When you think of famous inventors, you probably picture their signature breakthroughs. Yet there’s a whole world of bizarre forgotten creations that slipped through the cracks of history. Below, we dive into ten of those oddball inventions, each a glimpse into the quirky side of genius.
Bizarre Forgotten Creations Explored
10 Hiram Maxim’s Captive Flying Machines
Hiram Maxim, best known for the 1883 Maxim gun—the first fully automatic machine gun—didn’t stop at firepower. After his weapon became a staple of World War I and later evolved into the Vickers gun, Maxim turned his inventive eye toward the skies. To raise funds and drum up excitement for aeronautics, he designed an amusement ride for the 1904 Earl’s Court Exhibition.
The attraction, dubbed “Sir Hiram Maxim Captive Flying Machines,” was a swing‑style ride that swapped ordinary chairs for rocket‑shaped cars. Maxim originally wanted riders to control rudders and airfoils, but safety rules blocked the idea, prompting him to dismiss the contraption as a “glorified merry‑go‑round.” Nonetheless, the ride was a hit, spawning replicas at fairs across England. The Blackpool Pleasure Beach version still spins today, earning the title of Europe’s oldest operating ride.
9 Hugo Gernsback’s Isolator
Hugo Gernsback, the man behind the first sci‑fi magazine Amazing Stories and the namesake of the Hugo Awards, also dabbled in invention. Though his literary efforts earned mixed reviews and he earned the nickname “Hugo the Rat” from H.P. Lovecraft for stiffing writers on payment, Gernsback held dozens of patents.
One of his more eccentric patents was the “Isolator,” a helmet marketed as a sound‑proof, airtight sanctuary that required its own oxygen supply. He showcased the device in the 1925 issue of Science and Invention, even posing himself inside the helmet for the photograph. Despite the futuristic promise, the Isolator never entered production.
8 John Logie Baird’s Socks
John Logie Baird, celebrated for building the first working mechanical television in 1926, had a surprisingly varied early career. Before his TV fame, he invented a glass razor, pneumatic shoes for flat‑footed folks, and—most successfully—a special type of sock.
During World War I, Baird worked in a munitions factory and witnessed the dreaded trench foot that afflicted soldiers forced to wear wet socks for days. In response, he created the “Baird Undersock,” a secondary layer of socks soaked in moisture‑absorbing material and coated with antiseptic borax. The undersock quickly proved popular, letting Baird quit his factory job and market the product full‑time with soldier testimonials and sandwich‑board advertising.
7 Eugene Rimmel’s Toilet Vinegar
Eugene Rimmel, the 19th‑century cosmetics pioneer whose name still graces mascara tubes worldwide, also ventured into hygiene. One of his early successes was “toilet vinegar,” a blend of white vinegar, lavender extract, benzoin tincture, and various oils, steeped for ten days then filtered.
Initially marketed as a moisturizer or shampoo, users discovered it excelled at dissolving stubborn toilet stains. Rimmel promptly rebranded the concoction as a “tonic and refreshing adjunct to the toilet or bath,” touting its disinfectant power as superior to any Eau de Cologne of the era.
6 Leonardo Da Vinci’s Bronze Horse
In 1482, Leonardo da Vinci received a commission from Milan’s Duke Francesco Sforza to craft an equestrian monument—the Gran Cavallo. The proposed 7.3‑meter, 80‑ton bronze horse would have been the largest of its kind, cast as a single solid piece—a feat never attempted before.
Leonardo devised an entirely new casting method, documenting the process in his notebooks. Unfortunately, war with France forced the duke to reclaim the bronze for cannon production, halting the project. The clay model survived until 1499, when French troops destroyed it. Centuries later, a replica was finally erected thanks to American enthusiast Charles Dent.
5 John Napier’s Bones
Scottish polymath John Napier, famed for inventing logarithms and popularising the decimal point, also created a practical calculation aid: Napier’s Bones. The device comprised a set of numbered rods mounted on a plate, enabling multiplication and division through simple addition and subtraction. Napier also described configurations for extracting square and cube roots, borrowing from earlier lattice multiplication techniques used in the Arab and Indian worlds.
Decades later, Pascal and Schickard built the first true mechanical calculators, yet Napier’s Bones persisted as a useful tool, evolving into devices like the Genaille‑Lucas ruler (1891) and, most famously, the slide rule (1621) invented by William Oughtred. NASA even relied on slide rules during the Apollo program.
4 Nikola Tesla’s Egg Of Columbus
Legend has it that Christopher Columbus once proved a point by standing an egg on its tip. One hundred years later, Nikola Tesla took that anecdote literally at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (the World Columbian Exposition). Amid the “War of Currents,” Tesla needed a dramatic demonstration of his alternating‑current induction motor.
He built an “Egg of Columbus” device: an iron‑core stator wrapped with multiple coils that, when energized, generated a rotating magnetic field. The field not only balanced a copper egg on its tip but also set it spinning on its major axis, showcasing gyroscopic principles. Though the original was lost, replicas now reside in museums worldwide.
3 Harold Edgerton’s Loch Ness Monster Hunter
Harold “Papa Flash” Edgerton, the inventor of the electronic flash and a pioneer of high‑speed photography, sought fresh challenges after his 1930s breakthrough. By the 1970s, he was dabbling in sonar and deep‑sea imaging.
In 1972, fellow inventor Robert Rines pinged Edgerton for assistance locating the Loch Ness Monster, believing Edgerton’s expertise could pierce the loch’s murky waters. Although Edgerton wasn’t a believer, he relished the technical puzzle. He worked on specialized equipment, even drafting a new “streak camera” in 1987 to capture fast‑moving objects underwater.
The expedition never produced Nessie, but the research yielded other discoveries: a World War II Wellington bomber wreck and stone circles at the loch’s bottom (later identified as ordinary rocks from construction boats). Moreover, many of the imaging techniques Edgerton devised filtered into mainstream camera technology.
2 Thomas Edison’s Electric Pen
Thomas Edison, holder of over a thousand patents, scored an early commercial win with the electric pen. At 28, while tinkering with telegraph improvements, Edison noticed that the printing telegraph’s stylus punctured paper, leaving a faint imprint.
Partnering with Charles Batchelor, Edison fashioned a duplicating system: a wet‑cell battery, an iron‑cast frame, an ink roller, and the electric pen itself, which punched thousands of tiny holes into perforated paper to create a stencil. The stencil could then be fed into a duplicator, yielding up to 15 copies per minute and a total of 15,000 copies from a single stencil.
This invention became the first commercial appliance to house an electric motor and marked Edison’s inaugural foray into mass production. It thrived globally until the typewriter rendered it obsolete.
1 Alexander Graham Bell’s Vacuum Jacket
Beyond the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell pursued a myriad of interests, from early aviation to medical devices. After helping to save President James Garfield with a metal detector, Bell faced a personal tragedy: his third child, Edward, died shortly after birth in 1881 due to breathing difficulties.
Motivated to prevent such outcomes, Bell engineered a primitive artificial respirator he called the “vacuum jacket.” The device consisted of an iron cylinder encircling a patient’s chest; a hand pump adjusted internal pressure, compressing and releasing the chest to move air in and out of the lungs.
In 1882, Bell miniaturised the jacket for animal use, successfully reviving a lamb. Though never adopted on a large scale, the vacuum jacket demonstrated principles later refined in the iron lung.