MANY WOULD-BE INVENTORS CAUSED WORLD TO LAUGH

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 14, Issue 51, 14 October 1949, Page 3

MANY WOULD-BE INVENTORS CAUSED WORLD TO LAUGH

It is never wise to laugh at inventors, for so often in the pa3t they have had the last laugh. Apart from the works of Nature, everything in the daily life of man was invented by somebody at some time. There have never been any limits to the field for invention, for it is as boundless as the needs of mankind. Ever since the day when some unknown genius invented the first wheel, there have always ben ingenious folk who were anxious to make life easier—though some say more complicated—by inventing things.

Some Benefactors Some. of them, of course, were benefactors of the human race whose ideas have contributed immeasurably to our civilisation. But the cranks are always present, and never were they, more busy than during the past century. Now the misdirected' efforts of many of these well-meaning inventors has formed material for a most amusing book by Fred Coppersmith and J. L. Lynch. Many of the fantastic inventions dealt with in this book never got beyond the “paper” stage, others led to the bankruptcy of their optimistic sponsors, while a few enjoyed a modest'measure of success before they went out of fashion or were superseded by fresh novelties. It is difficult to believe that some of the extraordinary gadgets were ever meant to be taken seriously. Some inventors must have intended to invent a demand for their inventions!

Turning the pages with their amusing .illustrations, one feoon comes upon a reminder that hilarity should be tempered with respect for one of these “Heath Robinson” machines was the work of none other than Thomas Edison, the greatest inventor of them all. It seems that one of his women acquaintances complained that pedalling a sewing machine tired her feet. Edison 'remembered an old experiment in which sound waves were converted into power, so he constructed a sewing machine with .a membrane mounted on it just level with the workers’ mouth. All the seamstress had, to do was to keep on talking, and the sound waves of her voice were transformed into power which turned the machine.

Perhaps only a deaf man like Edison could have made such a device.

Another sewing machine which was actually used in some households in Britain, until it was banned, was powered by a dog on a leash running louncl a circular platform. Nervous Horses

But if some inventors were thoughtless about cruelty to animals there was at least one who went to the extreme in the other direction. He -was an American engineer who was concerned about the effect upon horses’ nerves when the new-fangled steam trams were introduced bn the streets of Boston, He suggested that the trams should be disguised to look like horses, and one vehicle camouflaged in this way actually ran for a time. History does not relate what the horses thought of it, but certainly the citizens found it diverting. The realm of transport has naturally been a happy hunting ground for the inventors, and here we find many weird and wonderful vehicles and vessels. Some of them do not look particularly safe, but hefie again the resourceful inventors have provided for the safety of travellers. For instance, a Frenchman wanted all trains to have rails running over their roofs, so that headon collisions could be averted by one train simply running right over the other and coming down safely on the other side.