A late odd railway: In 1922 a Los Angeles florist built a 28-mile monorail to carry hydrated magnesium sulphate from the Owlshead Mountains to a siding of the Trona Railway in San Bernardino County, California. Steel-framed locomotives crawled along a steel rail pulling carriages bearing low-slung loads like saddlebags. Its downhill speed touched 56 mph, briefly earning it the epithet “fastest monorail of the world,” but the beams warped as they dried, landslides further damaged the track, and the railway shut down in 1926, just two years after opening.

“In the late 1930s the rails were salvaged and sold for scrap, and the longitudinal timbers followed suit,” writes John Day in More Unusual Railways (1960). “In 1958 a long line of ‘A’ frames still marched across the wastes to show where the line once had run.”

The land speed record for a petrol-powered rail vehicle was set way back in 1931, when aircraft engineer Franz Kruckenberg experimented with a “rail zeppelin” on German railway lines. An aircraft engine drove a rearward-facing propeller to accelerate a lightweight aluminum body to the startling speed of 230.2 km/h (143.0 mph), a railway record that held until 1954.

The vehicle evolved over a few years but was eventually dropped in favor of other high-speed designs.

In 1913 Canadian politician Sam Hughes proposed the MacAdam Shield Shovel, a spade that could double as a protective shield in the trenches — it was provided with a hole through which a soldier could survey the enemy.

Some 20,000 had been manufactured before it was discovered that the blade was not remotely bulletproof, and it wasn’t much use as a shovel … because there was a hole in it.

Here’s one solution to the population problem: In 1967 Buckminster Fuller patented a giant floating geodesic sphere enclosing a city, hoping to reduce the economic and environmental costs of using land for housing. Each sphere would be a mile in diameter, enclosing an enormous volume of air that would be warmed by the sun, enabling it to carry buildings bearing thousands of people. The structural weight of even a half-mile sphere would be a thousandth the weight of the air inside, and heating the air even 1 degree would raise the whole structure like a hot-air balloon. By opening and closing polyethylene “curtains,” the occupants could keep the sphere floating at a chosen altitude. The cities could be tethered to mountaintops or float freely, enabling them (for example) to travel to disaster sites in a matter of days, and permitting humans to “converge and deploy around Earth without its depletion.”

“Cloud Nine is probably possible, but even Bucky didn’t expect to see one soon,” writes J. Baldwin in BuckyWorks: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (1996). “He offered it as a jarring exercise, intended to stimulate the imaginative thinking we’re going to need if the billions of new Earth citizens predicted to arrive soon are to have decent housing.”

Cruising the Mediterranean in 1962, the American aircraft carrier USS Independence came upon a full-rigged sailing ship with a striped hull, a teak deck, and an ornamented bow and stern.

With a light signal the carrier asked, “Who are you?”

The ship answered, “Training ship Amerigo Vespucci, Italian navy.”

The Independence replied, “You are the most beautiful ship in the world.”