Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions (28 page)

MORE DUMB USB GADGETS

G
okiraji Cockroach:
Want to see people scream at the sight of a cockroach without having to worry about bug-borne diseases? This fake insect moves across any surface via a USB–powered remote control. It also has a glow-in-the-dark backside.

Light Therapy:
This device, which mounts onto a computer, simulates the light of a sunny day, aiding in the body’s production of antidepressant hormones. It also comes with a car adapter, so that only the traffic can bum you out.

Yanko AromaUSB:
Are you getting complaints at work about the smell of the microwaved leftovers you had for lunch? Simply fill the AromaUSB with any fragrance oil and plug it into your computer. A cool mist will emanate and give you the best-smelling cubicle at the office.

Thanko Necktie Clip Cooler:
Outdoor formal events in the middle of the summer no longer mean profuse sweating in a suit. This tie clip includes a small fan that blows cool air upward, which means that men can keep cool and be fashionably cool at the same time, or as much as they can while awkwardly holding a laptop in front of themselves at an outdoor formal event.

iShaver:
It’s roughly the size of an iPhone, but flip the lid and it’s an electric razor that gets recharged by plugging it into a USB port. (Just don’t text with it—the last person who tried lost two fingers.)

THE DOUBLE CIGARETTE HOLDER

H
ave you ever seen an old movie where a glamorous socialite or elegant European lady takes a sultry drag on a cigarette held away and aloft of her face by a long, shiny cigarette holder? Those were a pretty fancy way to make smoking look extra-cool (smoking was cool before we knew it was deadly). But if everybody in the old-timey days, in this case the 1920s and 1930s, used cigarette holders, a truly fancy person had to set themselves apart from the hoi polloi with the next generation of cigarette holder: the
double
cigarette holder.

The idea began in books. Bulldog Drummond, the hero detective of a series of 1920s novels by Herman Cyril McNeile, carried around a cigarette holder that simultaneously burned and brought the smoke down. Bulldog’s “held Turkish one side, Virginian the other.” Because with the double cigarette holder, you didn’t have to choose which kind of tobacco you wanted.

It looked like a pitchfork with two prongs.

ROOFIN’ UP VERMONT

W
inters are harsh in Winooski, Vermont; temperatures in the tiny town can drop as low as -20° F. As you can probably imagine, the heating bills around there tend to be a wee bit higher than the national average.

In 1979, during America’s second major energy crisis in less than a decade, Winooski’s residents grew increasingly frustrated with the rising cost of heating oil. The town’s civic leaders decided to do something about it. During a dinner one night with his fellow bureaucrats, Mark Tigan, director of the Winooski Community Development Corporation, came up with a solution: Build a gigantic dome over the town.

Now keep in mind that this was the ’70s. Sci-fi movies and novels of the time featured futuristic communities protected by domes. At the time, Tigan’s idea didn’t seem completely nuts. Still, nobody had ever really tried to do something like that before, so Tigan and Winooski would be real scientific pioneers.

Tigan had his staff quickly put together a study. They estimated that a one-square-mile dome over the town could reduce residents’ heating bills by up to 90 percent annually. Still, Winooski’s city council remained skeptical until Tigan and his staff pointed out that the project could attract a windfall in grant money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The people of Winooski were on board from the very
beginning, convinced that the dome would turn their frigid town into a tropical paradise, albeit an artificial one.

Tigan spent most of early 1980 coming up with solutions for all of the possible logistical problems. Vehicles with combustion engines would be banned from the dome, meaning residents would have to get around inside via electric cars or a yet-to-be-built monorail. Temperature would be regulated by pumping in air and heating it, or cooling it, with large fans. Tigan contacted a conceptual architect who drew up blueprints based on domed homes from around the world.

While officials at HUD wanted to fund the dome, President Jimmy Carter, who was facing a tough reelection campaign at the time and was worried that goofy projects like this might cost him a second term, personally nixed Tigan’s plans. A citywide dome has yet to be built in the United States. (And Carter still lost.)

LINT LIZARD

S
ometimes an invention ingeniously solves a problem and takes care of a need that humans have struggled with forever. Sometimes it’s a modern improvement on an old design that makes life a little easier. And sometimes it’s just a smaller version of an existing device that works just fine. Or it replaces an incredibly easy, minor chore that most people have no problem taking care of by hand.

The Lint Lizard falls into the last two categories. It’s a tiny vacuum hose attachment you use to suck the lint out of a clothes dryer. Most lint accumulates in the lint trap, which you empty by hand after every load so as not to start a fire. Maybe you even occasionally vacuum it out, to get all the nooks and crannies in there clean, with your regular vacuum attachment. Well, stop it, because the Lint Lizard is here to replace that thing that worked just fine until now. But it’s not merely for emptying the lint trap—you still have to do that. To use the Lint Lizard, you have to completely remove the lint trap and clean out the place where the lint trap rests.

But the real problem is that, according to online customer reviews, the Lint Lizard doesn’t even work at doing the thing it’s supposed to do—it doesn’t suck very well, and it’s only 30 inches long. And, since it attaches to a regular vacuum cleaner, you’ve still got to lug the vacuum cleaner into the laundry room and put it right up against the dryer.

FAKE EGG YOLK SLICER

E
very single invention in this book is weird, but it takes a certain special something to transcend the simply unusual and soar into the realm of the truly esoteric. Let’s honor Eustathios Vassiliou, the inventor of the device that automates the creation of artificial egg yolks, then cuts them into disc-shaped slices.

Is there really a demand for this gizmo? Are the people who eat artificial eggs really that picky about things like shape, appearance, or flavor? Do words like “extrusion-head” and “disk-cutting process” belong anywhere near our food chain? These are all excellent questions, and we don’t really have answers for any of them, but we can tell you this: The minute anyone is in desperate need of a tube capable of squirting out mass quantities of artificial egg yolk and slicing it into disc-shaped segments, Vassiliou’s legacy (he died in 2006) will be there to answer the call of duty. (For what it’s worth, Vassiliou invented many things related to the creation and consumption of fake—but edible—eggish products.)

Until that day comes, we’ll just have to keep on getting by with boring old regular eggs that were extruded the traditional way, with nary a cutting wire in sight. Actually, you know what? We might just be good with a bowl of cereal and some toast, thanks.

PSYCHOTRONIC WISHING MACHINE

W
e’ve detailed a lot of weird and bizarre gadgets and gizmos in this book, both the oddly useful and the completely useless. But whatever the ultimate result, somebody out there put in the time, money, and work to create something out of thin air.

They completely wasted their time. They should have just bought a Psychotronic Wishing Machine from Life Technology Research International. They could have used it to wish their invention into existence, or skip the middle man and just wish for fame and wealth.

So how does the Wishing Machine work? It doesn’t. Okay, but here’s how it operates: You simply speak into the microphone on the Machine to tell it what you want. Then sit back and wait a few days for your wish to come true. There’s one big caveat from LTRI, though, to ensure wishes come true, and it’s not what you think—make sure the machine is on, as wishes are less likely to come true if the machine is turned off while a wish is being processed.

Nevertheless, results are not guaranteed from the magic box that grants wishes via “conscious human interaction and energy fields” and also costs $499.

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