Odd, Silly and Unnecessary Inventions

all things tech. And today I was feeling a little bit silly, probably because I didn't get enough sleep last night, and so to honor that silly feeling I have, I thought perhaps we would do an episode about odd inventors and inventions, the silly, the unnecessary, the wacky, sometimes just the unexpected. So not everything on this list is truly weird and bizarre. Some of them people have thought about as being odd, and in some cases they were purposefully

made that way. And there are a lot of gadgets and technologies out there that you could describe as useless or counterproductive, or ineffective or just playing dumb. But I want to celebrate inventors who came up with gadgets or technologies that are, at least on first glance, just playing goofy. So in other words, I'm not out to skewer some sincere but failed effort to make a cool product. I don't want to hold something up and say, look, at what they tried to do and see how they failed.

Ha ha ha. No, I really want to highlight stuff that was ingenious, perhaps in its entertainment value, if not in actual utility. So I think there's no better person to talk about when you're looking at silly inventions than Ruben Garrett Lucius Goldberg, better known as Rube Goldberg. And if you've ever heard about a Rube Goldberg device, this is the guy that that is named after. And if you haven't heard of a Rube Goldberg device, you've probably

seen one in some shape or form. I'll talk about a few famous pieces of meat you that feature Rube Goldberg devices in a bit. But first, who was Rube Goldberg? Well. He was born on the fourth of July in eighteen eighty three in San Francisco, California. As a kid, he loved to draw, and he showed signs of wanting to be an artist. He first started tracing pictures using thin trace paper on top of existing comics and drawings. Then he started to make his own drawings, but his father

had other ideas for him. His father was a police officer and a fire commissioner in San Francisco, and he thought his young son, Ruben would make an excellent engineer. So after Reuben graduated high school, young Goldberg would enroll in the University of California at Berkeley and major in engineering. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in the field, and he went to work for the City of San Francisco

as an engineer. And his day job had him designing and working on maintenance for sewer systems, and to say that he found the work unfulfilling would be an understatement. I guess he could say he thought it was a crappy job. He also was a witness to how politics works from the inside, and he saw city officials making deals with contractors in a way he found to be dishonest and corrupt, and that really rubbed him the wrong way. He did not want to work in that environment anyway.

After only a few months of working as an engineer, Rube decided to make a massive career change. He applied to work for the San Francisco Chronicle as a sports writer and a cartoonist. Then he jumped ship to the San Francisco Bulletin. Again, working as a cartoonist, he would often illustrate articles that were about sports and things of that nature, and he created several long running cartoons, most

of which have been largely forgotten today. He did create a comic strip called Mike and Ike, but today I'd argue that when people mentioned Mike and Ike there talking about the candy, and the candy may or may not have been named after the comic strip. The comic strip was already out of print by the time the Mike and Mike candy became a thing, so it may have just been true coincidence and not some a case where

they named a candy after a comic strip. It's not likely the comic strip was super famous and beloved at that point. By seven, Goldberg was creating comics with absurd, bizarre, and sometimes very dark jokes and gags in them. Starting in nineteen fourteen, he also illustrated scenarios involving complicated contraptions designed to carry out some relatively simple task, and this would become his real claim to fame. Goldberg might start with a very simple action, such as pouring water from

a water picture into a glass. Then he would concoct a series of improbable and complex actions that would lead to that conclusion. Sort of a very very complicated sequence. In a way, it's similar to elaborate Domino setups, where someone has created a really intricate design that a series of falling domino's reveals. In fact, there are typically some parallels between Rube Goldberg machines and Domino setups, and a lot of Rube Goldberg machines include Domino sequences in them.

In nine, Goldberg created a character named Professor Lucifer Gorgon Zola Butts a k. This character would become the genius inventor of many of the zany designs Goldberg imagined to either accomplish a simple task or otherwise make some sort of social commentary. For example, in one fairly ghoulish illustration, Goldberg created a system to test someone to see if they had the right metal to invest in the stock market are they the right kind of person to take

that gamble. The system included a pistol pointed at the back of the head of the would be investor, as well as a glass that would slowly get filled with poison, and should the person survive this experience, Professor Butts wrote, then that person would be suitable to act as an investor if they had a disregard for their own personal safety. So little social commentary there. Not all the inventions were quite so grim or packed with that kind of social commentary.

