Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions (21 page)
M
outh burn. We’ve all had it happen. That slice of hot pizza just looks so good, you can’t help but chomp down on it. And…
youch!
You burn the roof of your mouth. Or you’re just too eager to chug down that cup of coffee, and your tonsils get singed. Fortunately, the mouth heals very quickly—usually within a day or two—but while it does, you have no choice but to suffer through the pain. Until now.
Jason McConville, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico, has come up with an ingenious solution for mouth burn. His team of researchers have developed a strip, similar to the ones used for breath fresheners, that delivers benzocaine, a local anesthetic used by dentists and in cough drops. The strip is applied to the burned area inside the mouth and slowly dissolves, releasing the benzocaine and providing sweet relief from the pain. There’s still a long approval process ahead, so it may be years before the strips appear in drug stores. But one day, we will at last have an over-the-counter remedy to a problem that has plagued humanity since the first intersection of cooking and impatience.
T
his was patented in the early 1960s, when big hair was in fashion and big-haired ladies like Lady Bird Johnson were style icons. But Lady Bird was from Texas, where it doesn’t rain all that much, so she and other large-coiffed Texas ladies didn’t have to worry about the elements as much as the ladies around the country whose hair they were copying.
Sure, a hat would protect hair from rain and snow, but it would crush the delicate ’do. The Big Hair Hat guarded against the elements without putting undue pressure on the hair. It was an extra-thick, extra-tall, rigid shower cap. Simply slip it over the coif to protect the hair, while also looking like the pope.
H
ave trouble remembering people after being introduced to them? A joint team of researchers in Japan and Singapore have developed a solution. Sound Perfume Glasses are high-tech specs that connect wirelessly to your smart phone. When you are introduced to someone, an app in your phone assigns your new friend an identifying sound as well as an associated scent chosen from among the eight solid perfumes stored in little pods on the earpieces of your glasses. Whenever you encounter that person again, your phone will connect to theirs, triggering your Sound Perfume Glasses to emit that person’s associated sound from tiny hidden speakers, while heated wires in the earpieces activate their signature fragrance, thereby reinforcing their identity—and, the developers claim, promoting deeper, more pleasurable emotional bonding.
That sounds a little weird, but filmmakers have been associating characters with evocative sounds for decades. (Detective John Shaft would be less memorable without his iconic theme song, for example.) And research shows that scent is an extremely effective trigger of emotional memory.
But it takes only a single glance at someone’s chunky white goggles with smells coming out of them to determine if this is a person you even want to know.
T
his has happened to you before: Your hands are just too full to drink your coffee and play with your touch-screen smartphone at the same time. What on Earth is a modern multitasker to do? The answer should be obvious: Attach a long stylus to your nose, so you can poke at your phone with it.
The nose-extending stylus was dreamed up by Dominic Wilcox, an artist who felt as though there simply weren’t enough options for those who wanted to use their touch-screen devices while in the bathtub. While it’s not commercially available, Wilcox did create a prototype. The long, cylindrical facemask nose stylus appears to attach to the head via two white shoelaces and comes straight from the 1999 film
Eyes Wide Shut
.
In other stylus news: For those of use whose chubby digits have been creating explorations of the dark recesses of AutoCorrect, there’s now a fingertip stylus. The idea is this: You wear the stylus on the tip of your finger, sort of like a cool goth fingertip ring, then when the mood strikes, you’ve got a fingertip so dainty only a couple of angels could dance upon it.
T
here’s got to be a better way to get rid of the common tapeworm, that parasite that lives in the human intestines and sucks away all of the nutrition you put into your body.
Okay, so it’s not much of a problem anymore, at least not in the developed world, or in places where basic sanitation precludes the once-frequent passing of parasites from one person to another via exposure to feces. In the 19th century, though, it was a real problem, and because it was the 19th century, doctors were quite stymied as to how to remove a tapeworm without invasive, highly dangerous surgery.
A physician named Alpheus Myers invented a tapeworm-removal device in 1854 that didn’t “employ medicines” or “cause much injury.” That doesn’t mean it was pleasant. Myers’s gadget was a cross between a plumbing snake and a fishing pole. After fasting for a day or to make the worm hungry, the patient then swallowed the device, a three-inch-long metal trap on the end of a metal chain. The trap went into the stomach; the other end hung out of the person’s mouth. The trap, outfitted with “any nutritious material,” would lure the worm and grasp its head, at which point the patient would drag out the trap, and the worm along with it.
