Electrified water wasn't dangerous the charge usually stopped before people came in contact with it. But it also proved ineffective — it doesn't work to wash your clothes without soap, and, for most practical circumstances, electrified water didn't sterilize much at all. The Fiske Reading Device: so cozy! Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske was a celebrity inventor with many inventions and accomplishments to his name, like adding telescopic sights to ship guns.
That might be why people thought the Fiske Reading Machine, invented in , would be the next big thing in literature. The basic idea was that books would be printed onto small pages in really tiny letters, and readers would hold modified magnifying glasses up to their eyes to read.
As inconvenient as it sounds, Scientific American ran a piece listing all the advantages that Fiske machines would supposedly have over over old-fashioned books:. The invention got attention far and wide, from the New York Times to literary digests , and Popular Mechanics trumpeted tests that showed Fiske's reader didn't affect reading speed.
In the end, Fiske's reading machine never took off. Mass-market paperbacks grew in the s and s, possibly negating one of the reading machine's key advantages. Realistically, however, people probably just didn't want to hold a magnifying glass up to their eyes for hours at a time.
The Welte-Mignon was a twist on the player pianos that existed in the early s — pianos that played pre-recorded music using automated cylinders. While most player pianos emphasized the music, Welte-Mignons emphasized the actual performance. Famous pianists could sit down at a Welte-Mignon and play songs, and then the piano would "record" their performance on rolls.
People could then take the rolls, put them in their home Welte-Mignon, and listen to the exact same performance. A few similar inventions worked the same way, but the Welte-Mignon was the most famous. It was supposed to be the future of music.
In an ad , conductor and composer Walter Damrosch called it "without doubt the most remarkable musical invention of our age. But the automated piano was eventually surpassed by the record player — which offered better options for listeners and artists alike. Recording of Welte rolls was finished by you can read more about its history here. This is the submarine tube. Don't you wish you had one? The submarine tube, invented by Charles Williamson in the s, was once thought to be the future of underwater photography.
The idea was simple: put a sphere underwater and connect it to the surface using a large waterproof tube. Williamson originally wanted to use the device to find treasure and pearls underwater the New York Times thought the "ingenious Scot" would find millions.
Later, the device was touted as a way to see the ocean like never before. Submarine tube footage appeared in 20, Leagues Under the Sea , sketch artists used it to make amazing new drawings of undersea life , and one submarine tuber caught an epic picture of a diver right before he killed a shark.
But as wonderful as the submarine tube was, it didn't end up being the future of undersea exploration. The advent of small, waterproof cameras in the s made it more practical to send a diver down to capture ocean life instead of an entire tube. With better options available, submarine tubes became a historical quirk. Spring spokes still look pretty cool.
Popular Mechanics. As early as , automobile manufacturers tried to create elaborate spring spoke wheels to make car rides smoother. In , Popular Mechanics suggested that these new spring wheel would make pneumatic tires a thing of the past. Granted, spring spokes weren't so crazy in an age when wooden wheels were still common. And, arguably, spring spoke tires were less a fad than a failed alternative they were the Betamax to the pneumatic tire's VHS.
And they were everywhere: Research in Motion, as BlackBerry was then called, sold more than 50 million of the devices in RIM failed to keep up with the times, stubbornly sticking with its trademark physical keyboard rather than adopting an iPhone-like full touchscreen, which quickly became fashionable.
By , BlackBerry was selling only about 4 million devices annually. The first mainstream product to fit our digital lives into our pockets, the original Palm Pilot PDA sold a million units in its first year alone, which makes it hard to brand the device a failure.
That Palm was never able to convert the beachhead it established in mobile computing into a smartphone empire is one of the biggest tragedies in all of tech.
Acquired by HP in , Palm has devolved into a zombie brand, continually churning out handheld devices that neither sell well nor move the ball forward. Today, it feels more clear than ever that electric cars will be at least a part of our automotive future. Upstart electric automaker Tesla is leading the charge, having sold over 76, vehicles in But it was a legacy Detroit company, General Motors, that put the first mass-produced electric vehicle on the road. The GM EV-1, available between and , was a hit with the small number of customers who got to lease one.
They were only leased, not sold, and less than 2, were made. But GM ultimately decided that electric vehicles were too niche, controversially scrapping the program and sending most EV-1s to the crushers. But the company played a vital role in the way tech develops through the antitrust lawsuit it won against Microsoft, a decision with implications that still influence the industry today.
This merging was arguably brilliant and too far ahead of its time. And it certainly helped popularize the basic concept of social media and online profiles. But this once-king of social media was overtaken by rival Facebook around What happened? Facebook, which now boasts 1. Advertisement 11 AltaVista At a time when the idea of retrieving answers to questions by typing a question into a computer seemed like magic, Altavista thrived.
So what went wrong with Altavista? No one seemed to know what to do with it, which means it ended up being neglected and was poorly managed. They could be towed directly to the battle zone and easily flown to exactly the right spot. Although initial tests were successful, the winged tanks never made it into popular use. Better planes were developed first and are still used today to air drop tanks at their destinations. The demise of this strange-looking contraption was a combination of poor timing and a lack of foresight by its makers.
Poor timing because it came out in the s just before cassette players and Walkmen would corner the market…lack of foresight because, come on, a record player that you carry around with you? Anyone who has ever used a record player could tell you what a terrible idea that is. If a group of people gathered together to protest, for example, the police could mow them down with a humongous fortified vehicle complete with poisonous gas streams.
This hulking machine was patented in but thank goodness never built.
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