Many were just plain silly, and people enjoyed the comics. Goldberg became so well known for these ideas that didn't take long for his name to become an adjective for such devices. In ninety one, the Miriam Webster Dictionary included Rube Goldberg and used as an adjective to describe any system of unnecessary complexity designed to complete and otherwise simple task. I find it pretty impressive that took less than two decades from the first invention cartoon for Goldberg's name to

become officially associated with this general idea. Some people enjoyed the cartoons to the point of holding their own ridiculous complex devices to complete a simple task in real life. Physically building these things. They were bringing this philosophy into the real world, and the goal wasn't really to do whatever it was the machine did. It was to show off creative ingenuity as well as to celebrate this peculiar

human desire to avoid having to do certain things. It's a bit of a cliche, but it's also true that many people would spend much more effort finding ways to avoid doing something then it would require if they just took the time to do the thing in the first place. Goodness knows, I'm guilty of this. I found creative ways to avoid having to do certain things that involved doing way more work than it would have been for me

to just do the thing to begin with. Goldberg described it as quote man's capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results in the quote. In nine at Perdue University, to engineering fraternities called Triangle and Theta Tao would compete with one another to build actual physical machines following the Rube Goldberg esthetic as part of their Engineers Ball, which was a social event organized by those two fraternities over

the course of the next few years. Until the Engineer's Ball was discontinued in nineteen fifty five, the competitions would happen annually, and the competitions were spirited, to say the least, and at one point the fraternities had to agree to a set of rules that would disqualify any team guilty of attempting to sabotage the other team. But after nineteen fifty five, the competition was set aside and largely forgotten

about until nineteen eighty three. That's when some members of the Theta Tao Phi chapter did some cleaning around the old frat house and they came across a rather odd trophy. After some research, they learned about the original competitions and decided that they should be revived. The first competition, sponsored by the fraternity, set the task as filling a cup with eight ounces of water. That was the end goal. You could get to that end goal, however, you liked.

Once again, the competition became an annual event, and it began to attract attention beyond Perdue. University. Television personalities like David Letterman featured segments on the odd inventions, and by night a guy named Mike Barrett decide the celebration in Ridiculous and Unnecessary Inventiveness should really be a national competition. Since then, it has grown to become the biggest media event at Perdue, pulling in more media coverage than any

sporting event held at the university. While the machines are supposed to be absurd and silly, they're also supposed to work. That is, ultimately they are meant to accomplish whatever the end task happens to be. This makes designing a good Rube Goldberg machine challenging. How can you create a level of complexity, perhaps one bordering on chaos, and still get the result you wanted by the end of it. It requires not just an understanding of engineering, but also physics.

Many of these machines rely on careful timing that is determined by things such as the length or steepness of a ramp, the weight or size of a marble, or other physical factors. If you put a machine together without consideration for these factors, it might not work. You might find that one element isn't heavy enough or moving forcefully

enough to activate the next part of the sequence. To use the Domino's analog, it would be like setting out a domino course and finding out you had spaced a couple of the dominoes too far apart from one another, so that they failed to make contact and the whole

sequence just stops. Now. I have no clue how most engineers go about this, but I would probably start with whatever the end goal was and decide how I was going to achieve that very last step, and then work backward what action or event would do whatever it was I was trying to do. Then how could I make that action happen? And so on. I think of it

sort of like writing a murder mystery. You might want to start with the end and then work your way back to the beginning to make it a real mystery, as opposed to just trying to make it up as you go along. You can see a lot of examples of Rube Goldberg devices in the media. Peewee's Big Adventure, the film that Tim Burton made ages ago, opens with such a device that uses everything from models of dinosaur skeletons to a large mannequin in the guise of Abraham

Lincoln to cook breakfast for the main character. Likewise, the movie Back to the Future includes several devices, all triggered by a timer to do everything from start a coffee pot to open and empty a can of dog food into a bowl. So clearly Doc Brown has better things to do with his time than take care of menial tasks,

you know, are things like stealing plutonium from terrorists. On one of several versions of the music video for Okay Goes, This Too Shall Pass, an incredibly impressive Rube Goldberg system is set in motion and in apparent synchronization with the music, activates numerous effects and even provides some of the musical notes for the song itself. It's one of my favorite examples of the Rube Goldberg design philosophy, and it doesn't hurt that I was already a fan of that particular band.

