Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions (26 page)
Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
T
here are lots of products out there designed to make it look like someone is home when you’re on vacation (or even just at work for the day), so as to thwart burglars who might be casing the joint. Automatic light timers are one example. Another is the Peeping Thomas, invented by Terry Kirby after he walked in on three men trying to burgle his Texas home.
Kirby says he got the idea for Peeping Thomas almost immediately after the robbery. He went over to his grandmother’s house to stay for the night; when he knocked on the door, she put an index finger through two slats of mini-blinds and peered out to make sure it was him.
Peeping Thomas is an automated mini-blinds peering device, making it look like somebody is suspiciously leering out the window at you, the potential criminal. How it works: A base holds up a two-foot-tall metal pole. A hook in the middle of the pole goes beneath an eye-level mini-blinds slat. A timer in the device moves the hook, and opens the mini-blinds just a hair, at intervals of 5, 10, 20, or 30 minutes. That gives the impression that someone is home…and constantly checking.
P
encilina:
Invented by Brooklyn musician Bradford Reed, who used to play the zither in Blue Man Group, the pencilina features two wooden boards that serve as guitar necks, mounted atop legs, like a steel guitar. One board is strung with six guitar strings, and the other has four bass strings. Six electric pickups gather and send the sound to an amplifier. Double guitar! But wait, there’s more: Wedged under the guitar strings are two drumsticks that can be moved to change string length and, thus, pitch. The pencilina creates an array of almost otherworldly sounds that the
Village Voice
said “sounds like Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Rich playing ‘Dueling Banjos.’”
Glockenmundharmonika:
This instrument was patented in 1908 by New Jersey inventor Ernst Koch, and its mouthful of a name means “bells mouth harmonica” in German. Unlike a normal harmonica, it didn’t have any reeds—it had 22 little bells mounted inside. When you blew into the Glockenmundharmonika, tiny spring-loaded hammers would strike the bells. It’s unknown if any were ever made, because none are known to exist today. There no recordings either, so nobody’s exactly sure what it sounded like, although you can imagine it sounding “tinkly,” if it actually worked.
E
ver feel the need to pet a chicken, but there just wasn’t one handy? Good news: The University of Singapore has invented the Touchy Internet System. “We understand the perceived eccentricity of a system for humans to interact with poultry remotely,” says developer Adrian Cheok. “But this has a much wider significance.” The device will eventually allow people at zoos to scratch otherwise dangerous animals, such as lions and bears.
Users pet a chicken-shaped doll that’s hooked up to their computer, while watching a webcam image of a real chicken on the screen. Sensors on the doll relay the petting location to another computer, which then activates tiny motors in a lightweight jacket that the real chicken wears. The motors’ vibrations mimic the sensation of being petted exactly as the user at home is petting the doll. “This is the first human-poultry interaction system ever developed,” says Professor Cheok.
I
n 1991
Saturday Night Live
aired a fake commercial for an imaginary product called “The Love Toilet”—a two-person toilet for people so in love that they never want to be apart, even when they have to use the facilities. Like a Victorian love seat, the side-by-side toilets faced opposite directions, so the lovers could stare into each others’ eyes. In a case of life imitating art, the
TwoDaLoo
is now a real item, available for purchase for only $1,400. The only difference between the real TwoDaLoo and the fictional Love Toilet: The TwoDaLoo has a “privacy” bar separating the two commodes (as if that’s an issue).
The
Great John
is the first toilet, says the manufacturer, made specifically for “modern Americans.” By which they mean it’s an extra-large toilet made for extra-large people. Invented by the Great John Toilet Company, the Great John can reportedly accommodate any person up to the weight of 2,000 pounds. The base is wider than a conventional toilet’s to provide extra support, and it connects to the bathroom floor with four anchors instead of the standard two. The seat provides 150 percent more “contact area” than a normal toilet (as well as offering side wings to prevent pinching if flesh still hangs over the larger seat).
Lots of people want to teach their cats how to use the toilet (
see here
); it goes the other way with the
Compost Toilet
, essentially a litter box for humans. According to the World Toilet Organization, a legitimate, ultra-serious trade group based in Singapore, this Chinese toilet is a steel box filled with sawdust. It has a microcomputer that senses when the box has solid waste in it, and a mechanical arm that rotates the sawdust, burying the waste, which the company says can later be used as organic fertilizer, which you can then use to grow vegetables to turn into poop later, thus completing the circle of life. The device stays at a constant temperature of about 120°F, hot enough to make liquid waste evaporate, and has specially formulated low-odor sawdust that needs to be changed only once a year, but you can change it more often if you want to.
