Bird Diapers

http://www.google.com/patents?id=PKJuAAAAEBAJ&dq=2882858

You know, bird diapers. What more is there to say?

Bertha Dlugi’s invention, patented in 1959, was intended for parakeets and other birds that are allowed to fly freely about the house. “It is … a general object of the present invention to provide a garment to be worn by birds for receiving their excremental discharge to prevent it from being deposited on household furnishings when the bird is at liberty in the home and thereby avoid the consequent unsanitary condition.”

Good idea — but it’s twice the mess if the cat catches it.

| Technology

Red Menace

http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=WltCAAAAEBAJ

Ladies! Do you look like the loser of a tomato-eating contest? Do children mistake you for Bozo the Clown? Perhaps you’re incapable of applying lipstick properly!

Let’s face it, the task is practically impossible. That clumsy tube, those bewildering lips — where do you start? How do you finish? It’s a wonder you haven’t been injured or killed.

Marie Helehan’s lipstick stencil, patented in 1937, offers “a clean-cut accurate and symmetrical outline” in which to work. Now we just need a mascara gun …

| Society · Technology

Future Tech

Already every bank of any importance probably uses calculating machines. It is not likely that the fatiguing and uncertain process of having arithmetical calculations of any sort performed in the brains of clerks will survive the improvements of which these machines are capable. Account books, invoices, and all similar documents will doubtless be written by a convenient and compendious form of combined calculating machine and typewriter, which we may suppose to be called the numeroscriptor. … It will make any kind of calculation required. Even such operations as the weighing and measurement of goods will all be done by automatic machinery, capable of recording without any possibility of error the quantity and values of goods submitted to its operation.

– T. Baron Russell, A Hundred Years Hence, 1906

| Technology

Rat Cascade

http://www.google.com/patents?id=GLZBAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4&source=gbs_overview_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Joseph Barad and Edward Markoff were certainly humane — the rat trap they patented in 1908 merely fastened a jingling necklace around the animal’s neck and released it.

What would that accomplish? “The ‘bell-rat’ as it may be termed, then in seeking its burrow or colony announces his coming by the sounds emitted by the bells, thereby frightening the other rats and causing them to flee, thus practically exterminating them in a sure and economical manner.”

Did it work? Who knows?

| Technology

Forewarned

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HG_Wells_Land_Ironclads_1904.jpg

H.G. Wells’ 1903 story “The Land Ironclads” imagined a bold new war machine — a massive armored vehicle, “something between a big blockhouse and a giant’s dish-cover,” that ground remorselessly across the battlefield and gunned down enemy infantry:

They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside. The engineers directed the engines under the command of the captain, who had look-out points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch iron-plating which protected the whole affair, and who could also raise or depress a conning-tower set about the port-holes through the centre of the iron top cover. The riflemen each occupied a small cabin of peculiar construction, and these cabins were slung along the sides of and before and behind the great main framework, in a manner suggestive of the slinging of the seats of an Irish jaunting-car.

Thirteen years later, the first British tanks appeared at the Somme.

See The War Ahead.

| History · Technology

Down to Earth

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1904WrightFlyer.jpg

“The first successful flyer will be the handiwork of a watchmaker, and will carry nothing heavier than an insect. When this is constructed, we shall be able to see whether one a little larger is possible.”

— Simon Newcomb, “Is the Airship Coming?”, McClure‘s, September 1901

| Technology

Crashproof

This is clever — in 1895, Henry Latimer Simmons invented ramp-shaped railroad cars:

http://www.google.com/patents?id=xTBiAAAAEBAJ

“When one train meets or overtakes another train, one train will run up the rails carried by the other train, and will run along the rails and descend onto the rails at the other end of the lower train.”

See? With good design, everybody wins.

| Technology

White Heat

http://www.google.com/patents?id=LoE4AAAAEBAJ&printsec=drawing&zoom=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Ralph R. Maerz patented this snowball maker in 1989, to produce balls with an “aesthetically pleasing and aerodynamically sound round shape.”

It would have been a doomsday weapon in Edinburgh in 1838, when a snowball fight escalated into a full-scale riot:

On the 10th January some snowballing took place in front of the College, in which the students took part. The warfare between the students and the townspeople was renewed on the 11th, and became more serious. Several shop windows were broken, the shops were closed, and the street traffic suspended. The students, believing that the constables took the side of the mob against them, appeared on the 12th armed with sticks, to defend themselves against the constables’ batons. Then a regular riot took place, sticks and batons being freely used, and matters became so serious that the magistrates found it necessary to send to the Castle for a detachment of soldiers of the 79th Highlanders, which arrived and drew up across the College quadrangle, and peace was restored. [University Snowdrop, 1838]

This may be history’s only instance of military intervention in a snowball fight. Five students were tried; all were acquitted.

| Society · Technology

Unquote

“For God’s sake, go down to reception and get rid of a lunatic who’s down there. He says he’s got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him.”

— Editor of the London Daily Express, refusing to see John Logie Baird, inventor of television, 1925

| Quotations · Technology