The Guinness Book of World Records certified in twenty sixteen that an enormous Rube Goldberg machine designed to light the Christmas tree for the town of Riga in Latvia was in fact the world's largest Rube Goldberg machine. It takes about four minutes from initiating the sequence for the entire process to complete, and it's a fun watch on YouTube as well. When we come back, I'll cover other odd, silly and useless inventions, but first, let's say a quick

break switching gears for a moment. I thought I'd talked about another inventor who came up with some ideas that turned out to be sort of the punchline for a lot of jokes. They were simultaneously successful from a sales

standpoint and also the subject of ridicule by many. That inventor was Samuel J. Pope, Peel, father of the famous Ron Pope Peel now Ron Pope Peel, became known as the head of a company called Ronco that sold lots of kitchen gadgets, mostly for the kitchen itself, and Ron served as the host of many and infomercial coining phrases like but wait, there's more. He was a master of direct marketing, and we can thank him and his father for popularizing the suffix oh matic such as veggio madic.

While Ron Popel is who a lot of folks think about when you hear the name Pope Heal, it was his dad who invented many of those weird devices in ron Co's early days, though Ron himself would go on to invent some of his own later on. Anyway, the story of the Pope Heals is one filled with an incredible amount of drama, which I think is already kind

of unusual. Sam Popeal was born in New York in nineteen fifteen, and many of the men and his family worked as product demonstrators who would set up in various department stores to give personal demonstrations of different products that were for sale. At age seventeen, Sam was asked to fill in for one of his uncles to do that very gig and apparently didn't go so well. He apparently cut his finger badly on a vegetable slicer. But something must have made him feel like that was the right

line of work for him. So as he got older, he began to come up with ideas for his own products, and he and his brother Raymond founded a company they called, appropriately enough, the Pope Peel Brothers. One of Sam Popil's first inventions was what he called the chopp O Matic, later known as the Veggio Matic. It's a manually operated food processor, and there have been many variations in the

years since its introduction. The basic design had a pedestal with a round hole in the top surface of the pedestal, and in that round hole you would place the cutting blades for the vegeo maatic, so it might be a great might be a line of blades, and then positioned above this platform of blades was another surface that acted as the handle. So you would have a press essentially, and you would put the vegetable on the blades, and it would be essentially in between the blades and the

top of the press. And uh or I guess you should say, the bottom side of the press, and so then you would push down on the handle side of the press and create enough pressure to push the vegetable through the blades, and thus the vegetable would be chopped or sliced or diced or whatever. It's classic, and I guess it's not really that crazy of an invention, although you could argue the amount of labor it's saved might be somewhat trivial depending upon what you were actually trying

to do, so there was arguable effectiveness of this. The Popio brothers and later Ronco would produce lots of different inventions of debatable usefulness. My favorite has to be the pocket fisherman. This is a small fishing rod and reel. The base looks kind of like the handle for an appliance like a food mixer or a dustbuster vacuum cleaner, kind of has that shape to it, and it has a rod that folds down against this handle. So you unfold the rod from the base and then you have

your little fishing pole. There's a compartment inside the handle on the base that could hold stuff like tackle and lures and bobbers and that kind of stuff, and yep, you can still buy these today. If you're so inclined, you could actually purchase Pocket Fisherman right now. I've seen some videos of it in action, and while it's one of those gadgets that made as seen on TV a household phrase, it actually seems to hold up pretty well. The reviews I've seen have been maybe not glowing, but

not negative either. In other words, it just it works for what it is, and so if you have a desire to have a fishing rod stuffed in your backpack so it's not taking up too much space just in case you have the opportunity to fish, it's not necessarily a bad choice. In fact, I think a lot of the inventions from the Popeils probably hold up for the most part. You could argue they are unnecessary, but most

of them seem to work at least as advertised. Apart from the more outlandish claims you'll typically see on infomercials about how the right product is going to transform your life forever and turn it into a Disney musical, that part still seems like it might be a bit of

