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The best stuff ever advertised on late-night TV.
The Thighmaster. Sitcom star Suzanne Somers helped revive her sagging career by becoming a spokeswoman for this odd, butterfly-shaped exercise device. A series of infomercials featured the blonde bombshell using the ThighMaster and extolling the benefits of “squeezing your way to shapelier hips and thighs!” Late-night talk show hosts like David Letterman loved mocking the silly device, but Somers laughed all the way to the bank. Over 10 million Thigh-Masters have been sold to date.
The Rejuvenique Electrical Facial Mask. This one’s definitely the weirdest product on our list. The Rejuvenique was a motorized mask that debuted in 1995 and was hawked on late-night TV by former Dynasty star Linda Evans. Powered by a 9-volt battery, it supposedly gave users a “facial workout” comparable to eight sit-ups, or “face-ups,” as the ads called them. Those willing to wear the mask (which made them look like the love child of C-3PO and Hannibal Lecter) for 15-minute intervals, three to four times a week, were supposedly rewarded with a more youthful-looking face. It should come as no surprise that the Rejuvenique was the subject of an FDA investigation in the early 2000s.
The Flowbee. A San Diego carpenter created this “haircut vacuum attachment” in the late ’80s and started selling them out of his garage, marketing it to families fed up with the high cost of professional haircuts. The rather ridiculous Flowbee caught on after appearing in a series of infomercials, but it’s been widely panned by barbers and users alike. The problem: The device just isn’t very good at cutting hair—it did only one style of haircut (and sucked up the cut hair), somewhere between a bowl cut and a pageboy, a look that is neither flattering nor hip. It became a national joke in the ’90s, popping up in numerous TV shows and films like Wayne’s World, which featured a parody version called the Suck Kut. (Inventor: “As you can see, it sucks as it cuts.” Wayne: “It certainly does suck.”) Nevertheless, over two million Flowbees were sold by 2000.
The Tiddy Bear. It took decades, but someone finally came up with a way to prevent “shoulder pain” caused by seat belts. While that’s the alleged purpose of the Tiddy Bear, its name, and the voluptuous models featured in ads for the goofy product, suggest otherwise. The bear is, more or less, a Beanie Baby with a strap that fits over a seat belt, thus allowing for a more comfortable commute (if you happen to be a lady or a particularly buxom bloke). Talk show host Ellen DeGeneres once declared the Tiddy Bear “one of the best inventions I have ever found.”
ANTI-GRAVITY FLYING SAUCER
The flying saucer: It’s not just for aliens, by aliens! In the 1920s, American physicist Thomas Townsend Brown was studying the use of gravitational fields as a means of propulsion—in other words, using the power of gravity to make things go. He found that when he charged a capacitor to a high voltage, it moved toward its positive pole, creating an “ion wind.” He claimed that this effect proved a link between electrical charge and gravitational mass, and argued that it could be harnessed to create flight, seemingly free of both the strictures of mainstream physics and the need for gasoline.
In 1953 Brown demonstrated his “electrogravitic” propulsion for the U.S. Army at Pearl Harbor by flying a pair of metal disks around a 50-foot course. Energized by 150,000 volts, the disks, which were three feet in diameter, reached speeds of several hundred miles per hour. According to Brown, the military immediately classified the project and no more was heard about it. But throughout the 1950s, Brown’s work was cited as a possible explanation for how UFOs might be able to fly.
FANCY MAN MUSTACHE ACCESSORIES
The Mustache Cup and Glass. Patented by a man named Albert Schenck in 1879, this strange invention was designed to keep ’staches out of hot drinks. Picture a children’s sippy cup crossbred with a coffee mug. In addition to a side chamber that allowed liquid to pass into the drinker’s mouth, it also contained a miniature shelf on the top to keep facial hair out of the way.
The Mustache Guard. This one was created by Ruben P. Hollinshead in 1890 and was intended to help fanciful lads with mustaches eat meals. The guard, which sort of resembled a metallic bow tie, slipped over a gentleman’s facial hair and was held in place with strings that fitted around the ears. While practical, and capable of keeping a ’stache from getting in the way of spoonfuls of delicious soup, it was probably incredibly uncomfortable to wear.
