Douglas Eaton’s “storage apparatus for storing a necktie,” patented in 1993, winds your neckwear into a tidy cylinder when you’re not using it and dispenses it again at interview time. “The wrapping of the necktie about the tie rods and the storing of the necktie in the case prevents the necktie from substantially creasing during a storage period of time.”

Brent Gunnon’s “foot-pump-powered neck-massaging device,” patented in 2002, connects bladders in the wearer’s shoes to a massaging hand that he fits to his neck. The back of his neck, one hopes.

In 1874 John Thomas suggested a novel way to keep a locomotive’s smoke out of the passenger cars: a jointed pipe would carry the smoke the length of the train and release it harmlessly in its wake.

Smoke and sparks were a real danger on early railroads — in 1916 one Edson Hains filed a claim against the Wheeling & Lake Erie Railroad Company in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, for burning down his outhouse. The case is doubly memorable because Hains filed his pleading in verse:

Now comes the plaintiff, Edson Hains, and prays this august Court
To heed the very earnest plea, enshrined in this report.
The Wheeling & Lake Erie Co., a heartless corporation,
But licensed under certain laws of this fair State and Nation,
Did, by a spark through carelessness, from a locomotive owned
By the defendant in this Court, and by it not atoned,
Destroy and render Null and Void, a building situate
Upon the rear of premises, known as E. Hains Estate,
Which in the town of Bedford lies, a placid rural spot,
Until the conflagration, which spoiled the plaintiff’s lot.
The second of November last was the most woeful date
On which the said defendant did this outrage perpetrate.
Said building being plain but good, and open to all callers,
Was worth in money of the realm, the sum of fifty dollars.
Now, the aforesaid Hains will not cite Blackstone, Coke or Livy,
The incinerated building was, in vulgar terms, a privy.
The wealthy have from two to eight, but this case is more sad,
For like the poor man’s one ewe lamb, ’twas the only one he had.
And now in frigid winter’s time, before beginning labor,
He eke perforce must use the can of an obliging neighbor.

The plaintiff does still further state that he is an inventor,
And since the last catastrophe he has no place to center
His great inventive genius which, before in chaste seclusion
Of the before in mentioned can, did blossom in profusion.
True genius cannot be appraised, but plaintiff’s was so nifty
He thinks he should receive therefor at least one hundred fifty.
He therefore prays the Court to grant two hundred Iron Men,
That he may once more take his place midst Bedford’s upper ten,
And walk abroad midst citizens, and meet them man to man,
Which now he cannot rightly do, he being shy a can.
And so he prays that he may go from hence with compensation,
Commensurate with what he’s lost, through this his degradation.
And so he windeth up his prayer, and hopes the Court will grant
One fifty for his peace of mind, and fifty for the plant.

There’s a photostat of the pleading in John Allison Duncan’s Strangest Cases on Record (1940). Hains won — Judge William H. McGannon assessed the railroad $25 and costs.

Samuel Goss made the world a little sweeter in 1899:

My invention relates to bicycles, and has for its object to provide a combined bicycle and musical instrument whereby the rider when so disposed may treat himself and others in his immediate neighborhood to a musical accompaniment as he rides along.

Essentially it’s a giant music box mounted on the frame and driven by the pedals. Presumably a tandem bike could play in harmony — perhaps “A Bicycle Built for Two,” which had come out just five years earlier.

In 1886 Levi Deckard of Pennsylvania patented an electrified dental chair to provide “electricity as an anaesthetic” to people undergoing tooth extractions and other painful operations.

The dentist operates a foot-driven generator, the patient grips the electrodes, “and the desired shock is produced.” Deckard doesn’t explain why he thinks this will stop pain — but it certainly must be distracting.

Fanny Paul’s “device for inducing sleep,” patented in 1885, works on a simple principle: It restricts blood flow to the brain. Worry “quickens the action of the heart,” which excites the nervous system; by putting a collar around the neck and tightening it with a screw, the insomniac “slightly modifies” the circulation “and thereby reduce[s] the activity of the brain in order that sleep may ensue.”

“I have experimented with different degrees of pressure upon the arteries and veins of the neck,” Paul wrote, “and find that … very soon after this takes place the nervous system becomes soothed and quieted, and sleep follows almost immediately.”

Before the possibility of radio broadcast, inventors experimented with “piping” music into homes acoustically. From London’s Musical World, Jan. 6, 1855:

At the Polytechnic, a band playing in a distant apartment is unheard; but connect the different instruments, by means of thin rods of wood, each with the sounding board of a harp in the lecture theatre, and the music is audible to all as if it were present. The experiments prove, what we have often speculated on, that music might be laid on to the houses of a town from a central source, like gas or water.

“A well-known joker, at the private view, proposed the establishment of a ‘band-ditty’ company on the spot.”