Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions (9 page)
But how does someone actually live inside a house designed to roll on the ground? The Earthquake House is designed with a self-righting inner living structure, so you don’t have to worry about nailing your furniture to the floor. As for where to hang the Christmas lights, you’re on your own.
O
kay, smoking is dangerous business no matter how you look at it. So for decades, cigarette companies, sensitive as they are to public health concerns, have experimented with different filter materials to make the smoking experience “safer.” They tried charcoal, cork, and even asbestos (oops) before ultimately settling on cellulose acetate (a.k.a. plastic) around the mid-1950s.
Feeling that traditional filters did an inadequate job of removing tar from cigarette smoke, however, one inventor patented a novel approach in 1966—the cheese-filtered cigarette. The filter (more of a recipe, really) is made simply by grating a hard cheese (such as Parmesan, Cheddar, or Swiss) into small pieces and mixing it 2:1 with charcoal. The idea behind the mixture is for the cheese to more effectively filter out the nasty stuff, and for the charcoal both to absorb the cheese oil and to keep the cheese smelling and tasting its freshest without passing on any unctuous cheesy taste to the smoker.
Oddly, the inventor of the cheese-filtered cigarette was silent on what to do about the almost certain elevation in cholesterol smokers would face from using it. We recommend taking your anti-cholesterol medication with a creamy, ranch dressing-based dipping sauce.
B
abies drool, babies poop, babies scream bloody murder. Plus they’re lazy, just lying there doing nothing all day. Fortunately, there’s now a way to get your baby to help out around the house. In 2012 Better Than Pants, primarily a novelty T-shirt company, started selling the Baby Mop. It’s more or less a traditional baby bodysuit with mop heads attached to the arm and leg holes. Plop a little one into the Baby Mop and they’ll polish any floor as they crawl around. The item, which comes only in blue and has cartoon dinosaurs on the front, costs $40.
The outfit supposedly teaches babies a strong work ethic while they get exercise and burn up excess energy. Better Than Pants’ inspiration for the product? A fake commercial for a Baby Mop from a Japanese sketch comedy show.
I
n the 1980s, a hat with cup holders and straws coming out of both sides was all the rage in stadiums. It gave sports fans a chance to applaud a good play without having to put down their watered-down, overpriced beer or, as the case was,
two
watered-down, overpriced beers.
The “beer hat” was such a hit that somebody took the idea one step further and created the Helmet Bar, a device for rabid sports fans who can’t watch a game without consuming mass quantities of alcohol, but prefer classy mixed drinks to beer. The Helmet Bar, for which a patent was issued in 1987, held four bottles, which, when an assortment of valves across the front were properly opened, moved the liquid via tubes into a mixing chamber. The cocktail then flowed via another tube down to a mouthpiece, from which the world’s laziest bartender could sip the now-mixed drink.
The contraption failed to make a dent in the public consciousness, presumably because either a) it looked ridiculous, b) it was too difficult to operate and fans decided to buy a Coke and sneak in airplane bottles of rum, c) the weight of four bottles on the head caused the neck to collapse, or d) the engineer who created it forgot to include a way to transfer mint leaves, maraschino cherries, and other crucial garnishes.
M
ost dining tables just don’t have enough leg-room. Or, more precisely, they don’t have room for all the legs that end up underneath them: legs of diners, front legs of chairs, and of course the legs of the table itself. Remove those last four from the equation, though, and you’ve got more room to stretch out in comfort. Oh, yeah—and you’ve also got a freakin’ levitating table, a dining surface just floating in space, in the middle of the room, with no visible means of support, other than
magic
.
It’s not magic, it’s magnets. This marvel, created by Belgian designer Yana Christiaens and inspired by European high-speed trains, uses principles of magnetic suspension. Powerful electromagnets mounted on the underside of the table keep it hovering over a steel plate below. Because the plate is set permanently into the floor, the table will be stationary, so pick your spot carefully.
On the plus side, the height of the table is adjustable via a control panel (recessed into the tabletop) that varies the strength of the magnetic repulsion current. Also on the plus side, this is basically the coolest thing ever.
I
f you’re like us (you’re like us), then you’re always rummaging around the house, looking for one of the 118 chemical substances on the periodic table of elements and wish that there were some easy to use system for keeping all of your elements, from hydrogen to lawrencium, safely stored in one place.
In 2002 scientist Theodore Gray of Illinois came up with the solution we’ve all been clamoring for: the Periodic Table Table. He built a three-dimensional Periodic Table of Elements Table—it’s conference-table-sized—and included more than a hundred drawers. Each element group (alkali metals, noble gases, etc.) is represented by a different type of wood. He then filled the drawers with samples of as many real elements as he could get a hold of (sorry, no plutonium).
