In June 1875, Paul Boyton, “the fearless frogman,” crossed the English Channel enclosed in “Merriman’s Life Preserving Dress,” an inflatable rubber suit designed to float 300 pounds. “Over 1500 persons had assembled on the piers,” reported the Science Record, “and the house-tops in the vicinity were covered with spectators.”

The remarkable suit carried provisions for nine days, and “it is impossible for the body to sink, or, however tossed by a rough sea, to be thrown face downward.” Far from it: Boyton showed crowds how a floating man could display a flag, dispatch a carrier pigeon, build a raft, smoke, read, fish, cook, and shoot.

Ironically, he dazzled his way right out of the record books. Because the miraculous equipage included a sail and a paddle, Boyton’s feat scarcely counts as swimming, and credit for the first channel crossing today generally goes to Matthew Webb, who swam from Dover to Calais two months later the old-fashioned way.

A man about 43 years of age giving the name Joshua Coppersmith has been arrested for attempting to extort funds from ignorant and superstitious people by exhibiting a device which he says will convey the human voice any distance over metallic wires. He calls the instrument a ‘telephone,’ which is obviously intended to imitate the word ‘telegraph’ and win the confidence of those who know the success of the latter instrument. Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the human voice over wires, as may be done by dots and dashes and signals of the Morse Code. The authorities who apprehended this criminal are to be congratulated and it is hoped that punishment will be prompt and fitting, and that it may serve as an example to other conscienceless schemers who enrich themselves at the expense of their fellow creatures.

— Boston newspaper, 1865, quoted by Edison’s assistant Francis Jehl in Menlo Park Reminiscences, 1937

Say goodbye to tedious, time-consuming showers with this “simple, economical and portable sanitary bathing apparatus,” patented in 1913.

Just fill the bag with soapy water, jump in, and pull the drawstring. Now you can hop a bus, eat succotash, even conduct eulogies while attending to your personal hygiene.

Bonus: “By alternate crouching and rising in the bag or by rolling with the same upon a bed or floor on the part of the bather … the liquid in said bag … may be made to surge in simulation of sea waves and thus afford gratification to said bather.”

Pliny, Petronius, and Dion Cassius all tell of a flexible glass invented in the first century A.D. Dion says a man displayed a glass cup to Tiberius and dashed it to the ground. The vessel bent rather than breaking, and the inventor hammered it back into its original form.

Was it aluminum? We’ll never know — the emperor had the man killed lest the new metal devalue his gold.

This is clever — in 1974 Cecil Slemp invented shoes with reversed soles, to leave footprints that point in the opposite direction.

So now your bloody tracks will lead to the murder scene.

In 1912, inventor Lee De Forest was arrested and charged with mail fraud for promoting an early vacuum tube using “absurd and deliberately misleading statements.”

“De Forest has said in many newspapers and over his own signature that it would be possible to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic before many years,” the district attorney charged. “Based on these absurd and deliberate misleading statements, the misguided public … has been persuaded to purchase stock in his company.”

Two years later, De Forest transmitted his voice from Arlington, Va., to the Eiffel Tower.

What was the wonderful work of Mark Scalliot? Probably the smallest lock and key ever made. He was a London blacksmith, and this piece of mechanism (1578) was of iron, steel, and brass, all of which, with a pipe-key to it, weighed but one grain of gold. He also made a chain of gold, consisting of forty-three links, and having fastened the chain to the lock and key, he put the chain around the neck of a flea. The flea could hop around with ease in spite of the weight. The lock, key, chain and animal, all in a lump, weighed only one grain and a half.

— Albert Plympton Southwick, Handy Helps, No. 1, 1886