Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions (25 page)
Hall planned to make the airplane units available at every airport in the country, where driver-pilots could rent them for a small fee. He sold his idea to the airplane manufacturer Convair, which marketed it in 1946 under the name ConvAirCar. This might well have changed the face of the automobile industry forever. Unfortunately, in 1947 a Convair pilot miscalculated the amount of fuel he needed and was forced to crash-land his ConvAirCar on a dirt road, shearing off the plane’s wings in some trees. The adverse publicity doomed the project.
I
t seems like everything that begins as edgy eventually ages and finds a more sober and boring purpose in life. Bands like The Who and Led Zeppelin helped define an era of rock ‘n’ roll rebellion and youthful excess, yet their music was eventually used to sell four-door luxury sedans. More recently, those who got piercings in the ’90s have become accountants, dental hygienists, and marketing executives. For those who still have rings, studs, and gauges in places besides their ears, the Stud Spectacles can put them to use.
Stud Spectacles (stud as in the jewelry term, not as in your reputation, chief) offer a practical use for those eyebrow piercings your cousin Brittany got that summer when she went to Lollapalooza. Instead of traditional eyeglasses that rest on one’s ears and nose, this specially-crafted frame hangs from eyebrow piercing studs. If you’re looking for a pair of glasses for cousin Randy with the ear-hole gauges, you’re out of luck, but there is another version of this invention that hangs from a single piercing through one’s nose bridge.
Despite the name, it isn’t clear that these glasses will enhance anyone’s studliness or sex appeal. That is, unless, you find “practical eyewear that society at large isn’t yet ready for” to be studly.
E
ven though they may nott understand many English words beyond “outside,” “food,” and “baaaaaaad,” we use the word “neuter” or “fix” around our dogs as a euphemism for what the medical procedure really is—castration—so as to prevent them from making puppies with the flirty poodle next door.
Apparently, inventor Gregg Miller decided that dogs, the creatures who happily eat garbage and even more happily lick themselves where they’ve just been neutered or fixed, were self-conscious and apprehensive about lacking the physical, external machinery post-surgery.
So Miller created Neuticles, a portmanteau of the words “neuter” and “testicles.” Neuticles are plastic, decorative testicles you can have surgically implanted in your dog where his real testicles used to be. This way, it stands to reason, he won’t feel bad and will look like all the dogs in the neighborhood who didn’t get their genitals lopped off.
Neuticles are available in a number of sizes for dogs (and cats!), resemble a tiny breast implant, and cost a little over $100 a pair.
Y
ou know how when you make your bed, you do that thing where you kind of toss the bedspread or comforter up in the air so that it sort of inflates like a balloon and then spreads out as it falls, and then you just kind of straighten it out? The whole process takes about 10 seconds…but what if there were an unnecessarily complicated and bulky contraption you could put under your bed that could do that one, exact thing for you?
There is! It’s the Bedding Straightening Mechanism, patented in 2008 by a team of inventors from Chile. It consists of an air compressor (or, alternately, a turbine) placed inside of a soundproof box under the bed. When turned it on, it shoots air into the bedspread (and the rest of the bedding, for that matter), which makes it do that thing where it goes up in the air, fluffs up, and falls back down on the bed slightly straighter than before. It’s still up to you to finish making the bed all the way, though.
S
o you love the spray-tan look, but you hate going to a salon where some skeevy dude making minimum wage ogles you in your swimsuit while he’s hosing you down with bronzer? Maybe you’d rather spray-tan at home, if you don’t mind investing in your own airbrush. But after scrubbing tanning-solution residue off the walls of your shower a few times, you’d realize that the real advantage of using a salon is that somebody else cleans up afterward.
But fear not! The Spray-Tan Tent is a lightweight nylon contraption that pops up into a cubicle four feet wide and seven feet high. Available in a range of colors and equipped with a clear vinyl roof, this portable sanctuary maintains your modesty while keeping the mess of sunless tanning contained. Best of all, it folds down to the size of a large handbag when not in use.
Of course, the tent alone—not even factoring in the cost of the airbrush, pigment, and ventilation fan—could set you back as much as $100. Because this is totally a legitimate, professional-grade accessory, and in no way simply a child’s pop-up play tent repurposed and marked up to a ridiculous margin for a new market.
T
ired of moles and gophers ruining your lawn and garden? Instead of using poisons and traps to kill them, you can annoy them off your property with the $23 Mole Chaser. It looks like a weathervane or windmill mounted on a long metal pipe that you hammer into the ground. The spinning blades vibrate in the wind, sending pulses down the pole and into the soil—which drive the underground varmints nuts, forcing them to move elsewhere. The idea may sound farfetched, but the devices have been around for years, and gardeners swear by them.
Each Mole Chaser is effective across 10,000 square feet of ground. And if there isn’t a lot of wind in your area, you can use battery-and solar-powered versions, which cost $25 to $40.
O
ne of the things that makes obsessive-compulsive disorder such a drag is that it takes so much time to get anything done, especially the arduous task of sorting through bags of multicolored candy to separate the pieces by individual color. Thanks to an enterprising fellow by the name of Brian Egenriether, we now have the Skittles Sorting Machine.