“One evening while reading
Uncle Tungsten
by Oliver Sacks, I became momentarily confused,” Gray explains. “He begins a chapter with a description of a periodic table display he loved to visit in a museum, and in misreading the paragraph, I thought it was a table, not the wall display it actually is.”
I
n a famous sequence in 1989’s
Back to the Future Part II
, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox), trapped in the futuristic year of 2015, flees a gang of hooligans by flying around on a Mattel-made hoverboard—a flying skateboard.
On an NBC special promoting the film, director Robert Zemeckis claimed that hoverboards are real. “They’ve been around for years,” he said. “It’s just that parent groups haven’t let toy manufacturers make them.” He was joking, but the switchboards at Mattel were reportedly overwhelmed by parents looking to have a hoverboard under the tree for Christmas 1989.
While the boards used in the film look convincing, they were actually rudimentary props. To film the sequence, Fox’s sneakers were drilled into the hoverboard and he was suspended by cables to make it look like flight. Still, much like flying cars, the hoverboard become an iconic portent of the future, leading many to wonder “Where are the hoverboards?” Several attempts have actually been made to make them a reality.
• On a 2004 segment of the Discovery Channel series
MythBusters
, the show’s crew built what they called the “Hyneman Hoverboard” (named for co-host Jamie Hyneman). It was constructed out of a surfboard and was propelled by a leaf blower’s motor. It didn’t work very well.
• In 2007 the crew of the British series
The Gadget Show
created another leaf blower-powered hoverboard…that couldn’t be propelled or steered. Their second version added a small jet engine to the mix. It was more maneuverable but still barely functioned.
• That same year, a company called Future Horizons released a series of do-it-yourself hoverboard kits. The boards were made out of fiberglass shells, basically worked like miniature hovercrafts, and weighed 80 pounds. They were operable only on completely smooth surfaces and, in short, were a long way away from the movie version.
• A company called Arbortech released an actual, working hoverboard in 2009. Pros: It could float over both land and water, and reach a top speed of 15 mph. Cons: It was over six feet long and weighed more than 200 pounds.
• In 2008 French artist Nils Guadagnin began work on a more traditional hoverboard for an exhibition. His version was much more like the one in the movie, and it could float a few inches off the ground via electromagnets. A built-in laser system also helped keep it stabilized. But while this one looked cool, it couldn’t support any actual weight.
• To date, the most successful prototype has been the one constructed by researchers at Paris Diderot, a French science and medical university. Unveiled in 2011 and called “The Mag Surf,” this hoverboard can carry up to 220 pounds…and levitate just 3 cm off the ground.
R
esearchers say that cats emit dozens of different sounds, and if you pay attention, you can ascribe clear meaning to each individual yowl, meow, and purr. A dog’s vocabulary, however, consists almost entirely of “growl” and “bark.” With the former you know he’s upset; the latter could mean anything.
Translating the language of dogs, or wondering “what dogs would say if they could talk,” has long been the subject of humorous science fiction, but better communication with a dog is now a reality: Introducing the Bowlingual Dog Translator.
Simply get your dog to “speak” into the gadget, which looks like and probably was at some point a walkie-talkie, and the Bowlingual will display one of six digital dog-face icons, representing “happy,” “sad,” “on guard,” “showing off,” “frustrated,” or “needy.” It’s adjustable to the specific barks of more than 80 popular dog breeds, and is customizable according to “the size of the dog and the shape of its nose,” because nose shape definitely affects the context of your dog’s carefully chosen bark.
Y
ou probably rely way too heavily on your GPS to get you around town, and have done so, since, what, the late ’90s at the very earliest? It turns out there was a predecessor to consumer-grade in-car GPS or “global positioning systems,” and it dates back to the 1930s.
The product was called the Iter Avto. It did not talk to you in a calming female voice, but it did attach to the dashboard of a car, like a gigantic Garmin. Rather than feed satellite maps into your car, since they didn’t exist at the time, the Iter Avto came with scrolled paper maps that you loaded into the machine. It was then hooked up to your speedometer, and the speed of your car controlled the speed at which the map advanced. It’s sort of like a player piano that plays maps.
We don’t know much about the Iter Avto, as the automatically-advancing map system, which appears from photos to be Italian-made, didn’t really catch on. Perhaps because if you took a detour, the map would become almost useless. Or because a map had to be custom-made for a route. Or maybe because it didn’t talk to you.