In 1920, Gaitley Guise patented a rubber “tongue shield” to prevent “the unpleasantness accompanying the taking of medicine.”
“Medicine will flow over the shield and pass into the throat without affecting the sense of taste so that all unpleasantness of taking the medicine is obviated.”
Presumably it also works with broccoli.
In 1905 Kael Lange patented this “double bicycle for looping the loop.”
The idea was that you’d roll through the loop, sail across the gap, and land upside down on the other side.
It has no brakes.
At 120 feet, the Wright Brothers’ first flight would fit inside a modern Boeing 747.
In the economy section.
That’s Mary Todd Lincoln with the ghost of her husband, as captured by “spirit photographer” William H. Mumler.
The story goes that Mary sat for the photo in the early 1870s, when she had taken the name Lindall, and that the photographer didn’t know her identity until the exposure revealed the martyred president.
That’s the story. Skeptics immediately accused Mumler of fakery, and he didn’t win any friends with his new career, “revealing” the ghosts of Civil War dead for their grieving families.
That practice was too low even for P.T. Barnum (!), who testified against Mumler in a fraud trial in 1869. He was acquitted, but he died penniless in 1884.
Perhaps Mumler really had discovered an astonishing new technique … but it seems telling that his own ghost has never been photographed.
The first arrest by telegraph took place in 1845. John Tawell poisoned his mistress at her home at Salt Hill and fled by train to London, but police sent the following memorable message ahead to Paddington Station:
A MURDER HAD JUST BEEN COMMITTED AT SALT HILL AND THE SUSPECTED MURDERER WAS SEEN TO TAKE A FIRST CLASS TICKET TO LONDON BY THE TRAIN THAT LEFT SLOUGH AT 7.42 PM. HE IS IN THE GARB OF A KWAKER [the instrument lacked a Q] WITH A BROWN GREAT COAT ON WHICH REACHES HIS FEET. HE IS IN THE LAST COMPARTMENT OF THE SECOND FIRST-CLASS CARRIAGE.
In a London coffee tavern Tawell was confronted by a detective who asked, no doubt triumphantly, “Haven’t you just come from Slough?” He was jailed, tried, convicted, and hanged.
William Lamb was pretty cynical about fish. This apparatus, patented in 1894, assumes that a fish that sees itself in a mirror “will be made bolder by the supposed companionship, and more eager to take the bait before his competitor seizes it.”
“He will lose his caution,” Lamb wrote, “and take the bait with a recklessness that greatly increases the chances of his being caught on the hook.”
Who knows? Maybe it even works.
Proportions of national populations who are Internet users:
James Boyle patented this hands-free hat-tipping device in 1896.
“The hat is detachably secured to the working parts of the device that raise the hat, completely rotate it, and deposit it correctly on the head of the wearer every time said person bows his head and then assumes an erect posture.”
There’s no record of how the ladies received it.
A baby-patting machine patented by Thomas Zelenka in 1968.
Mark Twain wrote, “A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.”
In 1769, after completing his robotic chess player, Wolfgang von Kempelen began a 20-year effort to a build a machine that could speak.
His first crude undertaking involved a bellows, bagpipe, and clarinet, and it could produce only vowels. A second was operated from a keyboard, but this permitted an unnatural overlapping of sounds.
But von Kempelen began to study the human vocal tract more intensively, and this led to a winning third design, which had a “mouth,” a “throat,” a “nasal cavity,” and “nostrils.” It wasn’t perfect, but he trusted that listeners would forgive its errors because it sounded like a small child.
The finished machine could pronounce monotone phrases in French, Italian, English, Latin, and limited German, including Constantinopolis, vous êtes mon ami, je vous aime de tout mon coeur, venez avec moi à Paris, Leopoldus secundus, and Romanorum imperator semper Augustus.
His work wasn’t wasted. Before his death in 1804, Von Kempelen published a comprehensive account of his researches, and in 1837 Sir Charles Wheatstone took up the project. His efforts in turn inspired Alexander Graham Bell — and, eventually, the telephone.