Table, from the Motion of the Ship, have made me wish that our Potters or Pewterers would make Soup Dishes in Divisions, like a Set of small Bowls united together, each containing about sufficient for one Person, in some such Form as this,

for then when the ship should make a sudden Heel, the Soup would not in a Body flow over one Side & fall into People’s Laps & scald them, as is sometimes the case, but would be retain’d in the separate Divisions, as in this Figure.

Also: “If your dry Peas boil hard, a two Pound Iron Shot put with them into the Pot, will by the Motion of the Ship grind them as fine as Mustard.”

(From a letter to David Le Roy, August 1785.)

One early locomotive had legs. Scottish inventor William Brunton devised the “Mechanical Traveller” in 1813, giving it feet to grip the track on steep grades. It could creep forward at about 3 mph.

Popularly known as the “Grasshopper,” it hauled coal for about two years at the Newbottle Colliery until it ended its career with the first recorded railway disaster, a boiler explosion that killed 16 spectators. Brunton abandoned the project.

Here’s an odd invention from 1960, a “device for stimulating the mental processes,” patented by Darrell M. Johnson of Thomson, Ga. Johnson wanted to help people in creative but solitary occupations who feel inhibited “before a microphone, telephone, television camera or in other stimuli-lacking situation, or where the psychological environment is of a character to create tension and dissipate thought and concentration and thereby dispel the ability to create ideas.”

The answer, Johnson decided, is a lifelike human figure that seems to respond with intelligent interest when it detects a sound. The eyes glow and the eyelids move to create the impression of an active, encouraging listener. The dummy “may be inanimate but may be animated to portray a feeling of life, participation, and cooperation to thereby stimulate expression relative to the topic or subject under consideration with resultant improvement and intensity of such expression.”

Even outside a professional situation, users might find it helpful “when alone to obtain the resultant benefits as well as the release of pent up feelings, accompanying tensions, and emotions and the satisfaction obtained from such expression.” Here as elsewhere, I get the feeling that there’s a real human story behind this, but I suppose we’ll never know what it is.

Before steam power became widespread, some locomotives were powered by horses on treadmills. This version, dubbed Impulsoria by Italian inventor Clemente Masserano, was driven by four horses that walked continuously at their best speed; a gearbox could be set to forward, reverse, or neutral.

The “horse locomotive” successfully climbed a hill at trials in London in 1850 and was displayed at the Great Exhibition the following year. It was hoped that a final version might reach 20 mph, outrunning the steam engines of the day, but mechanical engines soon surpassed it.

How do you design a burglar alarm for people who can’t hear? Arnold Zukor came up with this solution in 1912 — when the burglar opens a door or window, a system of racks and gears opens a faucet and sprays the occupant through a nozzle mounted over the bed. “Alarm is thus given.”

If you leave your house during the day, you can disable the door alarm and direct the nozzle outside. Then if the window is opened, the flow of water will be visible from a distance, “indicating thereby the entrance of unauthorized persons into the building.”