Introduced at the end of the 19th century, hail cannons offered farmers a novel way to protect their crops: They could disrupt the formation of hailstones by blasting sound at approaching storms.
Unfortunately, there’s no scientific evidence that they work. And anyway, if loud sounds can prevent hail, won’t thunder do the work for us?
See also Japanese War Tuba.
On April 19, 1944, Howard Hughes flew a Lockheed Constellation from California to Washington, D.C., in just under seven hours.
On the way back he picked up Orville Wright in Ohio, giving him the last airplane flight of his life.
The Constellation’s wingspan, 126 feet, was 6 feet greater than the length of Wright’s first flight in 1903.
It is difficult to understand how the old-world fashion of … ‘washing up’ plates and dishes can have endured so long. Of course, in the new age, these utensils will be simply dropped one by one into an automatic receptacle; swilled clean by water delivered with force and charged with nascent oxygen; dried by electric heat; and polished by electric force; being finally oxygen-bathed as a superfluous act of sanitary cleanliness before being sent to table again. And all that has come off the plates will drop through the scullery floor into the destructor beneath to be oxygenated and made away with.
– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906
(Mechanical dishwashers had existed since the 1850s, but they were hand-powered. Modern dishwashers weren’t common until the 1970s.)
William Steiger had cold feet. But he also had a length of india-rubber tubing. So he snaked the latter down to the former, blew through the tube, and invented the “pedal calorificator,” a discreet way to breathe on one’s own feet.
Steiger’s 1877 patent application is quaintly charming — apparently he had built a working model and worn it around Maryland for some time, finding that his body warmed the tubes so that his breath arrived in his shoes at 84°F. It was necessary only to exhale through his mouth, “an easy process, which I have ascertained practically may be kept up a long time, as, for example, for miles on a railroad-car, without much personal inconvenience.”
Why didn’t this catch on? Joseph Fallek’s “grapefruit shield,” patented in 1927, would have saved generations of spouses from spattered juice.
And after breakfast, the rind could sail to the New World.
William Gladstone once asked Michael Faraday the practical value of electricity.
“Why, sir,” the physicist replied, “presently you will be able to tax it.”
You know, bird diapers. What more is there to say?
Bertha Dlugi’s invention, patented in 1959, was intended for parakeets and other birds that are allowed to fly freely about the house. “It is … a general object of the present invention to provide a garment to be worn by birds for receiving their excremental discharge to prevent it from being deposited on household furnishings when the bird is at liberty in the home and thereby avoid the consequent unsanitary condition.”
Good idea — but it’s twice the mess if the cat catches it.
Ladies! Do you look like the loser of a tomato-eating contest? Do children mistake you for Bozo the Clown? Perhaps you’re incapable of applying lipstick properly!
Let’s face it, the task is practically impossible. That clumsy tube, those bewildering lips — where do you start? How do you finish? It’s a wonder you haven’t been injured or killed.
Marie Helehan’s lipstick stencil, patented in 1937, offers “a clean-cut accurate and symmetrical outline” in which to work. Now we just need a mascara gun …
Already every bank of any importance probably uses calculating machines. It is not likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process of having arithmetical calculations of any sort performed in the brains of clerks will survive the improvements of which these machines are capable. Account books, invoices, and all similar documents will doubtless be written by a convenient and compendious form of combined calculating machine and typewriter, which we may suppose to be called the numeroscriptor. … It will make any kind of calculation required. Even such operations as the weighing and measurement of goods will all be done by automatic machinery, capable of recording without any possibility of error the quantity and values of goods submitted to its operation.
– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906
Joseph Barad and Edward Markoff were certainly humane — the rat trap they patented in 1908 merely fastened a jingling necklace around the animal’s neck and released it.
What would that accomplish? “The ‘bell-rat’ as it may be termed, then in seeking its burrow or colony announces his coming by the sounds emitted by the bells, thereby frightening the other rats and causing them to flee, thus practically exterminating them in a sure and economical manner.”
Did it work? Who knows?