The machine, which looks something like an old-fashioned food processor, uses BASIC Stamp 2 and 3 servos for actuation. An IR LED and phototransistor are used to stop the turnstile in position, which allows the color-sorted candies to drop into different bowls. If you understood any of that, congratulations, you deserve some Skittles!
Just don’t expect to eat them right away. A video Egenriether posted online of his machine in action reveals that it sorts Skittles at a rate of 37 per minute, or about as quickly as you could do it by hand. Still, it does free you up to perform more important tasks, like hand-sorting all your M&Ms.
F
or decades, American soldiers have made do with MREs (short for “meal, ready-to-eat”). While these kits are necessarily easy to prepare and consume in the field, they’re notoriously unappetizing and typically contain stuff like bland crackers and freeze-dried meatloaf. However, they’ve been steadily getting tastier in recent years because military culinary scientists (a thing) have been researching new ways to keep foods fresh for longer and longer periods of time. One of their latest developments is a sandwich with a two-year shelf life.
Bacteria, mold, and moisture can turn a yummy sandwich into an icky mass of glop in just a few days. After studying stuff like honey and salt, which are exceptionally good at retaining moisture, the scientists got to work on a sandwich that does the same thing. In 2011 they unveiled a cutting-edge hoagie that can stay fresh for up to 24 months. It locks in moisture, which prevents the bread from going stale. It’s also stored in an air-sealed container with a packet that absorbs water molecules in the air. Soldiers say that the new sandwiches are a definite improvement over the ones they’re used to finding in their MREs, despite the strong possibility that that sandwich is older than their children.
W
e generally think of the submarine as a modern invention, but it actually dates to the American Revolution. In 1775 Yale graduate David Bushnell designed a one-man submarine, which he called the
Turtle
. About six feet tall and three feet wide, and shaped like an egg, the
Turtle
consisted of two wooden shells waterproofed with tar and held together with steel loops, like a barrel. Inside were a variety of controls, including a foot pedal that cranked the propeller and a hand drill for boring into the hulls of enemy ships (damn the torpedos…because they hadn’t been invented yet).
The peculiar submersible attracted the attention of Benjamin Franklin, who knew a good invention when he saw one and recommended it to General George Washington. Washington was skeptical, but nevertheless provided funds for the
Turtle
’s completion in 1776. Sergeant Ezra Lee was given the daunting task of pedaling the craft through the waters of New York Harbor. His mission: attach a keg of explosive powder to the hull of the British warship H.M.S.
Eagle
. Unfortunately, because of copper plating, Sgt. Lee wasn’t able to bore into the hull as planned, and he was forced to abandon the attempt, and let his makeshift torpedo float away (it later exploded in the East River). A second attempt to blow up another British ship failed, and General Washington decided to abandon the project, although he praised it as a “work of genius.”
….isn’t very much fun to drive. In February 2013, Jeremy Clarkson, who co-hosts the BBC program
Top Gear
, unveiled the P45, which he dubbed “The World’s Tiniest Car.” Clarkson allegedly designed the hybrid vehicle, taking inspiration from the Peel P50, a three-wheeled British “microcar” that was released in the early ’60s. It’s still considered the smallest production car of all time. Like the P50, the P45 was built to be both street-legal and as tiny as possible.
Clarkson’s creation resembles the offspring of a Jet Ski and a Rascal scooter. The P45’s roof consists of a helmet. The closest thing to a windshield? The helmet’s visor. There are no side doors, and the contraption makes a Mini Cooper look like a Humvee. But the driver is enclosed, just barely, with their head popping out, so it technically isn’t a motorcycle.
Nevertheless, with its 1.7-liter fuel tank and two-stroke 100cc engine, the P45 gets amazing gas mileage. As Clarkson proved during his test drive, it’s also a fantastic car for weaving in and out of traffic on the UK’s narrow roadways. The driver needn’t get out of the P45 to fill up the tank at gas stations either. On the other hand, the P45’s not so great with potholes, and driving it on freeways can be downright terrifying. As of press time, exactly none of the car industry’s major manufacturers were clamoring for Clarkson’s blueprints.
A
utomakers in the 1890s faced major obstacles in winning public acceptance of their newfangled contraptions. People still trusted horse-drawn vehicles over the unreliable early autos, and because automobiles occasionally spooked the horses they passed on the road, many people considered cars a public nuisance. The obvious solution: Combine this newfangled contraption with the old-fashioned reliable appearance of a horse. By which we mean, “Tack a huge fake horse on the front.”
In 1897 carmaker Joseph Barsaleux built a car that had a combustion engine and all that, but looked like a carriage, with a full-size replica of a horse in front. The horse camouflaged a fifth wheel that provided power and steering, literally pulling the rest of the vehicle along the road. The driver steered the vehicle using a brace and bit attached to the faux horse’s mouth for that familiar horse-controlling sensation. However, by the dawn of the 20th century, the public was getting used to automobiles, and people were replacing their carriages and horses with them. There was no longer a market for Barsaleux and his weird mannequin horse car.