This looks a bit … direct, but it dates from 1882. James Williams needed a device that would destroy a burrowing animal and give an alarm so that it could be reset. His solution was a revolver attached to a treadle. Touché.
The patent abstract adds, “This invention may also be used in connection with a door or window, so as to kill any person or thing opening the door or window to which it is attached.” Evidently Williams had problems bigger than rodents.
Telecommunications got an early start in France, where inventor Claude Chappe built a series of towers between Lille and Paris in 1792. Each tower was topped with a set of movable wooden arms that could be arranged to represent symbols; if each operator viewed his neighbor through a telescope, a symbol could pass through 15 stations covering 120 miles in only 9 minutes, giving France a valuable communications advantage over the surrounding powers during the sensitive period of the revolution. It makes an appearance in The Count of Monte Cristo:
They passed to the third story; it was the telegraph room. Monte Cristo looked in turn at the two iron handles by which the machine was worked. ‘It is very interesting,’ he said, ‘but it must be very tedious for a lifetime.’
‘Yes. At first my neck was cramped with looking at it, but at the end of a year I became used to it; and then we have our hours of recreation, and our holidays.’
‘Holidays?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘When we have a fog.’
Expanded into a network of 534 stations, the system worked well, but it was expensive, with skilled operators manning towers set every 10-30 kilometers, and the messages were far from private. Finally the electrical telegraph killed it — Sweden abandoned the last commercial semaphore line in 1880. By then, depressed by illness and the conviction that others were stealing his ideas, Chappe had long since killed himself.
Galvanized by the school shootings of the late 1990s, James R. Taylor patented a desk whose top doubles as a bullet-resistant shield:
“Another object is to provide a shield that is configured to function normally in an innocuous mode as an ordinary desk work surface but that can be easily and quickly removed from the desk for use as a personal shield against projectiles including but not limited to bullets, knives, shrapnel, or flying debris that might be encountered in naturally occurring events such as earthquakes, fires, or storms.”
I can’t tell whether any districts adopted it. Hopefully we’ll never find out.
A perpetual-motion scheme from Henry Dircks’ Perpetuum Mobile (1861). Each bellows is fitted with a weight and filled with quicksilver, and a canal connects each opposing pair of bellows. Thus the weights will continually compress the bellows on the left and expand those on the right, forcing the quicksilver always into the rightmost bellows and ensuring that the wheel turns forever. Won’t they?
Future civilizations will remember us for one thing: We finally found a way to keep the cereal from getting soggy.
This “crispy cereal serving piece and method,” patented by Alton Davis in 1991, connects two bowls with a chute. “A measured, quickly consumable portion of the cereal can then be urged with a spoon or other eating utensil from the upper bowl down the chute and into the milk, from where it can be consumed before it absorbs sufficient quantities of milk to become soggy.”
Take that, Phoenicians!
Patented in 1991, Frederick Sevilla’s helium-filled sun shade combines protection with effortless portability.
It must be tricky to manage, though — one slip and you’ll never see it again.
Joe Armstrong’s 2000 patent application is a model of clarity:
“The amusement apparatus is operated by one user for self-kicking the user’s buttocks, or an alternative embodiment allows one user to operate the crank while a second person positions himself to receive a paddling of his buttocks for entertainment of observers.”
He adds that an LCD can display kicks per minute, and the whole apparatus can be folded for storage. Kudos.
Broke and lazy? With Chris Michaels’ “TV control device,” patented in 1976, you can change the television channel from the comfort of your armchair — and it’s “considerably less expensive than its electrical and electronic counterparts.”
The trouble is that you’ll need to find a TV with knobs.
Edward B. Kaplan patented a unique idea in 1995: a braille slot machine.
A pad of pins corresponds to each reel in the machine; as the reels spin, the braille display changes under the player’s fingers until the winning combination is displayed. If the player wins, the machine vibrates slightly.
Any winnings are credited to the machine until the player presses a payout button. “This will also deter any theft from any other individuals.”
Martin Goetze’s 1896 “device for producing dimples,” left, was uncomfortably similar to a hand drill — an ivory knob was placed on the site and a rotating cylinder made the surrounding skin “malleable.”
Evangeline Gilbert’s improvement, right, patented in 1926, was essentially a headpiece that drove depressions into the cheeks. “The length of time on this pressure will vary with different persons, but it has been found that, if the appliance be used during the night, dimples will be present during the next day.”
Baltasar Gracian wrote, “Beauty and folly are generally companions.”