Letters to the Times, March 1976:

From the Reverend E.H.W. Crusha:

May I enlist your support in restraining the use of ‘Dear Reverend’ and ‘Dear Reverend So-and-so’ in letters to clergymen? It appears to be increasing among people of standing and education who might be expected to be readers of The Times.

From Peter du Sautoy, chairman, Faber and Faber Ltd.:

I learnt from T.S. Eliot, the politest of men, that letters to clergymen one does not know personally should begin ‘Reverend Sir.’

From Peter Faulks:

I remember being told by a clergyman that when in India a parishioner wrote to him as ‘Reverend and Bombastic Sir.’

From Canon Allan Shaw:

There are degrees of reverence. When I was a Dean and very reverend I once received a letter addressed to ‘The Very Shaw’. I thought that took some beating. However, it was bettered by the present Bishop of Lincoln. He once told me that he had received a letter directed to ‘The Right Phipps.’

From Rabbi David J. Goldberg:

While Christian clergymen ponder their correct form of address, they might also spare a thought for the difficulty experienced by their Jewish colleagues. On several occasions (and usually from the Inland Revenue) I have received letters which address me as ‘Dear Rabbit’.

From the Rev. D.F.C. Hawkins:

A young member of my congregation in Nigeria once addressed me in a letter as ‘My dear interminable Canon’. I try to believe he intended it kindly.

To be fair, it’s hard to teach a computer to produce the correct salutation by interpreting the first line of an address. One programmer sent the contents of a test database of challenging addressees: Danie Van Der Merwe, The Master of Ballantrae, The Mistress of Girton, C.M. Gomez de Costa e Silva, Mrs. Mark Phillips, Earl Mountbatten, Count Basie, Sir Archie McIan of that Ilk, Adm. Hon Sir R.A.R. Plunkett-E-E-Drax, J. Smith Esq, Sister Mary-Paul, A. d’Ungrois, the Revd Dewing. He declared himself “confident of the continuing superiority of that product of unskilled labour, the human mind, over its most marvellous artifact.”

Gordon Spitzmesser’s “combustible gas-powered pogo stick,” patented in 1960, is exactly what it sounds like: a pogo stick with an internal combustion engine.

“In using this device, the cycle is started by the operator giving the initial jump upon the foot rest. As the frame reaches the bottom of its stroke, thus causing ignition of the sparkplug, the resulting compression forces the ball valve to seat and remain seated during the compression stroke of the piston and until it passes the exhaust ports in the manner described. The instant that the cylinder is cleared, new air and gas is permitted to enter into the cylinder, thus enabling the cycle to be repeated.”

All of this, we are told, is “extremely safe and harmless and of tremendous entertainment value.” You go first.

Someday archaeologists will unearth this 1933 patent abstract by Rennie Renfro and use it to judge our entire civilization:

In the sport of greyhound racing, that is enjoyed by dog fanciers and racing enthusiasts, there has been recently introduced, the use of monkey riders, who serve in the capacity of jockeys. Because of the aptitude and imitative tendencies of simians, when they are positioned on the backs of their fleet charges, they imitate the actions of regular jockeys. The employment of the monkey jockey adds considerable zest and enjoyment to the sport. However, as in horse racing, there is always present the danger of the rider being accidentally thrown, and unless some means is provided for safely securing the riders, there is ever present the hazard of the rider being dislodged, with consequent injury.

Renfro’s improvement was to snap the monkey’s collar to the harness and to strap its breeches to the saddle. “In practice the device has proven to be most efficient, humane and because of its novel construction, has added to the enthusiasm and entertainment of racing patrons.”

An advertisement from The Atlantic Monthly, 1884:

The gloves, presumably, are not included.

Wisconsin’s Lorenzo Macauley patented this “improvement in road-lanterns” in 1879, presumably after testing it himself.

A lantern thus attached to a horse’s head enables both horse and driver to see the condition of the track and the objects in it much more plainly and at greater distance than when a lantern is placed on the carriage.

Fair enough.

New York architect Edwin Koch had a brainstorm in 1939 — he proposed a teardrop-shaped “hurricane house” that could rotate like a weather vane. “This amazing dwelling would revolve automatically to face into the oncoming storm, meeting it like the wing of an airplane and passing it smoothly around its curving sides toward its pointed tip,” explained Popular Science.

Electricity would enter through one of the circular tracks on which the house turned, and water and sewage pipes would be connected via swivel joints at the axis of rotation.

Koch had planned the house for hurricane zones, but the swiveling feature could prove useful in any climate: “Merely by selecting the desired push button on a central control board, the entire house may be rotated to face rooms toward or away from the sun or to point bedroom windows toward a cooling breeze.”

Lili McGrath’s admirably low-tech “floor polisher,” patented in 1915, is little more than a pair of slippers, but the description is charming:

The wearer merely places his or her feet within the slippers and begins to dance, preferably such dances as require long glides, and it will be seen that the floor polishing operation becomes a pleasure.

The cord “is made of a length permitting a full stride of the wearer, as in dancing, but not sufficiently long to admit of the wearer’s feet spreading apart to permit his or her fall.” We could market this today.

Ever since ‘weather shooting,’ as it is called in Germany and Switzerland, met with such pronounced success in Styria, upper ltaly, Hungary, and France, meteorologists have been engaged in a very wordy battle as to the merits of the scheme. That something has been accomplished cannot be denied. Indeed, so successful have been the efforts in preventing hailstorms in upper Italy that since the experiments of 1898 some twenty thousand stations have been established. At the Agricultural Congress held in Padua last November by far the greater number of the members were in favor of the building of ‘weathershooting’ stations. The congress was very decidedly impressed by an account of one of last summer’s hailstorms in the vicinity of Vicenza. So violent was this particular storm, the story runs, that for miles the land was completely devastated. But in this ravaged section, one spot was spared, because there it is asserted a number of stations had been located which had warded off the danger.

The shooting apparatus hitherto used has been very primitive in construction. For a cannon, a mortar with a funnel-like barrel was often used. In some places the funnel is fixed vertically in masonry. This method of mounting the cannon is not only crude, but also dangerous, for often enough serious accidents have occurred. In order to avoid these dangers as well as to improve the apparatus in general a Hungarian editor named Kanitz has devised a simple form of cannon which is essentially a breech-loading mortar some thirty feet in length. The mortar is journaled in a rotatable carriage, so that it can be raised and lowered and swung from side to side. The charge is a metallic cartridge of blasting powder. After the discharge a loud, shrill whistling is heard, lasting for about fourteen or fifteen seconds. French and Italian wine-growers insist that by means of the gun clouds are torn asunder, so that rain instead of hail falls.

The grape growers of five departments of the French Alps have formed an alliance for buying cannon and powder for next summer. The Italian government has such faith in weather-shooting that it supplies wine-growers with powder at the rate of three cents a pound.

— Scientific American, April 27, 1901

This is U.S. patent number 112, “saddle for removing the sick and for other purposes,” issued in 1837 to the magnificently named Hezekiah Thistle of New Orleans.

The patient (or body) lies on a bed mounted on springs above the wooden saddle. “There is also a strap G attached to the side of the bed near the center which passes around the thigh and is buckled to the outside of the bed in an oblique direction to prevent the wounded man from slipping down.”

Even the horse looks grim.