Shop while you plop! Twyford, a toilet manufacturer in Cheshire, England, created the
Versatile Interactive Pan
(VIP), a toilet that analyzes your urine and stool samples for dietary deficiencies, compiles a shopping list of needed nutritional items, then e-mails your local supermarket to order the foods. “If, for example, a person is short on roughage one day,” says Twyford spokesperson Terry Woolliscroft, “an order of beans or lentils will be sent from the VIP to the supermarket and delivered the same day.” The toilet can also e-mail a doctor if it detects health problems. Added bonuses: The seat is voice-activated, and the toilet flushes automatically. (That is one pushy toilet.)
E
nterprising food scientists have recently unleashed amazing new things at state fairs around the U.S., deep-frying things never before thought eligible for deep-frying.
•
Bubblegum.
Marshmallows flavored with bubblegum essence, then battered, fried, and sprinkled with Chiclets.
•
Butter.
Balls of butter are frozen, then breaded and fried.
•
Chicken-Fried Bacon.
The bacon is drenched in buttermilk, then breaded and deep-fried.
•
Fried Pop-Tarts.
It’s three breakfast treats in one! It’s a Pop-Tart stuffed into donut batter, then fried up like a donut and topped with Fruity Pebbles cereal.
•
Fried Salad.
Salads don’t have to be healthy. This is a tortilla filled with spinach, ham, cheese, chicken, tomatoes, and lettuce, then deep-fried and served on a bed of lettuce that no one will ever eat.
•
Fried Frito Pie.
Frito Pie is a southern favorite: a bowl of Fritos corn chips topped with chili, cheese, and onions. The fried version takes balls of chili, cheese, and onions, and rolls them in a breading made with crushed Fritos.
•
Fried Chicken Skin.
No meat necessary.
A
company called Phoenix-Fly (whose motto is “Human Flight Innovations”) sells several versions of what it calls a Wingsuit. The Wingsuit is, essentially, a voluminous full-body tracksuit that fans out in the wind and allows you to hurl yourself out of airplanes and off of cliffs without dying (usually). As the name suggests, most Wingsuit models have large flaps of fabric along the sides that look like wings, eliminating the need for a silly parachute.
The Wingsuit website explains that to even be eligible to purchase a Wingsuit, you have to have completed at least 200 skydives. Ominously, it also indicates that several people have died “so far” in Wingsuit-clad jumping mishaps.
Prices vary; $580 gets you the most basic model of Wingsuit, which looks like a workaday nylon track suit, while for $1,690 you can upgrade to the deluxe Vampire model, which is custom-made for each buyer and looks sort of like what you’d get if you sewed yourself into a camping tent. But hey, if you’re the type who doesn’t mind jumping off of a skyscraper without a parachute, you probably also don’t mind looking like a flying squirrel while doing it.
H
igh heels are uncomfortable, they’re awkward, and there’s a good chance you’ll break your neck while wearing them. They’re also not a product of the 20th century—they date to ancient Egypt. Those ancient shoes, which were made out of leather and held together with intricate laces, were all the rage among the higher classes circa 3500 B.C.
But one thing the Egyptians most certainly didn’t have back then were training wheels for the clunky shoes. While you probably won’t find a pair of “High-Heel Training Wheels” at the nearest Lady Foot Locker, photos of homemade versions have been passed around online for years. Most of the images feature conventional shoes with repurposed toy-car wheels attached to the heels, offering support for those learning how to walk around in the godforsaken things.
Kenji Kawakami, the magazine editor responsible for the Japanese art of
Chindogu
(
see here
), in addition to plenty of ridiculous inventions, may have been the first person to dream up the silly but brilliant devices. While you would think that every young and fashionable gal on the planet would have a pair in her closet, these shoes have yet to become commonplace. Why? Well, among other reasons, the wheels would probably only work well on perfectly smooth surfaces. And stairs would be a challenge.
T
here’s really nothing better than kicking back on a nice day with a tall, frosty beer, either in the backyard, on the beach, or on the porch. The problem with that is that while the sun warms you up nicely, it also warms up your bottle or can of beer, which isn’t nice.
It’s not like there aren’t solutions to this problem. 1) You could drink your beer really fast, but too much beer + sun = naps. 2) The ever-popular foam “beer koozie” wraps around a can and keeps a beer cold, but really only because it blocks the warmth of your hand. It also only works for cans. 3) The Beerbrella.
Patented in 2003, and available in lots of novelty catalogs, the Beerbrella is a pint-size umbrella with a beer-bottle-size plastic clip at the bottom. Simply clip it onto a tall one, and the umbrella shrouds your beer in darkness, away from the warming and beer-ruining rays of the sun.