My all-time favourite in the literature of exaggerated claims on behalf of the digital computer is from John McCarthy, the inventor of the term ‘artificial intelligence.’ McCarthy says even ‘machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs.’ And indeed, according to him, almost any machine capable of problem-solving can be said to have beliefs. I admire McCarthy’s courage. I once asked him: ‘What beliefs does your thermostat have?’ And he said: ‘My thermostat has three beliefs — it’s too hot in here, it’s too cold in here, and it’s just right in here.’

— John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science, 1983

(Searle responded with the “Chinese room argument” — a computer program that formulates convincing answers written in Chinese to questions posed in Chinese doesn’t “understand” Chinese any more than would an English-speaking human who followed the same instructions. “There is more to having a mind than having formal or syntactical processes. … Minds are semantical, in the sense that they have more than a formal structure, they have a content.”)

In 1896 engineer Magnus Volk faced a problem. The electric railway he’d built on England’s south coast reached a terminus at Paston Place — the difficult terrain beyond that point made a conventional railway impractical. The solution he reached was unique: He laid tracks under the surface of the English Channel and built a car on 7-meter stilts that could wade, so to speak, through the surf to a pier at Rottingdean. Driven by electric motors, it was christened Pioneer, but crowds quickly dubbed it Daddy Long-Legs. By the end of 1897, 44,282 passengers had undertaken a rail voyage at sea — under regulations at the time, the car was even equipped with lifeboats and kept a sea captain on board.

The line ran successfully until 1901, when the local council chose to build a beach protection barrier and Volk couldn’t afford to divert the railway. Eventually it was moved onshore, but the concrete sleepers can still be seen at low tide.

Michigan inventor Uriah Smith patented the Horsey Horseless in 1899. He hoped that an automobile that bore a wooden horse’s head would be less likely to spook animals in the road.

For all we know he was right. Maybe we should still be using these.

Why didn’t this catch on? Jean Gronier’s “automatic hair-cutting machine,” patented in 1966, works “in accordance with a predetermined program; each program is designed for a particular person and is established once and for all with a view to obtaining repeatedly the same cut for the same head.”

“Here I am, bald at last,” wrote Jules Renard in 1894. “So much the better! What use to me was hair? It was not exactly an ornament, and I was the natural victim of all barbers, an ignoble breed, who exhaled into my face their disdain, or caressed me like a mistress, or patted my cheek like a parish priest.”

Watch this footage and try to guess when it was recorded.

Amazingly, it’s from 1902. The cities of Elberfeld and Barmen in western Germany had begun to discuss an elevated railway as early as 1887; they enlisted engineer Eugen Langen, and the line opened in 1901.

The Wuppertal Schwebebahn is still in use today — the world’s oldest electric suspension railway carries 85,000 passengers a day on an eight-mile route through the city of Wuppertal, much of the journey unfolding 12 meters above the River Wupper. Local poet Else Lasker-Schüler compared it to a flight on the back of a steely dragon.

(Thanks, Nick.)