Odd, Silly and Unnecessary Inventions

We can thank geniuses for the development of stuff like radios, television and electricity. But what about the pocket fisherman? We explore the lighter side of invention.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with
I Heart Radio and How Stuff Works, and I love
all things tech. And today I was feeling a little
bit silly, probably because I didn't get enough sleep last night,

(00:27):
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

(00:48):
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.

(01:11):
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

(01:34):
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

(01:54):
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

(02:15):
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

(02:35):
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

(02:55):
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

(03:17):
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

(03:40):
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

(04:00):
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,

(04:26):
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

(04:49):
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

(05:09):
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

(05:30):
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

(05:51):
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

(06:11):
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

(06:33):
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

(06:58):
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

(07:20):
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

(07:41):
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,

(08:01):
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

(08:21):
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

(08:43):
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

(09:03):
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

(09:26):
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

(09:46):
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

(10:06):
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

(10:28):
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

(10:49):
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

(11:11):
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

(11:33):
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

(11:53):
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,

(12:16):
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

(12:38):
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

(13:00):
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

(13:22):
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

(13:43):
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

(14:05):
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

(14:28):
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

(14:49):
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

(15:10):
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

(15:31):
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

(15:53):
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

(16:15):
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,

(16:38):
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,

(16:58):
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

(17:20):
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

(17:42):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:48):
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

(19:10):
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

(19:32):
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

(19:53):
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,

(20:17):
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

(20:38):
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

(20:59):
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,

(21:21):
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

(21:44):
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

(22:06):
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

(22:29):
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

(22:50):
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,

(23:12):
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

(23:33):
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

(23:56):
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

(24:19):
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

(24:44):
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

(25:05):
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

(25:28):
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,

(25:51):
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,

(26:15):
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

(26:38):
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

(27:00):
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.

(27:22):
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.

(27:44):
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

(28:08):
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

(28:30):
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

(28:51):
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

(29:12):
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

(29:33):
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

(29:53):
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

(30:17):
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,

(30:39):
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.

(30:59):
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

(31:20):
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

(31:43):
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

(32:06):
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

(32:27):
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

(32:50):
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

(33:12):
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

(33:36):
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

(33:57):
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,

(34:18):
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.

(34:41):
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

(35:02):
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

(35:24):
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

(35:47):
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.

(36:09):
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

(36:30):
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

(36:51):
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

(37:11):
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

(37:32):
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

(37:55):
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

(38:19):
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.

(38:40):
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.

(39:04):
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

(39:25):
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

(39:45):
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

(40:06):
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

(40:28):
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.

(40:53):
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,

(41:17):
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

(41:41):
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

(42:04):
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

(42:24):
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
Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

(42:47):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.