a reach. Ron Bobile's company, Ronko, went bankrupt in two thousand seven, so he can still find the products he made famous for sale on sites like Amazon, and I don't want to end on a sad note, so I thought i'd explain why I wanted to include the Pope Pels in this section. It's because of a particular person. That person is weird Al Yankovic. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with weird Al, he's a comedian who writes humorous songs, and about half his songs are

outright parodies of existing music. The other half our original songs, though some of them are what you might call style parodies, and that Yankovic is mimicking the sound of an established band or artist, just not picking a specific song to mimic. On his Weird Al in three D album, he has a song called Mr. Pope Peel that's done in the

style of the B fifty twos. The song references some of Sam Pope Peel's memorable inventions, and that album was one of my favorites when I was a kid, which I'm sure surprises absolutely ly none of you out there, but it's why I decided to choose Mr pope Peel to be included in this particular episode. Ron Popeil Samuel's son was really the TV personality who would pave the way for other famous spokespeople like Billy Mays and Tony Little,

among others. And he owed a lot to the pitchman who came before him as well, people like Crazy Eddie. But yeah, you could kind of trace the lineage of television spokespeople, and Ron Popel would be a very important part of that lineage. Now, there are a few inventions that aren't really inventions, nor are they really tech, but they tend to end up on lists about odd or useless inventions, and I want to spend a little time

talking about a couple of those. One is the famous pet rock, which had a strong run for a good part of nineteen seventy five. It was the brainchild of a copy editor named Gary Doll, who, when listening to his friends complain about how high maintenance their pets were, bragged that he had the perfect pet. It was rock. You didn't have to feed it, you didn't have to walk it, you know, to clean after it. It was perfect.

So Doll would then go on to sell pet rocks, and yes they were rocks, but they were packaged and what looked like a small pet carrier and more importantly, they came with a pretty decent book of instructions on how to care for the pet rock. And the book was really just a joke book that was filled with jokes and puns. So really, ultimately you were buying a book of jokes that happened to have a rock that came with it. And it was a cute idea and

it was a successful one. It made Doll into a millionaire, so you can't really knock it. And yeah, that's not really tech, but hey, how about how about a USB pet rock? I think Geek sold these, and uh, it was a pet rock with a USB port, didn't do anything. You could just you can plug a USB cable into it. But then you had a rock on a USB cable

and that was it. This is the joke. And just for the heck of it, I check to see if you can still buy pet rocks and I found one on Amazon that claims it was approved by Gary Doll himself, and the price on it is prepare yourself for this twenty bucks. And also it did not include the thirty two page care manual. I'd now like to introduce you to my brand new idea, the pet paper weight. Order now. But yeah, I think without the Book of Jokes, it's

really just a rock. Now, I never could have predicted the success of the pet rock, But do you know someone who might have predicted that success? This is my playful way to introduce a duo, that of Albert or maybe it was Alfred Harder at abe Bookman. Now I say Albert or Alfred because about half the sources I looked into on this story had it as one, any other half had it as the other. So we'll just call him al Anyway, these are the two guys largely

responsible for the invention of the magic eight ball. So let's tell the story of this low tech novelty item. So Albert or Alfred again conflicting reports. There was the kid of a mother who did something pretty special for her profession. Carter's mother claimed to be clairvoyant. Now, I'm a skeptic and I do not believe in such things as clairvoyance or psychic powers, or telekinesis or anything of the sort. But never mind that Ma Carter was bringing

in clients for her sessions in the nineties. One of the items she used was reportedly a container that had a slate and some chalk inside the container, and her clients would ask questions and the answers would reveal themselves on the slate. She would open up the container and the slate would have something written on it by the chalk, as if by magic. This is, by the way, a pretty popular gimmick was stage magicians who accomplished this task

without the dreadful responsibility of being psychic. So, in other words, if there's a way you can do it by trickery, that indicates that any quote unquote real version of the phenomena is questionable at best. If there are ways to do it without it being from some supernatural source, chances are it was a perfectly normal source. Anyway, This gave

her son Al an idea. Al wanted to build something that he could sell to folks, and his first version of the gimmick was a cylinder look a bit like a soda can or a beer can, a little narrower than what you would see with a soda can, and the two ends of the can were transparent, so the top and the bottom of the can had these transparent

