George V. Rael’s “arm protective garment,” patented in 1994, addresses a unique need:

The ordinary motorist may wish to particularly shield his hand and arm from sunburn while driving along on his or her usual daily route, or on longer vacation drives. Air conditioning is great, but driving on a lovely day with one’s arm resting on the ledge of an open car window is found enjoyable by many drivers. The driver’s enjoyment, however, can be shattered if the drive results in a severe sunburn to the hand or arm.

The answer is a combination sleeve and mitten to protect the left arm from the sun’s rays. Presumably there’s an alternate version for vehicles with right-hand drive.

Hungarian inventor Michael Kispéter offered this safety suit for air travelers in 1915 — a jacket lined with inflatable cushions, a torso-mounted parachute, and a helmet fitted with a spring:

A person falling from the air, equipped with my life saving apparatus, will first open the parachute … Should the person fall into water, the air-cushions will keep him or her afloat, and should the respective person fall on land and the parachute not assure a descent smooth enough to prevent a violent impact with same, the impact will considerably be reduced also by the air cushions. Should the person fall head foremost the sides of the helmet will break on contact with the soil and the resilient means contained in the helmet will mitigate the concussion.

I can’t tell whether Kispéter ever tested his contraption, but he’s not the only inventor who was thinking along these lines.

In 1974 Jack Jensen proposed a new way to stop hijackers from commandeering airplanes — each seat would be fitted with a solenoid-actuated lock in the seatbelt, an inflatable seat back, and a hypodermic syringe. Using remote switches, the crew could lock any passenger into his seat, force his head to his knees, and inject him through the seat cushion with “a strong sedative or poison.”

“Heretofore airlines have adopted numerous measures to curb hijacking, including observation of passengers, use of metal detecting devices, random searching of loading passengers, and the use of armed guards on the aircraft,” reads the patent abstract. “However, such measures … have been ineffective.”

I like this one: If you fill your air mattress with helium you can keep it on the ceiling.

William Calderwood’s 1989 brainstorm automatically increases the floor space in a small apartment. When you get up in the morning the bed floats to the ceiling, and you can spend the day roller-skating beneath it. Then at bedtime you pull it down again by the tether. Best of all, you never have to make the bed, because no one will ever see it!

While [Thomas Edison was] an operator at one station, the telegraph office was greatly infested with cockroaches. Mr. Edison tacked several zinc strips to the walls at intervals of an eighth of an inch, and applied the positive and negative poles of a battery alternately to the strips. He next smeared the walls above the strips with molasses. The long legged bugs came up, and as they stepped from strip to strip, they ‘closed the circuit,’ received the electric shock and dropped dead by scores. Water pails put at the proper places received their bodies as they fell.

— James Baird McClure, ed., Entertaining Anecdotes From Every Available Source, 1879

In 1932, Winston Churchill wrote an article for Popular Mechanics examining the technological promise of the coming half-century:

• “Wireless and television would enable their owner to connect up to any room similarly equipped and hear and take part in the conversation as well as if he put his head in through the window.”
• “Vast cellars, in which artificial radiation is generated, may replace the cornfields and potato patches. Parks and gardens will cover our plowed fields.”
• “We shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or the wing, by growing these parts separately.”
• “A few years ago London was surprised by a play called Rossum’s Universal Robots. The production of such beings may well be possible within fifty years. They will not be made, but grown under glass.”
• “There seems little doubt that it will be possible to carry out the entire cycle which now leads to the birth of a child, in artificial surroundings. Interference with the mental development of such beings, expert suggestion and treatment in the earlier years, would produce beings specialized to thought or toil.”
• If the potential of nuclear power were realized, “we could make an engine of six hundred horsepower weighing twenty pounds and carrying fuel for a thousand hours in a tank the size of a fountain pen.”

“Mankind has sometimes traveled forward and sometimes backward, or has stood still for hundreds of years,” he wrote. “Now it is moving very fast.”

In 1930 one found it vexing to pilot one’s Bugatti through the multitude in time for the first-act curtain. Happily Eugene L. Baker invented this “automobile attachment,” through which one might address the vulgar without deserting one’s foie gras:

This invention relates to an attachment for automobiles and more especially for closed vehicles, one of the objects being to provide a simple and efficient device by means of which the driver of the vehicle can speak to persons in front thereof, thereby to facilitate traffic.

The device doesn’t appear to accommodate two-way communication. Pity, isn’t it?

Richard J.D. Stokes had a brainstorm in 1949: Why waste energy maintaining both a car and a washing machine when you can attach a washtub to one of the car’s wheels?

Pour water and soap through the opening in the watertight container and drive at a low speed to wash your clothes, then drain the water and drive a second leg to dry them.

Stokes envisioned that his invention would be useful to “campers, those who live in trailers, and other travelers” — but it might also appeal to fleeing murderers with bloodstained clothing.

Rick Hilgert’s 1995 “wave generating apparatus” is essentially a giant horizontal centrifuge, a 25-foot tubular tank that’s spun until the water hugs the wall.

This creates “a continuous simulated ocean-type wave that will allow one to participate in body-surfing, boogie-boarding and/or surfboarding.”

What could go wrong?