B
y the late 1980s, kids (and adults) were buying baseball cards not just out of love of the game, but also as an investment, fooled by a marketing campaign to make them think that buying mass-produced pieces of cardboard at inflated prices would make them rich someday. In 1989 LJN Toys tried to cash in on the newfound love of the old pastime, but at least they aimed to make it about collecting and statistics again.
They came out with the Sportstalk—a handheld device about the size of a Walkman that “played” electronic baseball cards. Each card, which looked like a normal baseball card, only slightly larger and slightly thicker, had a tiny vinyl record embedded in the back. The Sportstalk then just played the record. Through the built-in speaker the size of a quarter came two minutes of statistics about the player (voiced by nine-time All-Star Joe Torre), along with radio calls of famous plays, and players reminiscing about their biggest moments on the field. It probably failed because it cost too much—$28 for the player and $2 per card. Toys “R” Us ordered half a million Sportstalks and sold fewer than 100,000.
T
he train of the future may well be a VacTrain, a “magnetic levitation” train that, theoretically, will travel at extremely high speeds through vacuum tunnels. Engineers are currently looking at the VacTrain as the basis of a global subway network between continents and even under the oceans. The lack of air resistance in a vacuum tunnel would allow a VacTrain to reach speeds of more than 4,000 mph, or five to six times the speed of sound. The 3,100 mile trip from New York to London would take about an hour.
The concept of intercontinental tunnel travel is not new. Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, was issued 2 of his 214 patents for work on VacTrain technology in the 1910s. In the 1970s, Dr. Robert M. Salter of the RAND Corporation proposed a VacTrain route down the northeast corridor of the United States, but the estimated $1 trillion price tag killed the project. Tunnel-boring technology has improved dramatically since then, and the project is back on the desks of engineers in China, the U.S., and England. Today the cost of a transatlantic tunnel is thought to be closer to $175 billion, which seems downright affordable in comparison.
T
he only way to get away from it all, to truly relax, to really commune with nature, is to walk around the Great Outdoors totally barefoot. Of course, that’s a terrible idea—the Great Outdoors is full of jagged rocks, pine needles, scorpions, and broken glass. Only a moron would walk around the Great Outdoors without any sort of protection on their feet.
Granted, they make those ultra-snug, second-skin-like running shoes that fit around your feet and even have little holes for each of your toes, but those look incredibly goofy, and your feet get hot in those on a hike or at the beach. Instead, you could go with the Topless Sandals. Essentially foot-shaped slabs of rubber, they are foot-shaped slabs of rubber that laboriously stick to the bottom of your feet when you trek through nature. (The manufacturer guarantees that you can remove the sandals when you need to, and that the sticky icky on the shoes will last for up to a year.) So the bottoms of your feet are protected and bound, but the tops of your feet are as free as a bird.
S
ometimes a dubious notion can come with an impressive pedigree. In 1944 the U.S. National Defense Research Committee, looking to step up the Navy’s attack capability against German battleships, engaged renowned researcher and boxer of children B. F. Skinner to help develop a missile-guidance system. Skinner was an unlikely choice for the job, because, while he was undoubtedly a brilliant fellow, he was—literally—no rocket scientist. Rather, his specialty was behavioral psychology.
Skinner had devised a method whereby a missile’s flight could be directed by trained pigeons riding in the nosecone. The pigeons watched the target on monitors and were conditioned with food rewards to keep the target centered onscreen by adjusting the missile thrusters with beak-activated switches.
Project Pigeon was scrapped when the Navy decided that its existing mechanical guidance systems were accurate enough for the task. Skinner later complained, “Our problem was that no one would take us seriously”—that is, the idea was rejected simply because it was unconventional. But there were practical considerations as well. Training and sustaining the pigeons was expensive and time-consuming, and the birds were, sadly, not reusable. The project was briefly revived in the early days of the Cold War but, like many a birdbrained scheme, never caught on.
I
n 1955 Columbia Records came up with a novel way to sell more records: Install record players in cars. Engineers solved the obvious problem of how to keep the needle on the record while the car rides along with a spring-loaded tonearm. The disc was also twice as thick and heavy as a regular record, which helped keep it from bouncing off the turntable.
Columbia talked Chrysler into making the Highway Hi-Fi an option on all new 1956 models, and produced 21 “Highway” records to go with it (mostly classical and Broadway cast albums). The main problem was that they didn’t know their audience: Teenage drivers were the ones who’d want to play records in the car, and they bought rock ’n’ roll music. But they didn’t buy very many new cars, and the adults who did weren’t much interested in a record player—Chrysler abandoned the concept after just two years.