discs there instead of solids. Inside the cylinder was a syrupy liquid uh largely described as molasses in the reports I read, and inside were a couple of dice that had different phrases written on the face of the dice. So you would ask a yes or no question, you would give the cylinder a shake, and you would wait for one of those dice to float up to the

surface and you would see your answer. And he called it the Psycho sear s Y c O S E E R. Carter brought his invention to a store owner named Max Levinson, who thought it was a pretty clever gimmick, and he contacted his own brother in law, the aforementioned Abe Bookman, who had an education in engineering. So Bookman's task was to you take Carter's invention and figure out a way that they could mass produce it in order

to sell it to a wider audience. Bookman simplified the design somewhat, making only one end of the cylinder transparent so the other one was solid, and he also switched the molasses out for water with ink inside of it, and he renamed it the Psycho slate. Bookman and Carter formed a company called a Labe Crafts. A Labe was the combination of Al and Abe's first names. Carter had applied for a patent for his invention, calling it a liquid filled dice agitator, which also describes some of the

Dungeons and Dragons players I know. But he would pass away before the patent office would grant the patent in There's not much info on how al Carter passed away, though it seems like alcoholism may have played a part. The next evolution of the idea involved changing the shape of the gimmick so that you had a crystal ball surrounding the cylinder, make it more like a fortune teller

type of gimmick. This got the attention of a company called Brunswick Billiards, which saw the opportunity for promotional tie in, so they had Bookman make a version of the crystal ball fortune telling device that was, and they had him painted like an eight ball and billiards and it did very well, so well that once this promotional contract was over, Bookman started making these magic eight balls on his own.

He found that marketing it as a toy got him the most success, Like if you called it a toy rather than some sort of psychic aid, you could do really well. In nine Bookman sold the Labe Crafts Company to another company called the Ideal Toy Company. That's the

same company that would later produce the Rubik's Cube. Eventually, Mattel would end up with the i he for the Magic eight ball, so they didn't end up with all the stuff from Ideal Toy Company, but they do own the rights to the Magic eight ball, a modern eight ball. Magic eight ball that is, has a twenty sided die in it, which you could also call an icosahedron. That means there are twenty different phrases inside of Magic Eateball.

Ten of the phrases are versions of yes or in the affirmative, five are versions of no, and five are versions of beats me or just beat a kid. You're bothering me, so like ask again later. Essentially, there are lots of variations of the Magic eate ball. For instance, I have a licensed Simpson's version of one at home. For example, we have a few more weird, odd and useless inventions to cover, but first let's take another quick break. I can't let this episode go by without an entry

from Japan. Invention and creativity in Japan is celebrated on a grand scale, and there are countless technological entries that we could focus on. In this episode, but one of my favorites was a promotional gadget created by a juice company called Kagome. The invention was Tomaton, a robot that would ride piggyback on a human and feed that human a steady supply of tomatoes. You never knew you needed a robot to do that, did you, So stick with me on this Tomaton looks like a very odd child

that has a tomato for a head. It's designed to rest on the shoulders of the person wearing it. On the back of the robot is a clear container holding a series of tomatoes, and it has a switch on

the bottom of one foot. When you flick that switch, it puts the robot in action, so it's arms reach back over its head, rotating all the way back behind to the base of that clear container on the robot's back, and then it picks up the tomato that's at the base of that container, and then lifts the tomato back over the back of the robot, over the robot's head, over the wearer's head, and then positions it in front of the wearer's mouth, so then you can just lean

forward and start chewing on a nice juicy tomato. Finally, you don't have to spend all that time feeding yourself tomatoes on your daily jog. You can have a robot do it for you. And yes, I realized hearing about this is bizarre, but trust me, guys, you need to find the video of this thing, tomaton. It will change your life. Just go to YouTube and look for robot tomatoes jogging and that'll be enough for you to be able to see this thing. Um. Obviously, this was a

promotional gimmick. It wasn't meant to be like a actual practical product that everyone would go out and buy. It was meant to get attention and generate conversation, and it worked. I'm talking about it now. And some inventions didn't start out with the intent to be really useless or just to grab attention. They might have had an intended use that you know, just didn't work out. Such is the topic of our next tail, which begins in World War Two.