The Mustache Trainer. This harebrained device, invented by Louis Auguste Allard in 1889, looked like a cruel dental appliance. Supposedly, it allowed the wearer to “train” his mustache and make it grow in a “desired form and position” with the use of hooks. Needless to say, the trainer wasn’t very good at helping men grow anything other than painful facial welts.
RELAXATION CAPSULE
In 1998, Dr. Claude Rossel opened his private clinic, Centre Biotonus Clinique Bon Port, with the intention of taking both the physical health and mental balance of patients into account. For those who can’t afford to pop over to Switzerland at the drop of a hat, however, the clinic has designed the Relaxman Relaxation Capsule.
If you’re stressed out about your stress levels, finding yourself increasingly desperate to unwind, and—we really can’t stress this particular bit enough—you have $50,000 lying around, then you could do a lot worse than spending it on a Relaxman. Purportedly soundproof, lightproof, and heatproof, the capsule features a water mattress that remains heated to body temperature and plays pre-programmed music to soothe whatever savage beast lies down inside.
The advertisement for the Relaxman cites source-free research that conveniently shows that “a 50-minute rest in the negative ion-enriched atmosphere effectively helps reduce tension, anxiety, depression, and fatigue.” The capsule is also supposedly pretty good for fixing folks’ jet lag and sleep imbalance, as well it should be.
DISSOLVABLE MOUTH BURN STRIPS
Mouth burn. We’ve all had it happen. That slice of hot pizza just looks so good, you can’t help but chomp down on it. And…youch! You burn the roof of your mouth. Or you’re just too eager to chug down that cup of coffee, and your tonsils get singed. Fortunately, the mouth heals very quickly—usually within a day or two—but while it does, you have no choice but to suffer through the pain. Until now.
Jason McConville, an associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of New Mexico, has come up with an ingenious solution for mouth burn. His team of researchers have developed a strip, similar to the ones used for breath fresheners, that delivers benzocaine, a local anesthetic used by dentists and in cough drops. The strip is applied to the burned area inside the mouth and slowly dissolves, releasing the benzocaine and providing sweet relief from the pain. There’s still a long approval process ahead, so it may be years before the strips appear in drug stores. But one day, we will at last have an over-the-counter remedy to a problem that has plagued humanity since the first intersection of cooking and impatience.
THE BIG HAIR HAT
This was patented in the early 1960s, when big hair was in fashion and big-haired ladies like Lady Bird Johnson were style icons. But Lady Bird was from Texas, where it doesn’t rain all that much, so she and other large-coiffed Texas ladies didn’t have to worry about the elements as much as the ladies around the country whose hair they were copying.
Sure, a hat would protect hair from rain and snow, but it would crush the delicate ’do. The Big Hair Hat guarded against the elements without putting undue pressure on the hair. It was an extra-thick, extra-tall, rigid shower cap. Simply slip it over the coif to protect the hair, while also looking like the pope.
SOUND PERFUME GLASSES
Have trouble remembering people after being introduced to them? A joint team of researchers in Japan and Singapore have developed a solution. Sound Perfume Glasses are high-tech specs that connect wirelessly to your smart phone. When you are introduced to someone, an app in your phone assigns your new friend an identifying sound as well as an associated scent chosen from amo
ng the eight solid perfumes stored in little pods on the earpieces of your glasses. Whenever you encounter that person again, your phone will connect to theirs, triggering your Sound Perfume Glasses to emit that person’s associated sound from tiny hidden speakers, while heated wires in the earpieces activate their signature fragrance, thereby reinforcing their identity—and, the developers claim, promoting deeper, more pleasurable emotional bonding.
That sounds a little weird, but filmmakers have been associating characters with evocative sounds for decades. (Detective John Shaft would be less memorable without his iconic theme song, for example.) And research shows that scent is an extremely effective trigger of emotional memory.