The United States government's War Production Board was searching for ways to meet the demands of a modern military at war, and that included getting hold of basic production materials as quickly and cheaply as possible. One holdout was rubber, so rubber can be found in nature. You probably heard about rubber trees. They are in parts of Southeast Asia in abundance. So rubber trees produce this elastic substance, typically in a

form of latex, and it comes from tree sap. Some tree SAPs have more of this elastic material in them than others, particularly trees that are in the Haya and Ficus genera. You gather this stuff by making an incision in such a plant, and then you place a cup below that incision, and sap slowly fills the cup, and then you have to take that sap and refine it to get usable rubber. And rubber is useful in all sorts of stuff. It's resilient, it's flexible, it's stretchable, it's waterproof.

But the collection and processing of natural rubber is inefficient when you need to make a lot of rubber for a lot of military gear during wartime, stuff like tires and boots and tons of other stuff. Plus, the Japanese military had either outright attacked or was in position to attack many rubber producing regions, which meant the supply chain

was interrupted. Well. Since the nineteenth century, engineers had been experimenting with ways to make synthetic rubber with varying degrees of success, but even the successful attempts were still fairly inefficient and slow, plus at least some of the ingredients in most of the existing approaches were equally hard to get hold of, particularly in wartime. So the War Production Board tasked an engineer named James Wright to come up with an alternative to the synthetic rubber of the day,

and Right got to work. His lab was set up in New Haven, Connecticut as part of General Electric In One of Right's experiments could combine boric acid and silicone oil. Boric acid is a kind of wonder material. It can be used in stuff like flame retardants, antiseptic insecticide, tons of stuff. Silicone oils are used in stuff like hydraulic systems or as an industrial lubricant. Combined, they make a substance that consists of long chain polymers. These different things

can come together. Sometimes they can be in liquid form and they form a solid. It has many remarkable properties. You can shape it. You can bounce it against a hard surface. You can stretch it. If you strike it hard enough, it will actually shatter instead of bounce. You can actually leave it out forever and it won't rot or have mold form on it. It could do so many amazing things, but one thing it couldn't do was stand in for rubber, so the military had no real

use for it. In fact, for a while there was no use at all for rights invention, but Right decided to market it as a consumer product. He called it nutty putty when he started selling it in the nineteen forties, but when a marketing consultant named Peter Hodgson brought the rights to nutty putty, he renamed it silly putty, and he introduced it around Easter, which might be why the stuff found its way into plastic eggs, which became the

classic packaging for the material. Now, according to most histories, in the early days, the focus was to try and sell silly putty as a practical putty. Practical to what purpose, I don't know, but it found its way into the market as a toy. It didn't immediately succeed even in that context, but a New Yorker article mentioned silly putty and that got things moving pretty quickly for the stuff. Now that being said, people would come up with a

few practical uses for silly putty for one thing. It can be used to remove lent from clothing for another. Astronauts apparently took the stuff with them up into space so that they could stick silly putty to walls of the spacecraft and then hold various tools in place in microgravity. So you're working with a tool, you put it, push it against the silly putty that's on the wall, and it will stay there instead of just floating off. It makes sense. You don't want your thing, a jig, to

go floating off a mid job. But it's not exactly the practical use case that we can all identify with down here on Earth. It's rare that we need to make such considerations. Now. One other person I should mention in this episode is someone dedicated to coming up with ridiculous inventions that solve precisely zero problems, and this is all on purpose. His name is Matt Benedetto, and I have never met Matt Benedetto. I do not know Matt Benedetto,

but I admire him and his ingenuity. He has the Instagram account Unnecessary Inventions, and I think he's kind of brilliant. His inventions range from the chuckle inducing silly like gloves that mimic crocs sandals to potentially disastrous such as his Right Round Cone device, which is an ice cream cone holding drill bit that you would put on the end of a power drill. It's got a place where you would then slot in an ice cream cone. That way

you can get perfect coverage. When you're licking the ice cream cone, you just pull the trigger on your power drill. It'll spin the cone as you lick the ice cream. As you can imagine, this would create disastrous but potentially

hilarious results. Other inventions include a pizza Fannie pack so that you can have slices of pizza at the ready you wear them on a belt, or the text Bumper t x T bumper, which is a headband with a bumper built into the headband so that you can look on your phone while you're walking around and not worry about bumping into stuff like street signs and telephone poles and trees and other stuff. I could definitely use one