But it takes only a single glance at someone’s chunky white goggles with smells coming out of them to determine if this is a person you even want to know.
STYLUS ICONS
This has happened to you before: Your hands are just too full to drink your coffee and play with your touch-screen smartphone at the same time. What on Earth is a modern multitasker to do? The answer should be obvious: Attach a long stylus to your nose, so you can poke at your phone with it.
The nose-extending stylus was dreamed up by Dominic Wilcox, an artist who felt as though there simply weren’t enough options for those who wanted to use their touch-screen devices while in the bathtub. While it’s not commercially available, Wilcox did create a prototype. The long, cylindrical facemask nose stylus appears to attach to the head via two white shoelaces and comes straight from the 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut.
In other stylus news: For those of use whose chubby digits have been creating explorations of the dark recesses of AutoCorrect, there’s now a fingertip stylus. The idea is this: You wear the stylus on the tip of your finger, sort of like a cool goth fingertip ring, then when the mood strikes, you’ve got a fingertip so dainty only a couple of angels could dance upon it.
TAPEWORM TRAP
There’s got to be a better way to get rid of the common tapeworm, that parasite that lives in the human intestines and sucks away all of the nutrition you put into your body.
Okay, so it’s not much of a problem anymore, at least not in the developed world, or in places where basic sanitation precludes the once-frequent passing of parasites from one person to another via exposure to feces. In the 19th century, though, it was a real problem, and because it was the 19th century, doctors were quite stymied as to how to remove a tapeworm without invasive, highly dangerous surgery.
A physician named Alpheus Myers invented a tapeworm-removal device in 1854 that didn’t “employ medicines” or “cause much injury.” That doesn’t mean it was pleasant. Myers’s gadget was a cross between a plumbing snake and a fishing pole. After fasting for a day or to make the worm hungry, the patient then swallowed the device, a three-inch-long metal trap on the end of a metal chain. The trap went into the stomach; the other end hung out of the person’s mouth. The trap, outfitted with “any nutritious material,” would lure the worm and grasp its head, at which point the patient would drag out the trap, and the worm along with it.
TALKING BASEBALL CARDS
By the late 1980s, kids (and adults) were buying baseball cards not just out of love of the game, but also as an investment, fooled by a marketing campaign to make them think that buying mass-produced pieces of cardboard at inflated prices would make them rich someday. In 1989 LJN Toys tried to cash in on the newfound love of the old pastime, but at least they aimed to make it about collecting and statistics again.
They came out with the Sportstalk—a handheld device about the size of a Walkman that “played” electronic baseball cards. Each card, which looked like a normal baseball card, only slightly larger and slightly thicker, had a tiny vinyl record embedded in the back. The Sportstalk then just played the record. Through the built-in speaker the size of a quarter came two minutes of statistics about the player (voiced by nine-time All-Star Joe Torre), along with radio calls of famous plays, and players reminiscing about their biggest moments on the field. It probably failed because it cost too much—$28 for the player and $2 per card. Toys “R” Us ordered half a million Sportstalks and sold fewer than 100,000.
VACUUM TRAIN
The train of the future may well be a VacTrain, a “magnetic levitation” train that, theoretically, will travel at extremely high speeds through vacuum tunnels. Engineers are currently looking at the VacTrain as the basis of a global subway network between continents and even under the oceans. The lack of air resistance in a vacuum tunnel would allow a VacTrain to reach speeds of more than 4,000 mph, or five to six times the speed of sound. The 3,100 mile trip from New York to London would take about an hour.
The concept of intercontinental tunnel travel is not new. Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, was issued 2 of his 214 patents for work on VacTrain technology in the 1910s. In the 1970s, Dr. Robert M. Salter of the RAND Corporation proposed a VacTrain route down the northeast corridor of the United States, but the estimated $1 trillion price tag killed the project. Tunnel-boring technology has improved dramatically since then, and the project is back on the desks of engineers in China, the U.S., and England. Today the cost of a transatlantic tunnel is thought to be closer to $175 billion, which seems downright affordable in comparison.
TOPLESS SANDALS
The only way to get away from it all, to truly relax, to really commune with nature, is to walk around the Great Outdoors totally barefoot. Of course, that’s a terrible idea—the Great Outdoors is full of jagged rocks, pine needles, scorpions, and broken glass. Only a moron would walk around the Great Outdoors without any sort of protection on their feet.
Granted, they make those ultra-snug, second-skin-like running shoes that fit around your feet and even have little holes for each of your toes, but those look incredibly goofy, and your feet get hot in those on a hike or at the beach. Instead, you could go with the Topless Sandals. Essentially foot-shaped slabs of rubber, they are foot-shaped slabs of rubber that laboriously stick to the bottom of your feet when you trek through nature. (The manufacturer guarantees that you can remove the sandals when you need to, and that the sticky icky on the shoes will last for up to a year.) So the bottoms of your feet are protected and bound, but the tops of your feet are as free as a bird.
PIGEON-GUIDED MISSILES
Sometimes a dubious notion can come with an impressive pedigree. In 1944 the U.S. National Defense Research Committee, looking to step up the Navy’s attack capability against German battleships, engaged renowned researcher and boxer of children B. F. Skinner to help develop a missile-guidance system. Skinner was an unlikely choice for the job, because, while he was undoubtedly a brilliant fellow, he was—literally—no rocket scientist. Rather, his specialty was behavioral psychology.
Skinner had devised a method whereby a missile’s flight could be directed by trained pigeons riding in the nosecone. The pigeons watched the target on monitors and were conditioned with food rewards to keep the target centered onscreen by adjusting the missile thrusters with beak-activated switches.
Project Pigeon was scrapped when the Navy decided that its existing mechanical guidance systems were accurate enough for the task. Skinner later complained, “Our problem was that no one would take us seriously”—that is, the idea was rejected simply because it was unconventional. But there were practical considerations as well. Training and sustaining the pigeons was expensive and time-consuming, and the birds were, sadly, not reusable. The project was briefly revived in the early days of the Cold War but, like many a birdbrained scheme, never caught on.
IN-CAR RECORD PLAYER
In 1955 Columbia Records came up with a novel way to sell more records: Install record players in cars. Engineers solved the obvious problem of how to keep the needle on the record while the car rides along with a spring-loaded tonearm. The disc was also twice as thick and heavy as a regular record, which helped keep it from bouncing off the turntable.
Columbia talked Chrysler into making the Highway Hi-Fi an opt
ion on all new 1956 models, and produced 21 “Highway” records to go with it (mostly classical and Broadway cast albums). The main problem was that they didn’t know their audience: Teenage drivers were the ones who’d want to play records in the car, and they bought rock ’n’ roll music. But they didn’t buy very many new cars, and the adults who did weren’t much interested in a record player—Chrysler abandoned the concept after just two years.
ALUMINUM FACIAL SPA
The Indian sage Swatmarama wrote, “When the breath wanders, the mind also is unsteady.” While his words may have referred to breathing techniques during yoga, a more recent implication is that those who invest in the Aluminum Facial Spa will have the steadiest minds around. Produced by the Japanese company Akaishi, this aluminum mask covers its wearer’s entire face and uses their own lukewarm breath as a steam facial treatment. The mask fastens around the back of the neck via a Velcro strap using the time-honored hook-and-loop method, and snuggles the jaw—fans of Marvel Comics will find that it falls somewhere between the visages of Iron Man and Dr. Doom. Oh, right, and it’s also bright pink.
Although everyone breathes and sweats differently, the recommended usage time of the mask hovers at around 15 minutes per session, with the Amazon.com description for the product—which appears to have been translated from Japanese to English somewhat haphazardly—warning potential buyers, “Please discontinue use if symptoms are itching, and rash appeared in use or after use.” Lastly, while most would reasonably theorize that the mask should be rinsed with water after each use, the company also advises not to clean the mask with a washing machine, dryer, hair dryer, or iron.
Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Inventions Page 12