of those. Or the sweat gutters, another headpiece you would wear that collects the sweat dripping down from your head and funnels it into gutters, complete with down spouts so that the sweat doesn't get in your face. How thoughtful. These are all jokes, obviously, and they are pretty amused ing. Also, there aren't really that far off from some of the stuff we've seen on television or in stores, whether those

stores were selling stuff as novelties or genuine products. So I recommend you take a look at the Unnecessary Inventions Instagram account to see his work, because there's a lot of stuff. I actually saw one of his videos up on Facebook the day that I'm recording this podcast, probably because the Facebook algorithm is super creepy and pays attention to what I'm browsing so they can serve up related content on my feed. But that's a topic from a

different show. Anyway. I once did an episode about a guy named Marvin Minski. He's an artificial intelligence pioneer, or was, I should say he passed away in two thousand and sixteen. Uh, he's he was an artificial intelligence pioneer. He was also a cognitive scientist. Minsky helped establish the AI laboratory at m I T. He created the first head mounted display back in nineteen sixty three. His work lead to the

development of sophisticated artificial neural networks. He made numerous contributions to science and technology, and he also made a truly useless machine on purpose. He spent some time at Bell Labs along with Claude Shannon, another important figure in the world of technology. I've done an episode about Shannon as well, and he amused himself by inventing all sorts of different gadgets, and one of those was the Useless machine. And it's pretty simple in concept. The machine looks like a box.

The original was about the size of a cigar box. The top of the box has a trap door or hatch, and a single toggle switch. Turning the switch on activates the machine. The hatch pops open, a small mechanical arm pops out, hits the switch to the off position, then retracts back inside the box, which then shuts. So in other word, it's a machine that only turns itself off. That's all it does. But it's incredibly amusing to see.

I had a commercial version of this gadget once upon a time, and it certainly was an amusing piece of technology, and it also got me thinking about how it worked. In another reality, perhaps I would have pursued that feeling of curiosity I had, and maybe I would have ended up an engineer. The gadget has inspired lots of people to make similar devices, many of which you can find

on YouTube. Some of them have different behaviors set up as a sequence so that the box appears to behave in a way that implies it is growing frustrated or exasperated with the user's efforts to flip the switch, so it continues to turn itself off, but it does so

in different ways as the sequence continues. One of my favorites has a sequence that's perhaps twenty different behaviors long until you get to the twentieth one, where flipping the switch makes the hatch pop up, and then a little white flag comes out, indicating the machine has given up in the face of the user's persistence, and then the

sequence starts over again. Minsky has had an incredible impact on technology in general, and it would be easy to dismiss this particular device as just a whimsical exercise, but I maintain it also gets people interested in tinkering and engineering, thus playing a very important role of its own. So arguably the useless machine isn't so useless after all. I think there's a real place for silly inventions. In some cases they may be practical, though in very narrow scenarios.

At times they might serve to inspire others, either to use ingenuity and creativity to build something whimsical, or to investigate how stuff works and to become more mechanically knowledgeable. Sometimes they might just make us laugh, which I'd argue is an incredibly valuable service all in its own. This is just a small sample of some of the ridiculous things that have been made in the past, and there

are obviously countless others that have come out. The ones I focused on were from the modern age, but there are also plenty of ridiculous inventions throughout all of history, some of which were supposed to do something actionable and useful but either failed to do that, or maybe they were never really made to do it, but we're sold as if they were a solution. In other words, in other words, they were a con. These cases that I'm

talking about, they're not cons. They weren't created that would by somebody who knew it didn't work but was selling it as if it did work. So that's something I could do a full episode on cons and I've talked a little bit about some in the past, but yeah, I wanted to kind of focus more on the fun elements then not so much on the let's trick people elements. Do you guys have any favorite, weird, odd, or completely useless inventions that tickle your funny bone. I'd love to

hear about them. You can send me a message. The email address is tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can pop on over to our website that's tech stuff podcast dot com. There you'll find an archive of all of our past episodes, as well as the links to where we are on social media, and you'll also find a link to our online store, where every purchase you make goes to help the show and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to you again and really soon. Text Stuff is a production of I

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