Brainstorms and Mindfarts: The Best and Brightest, Dumbest and Dimmest Inventions in American Histor

so greetings from the national archives flagship building in washington d.c which sits on the ancestral lands of the nakacha tank peoples i'm david fario archivist of the united states and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with jim downey co-author of brainstorms and mind farts before we begin i'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our youtube channel on wednesday june 2nd at 7 pm pulitzer prize winning historian annette gordon reed presents her latest book on juneteenth she will recount the origins of juneteenth and its integral importance to american history this program is presented in partnership with james madison's montpelier and on tuesday june 8th at 7 pm former president george h.w bush's chief of staff gene becker will tell us about her book on the bush post-presidency the man i knew joining gene in conversation is warren finch director of the george bush presidential library in his new book written with tom connor jim downey promises to bring us the best and brightest dumbest and dimmest inventions in american history the book presents patents for products and services that change daily life as well as the unusual and peculiar my own favorite which i was delighted to see in the book is eye protector for chickens patton did on june 16 1903 the drawing accompanying the patent application shows a plump chicken sporting wire rim glasses looking a bit like an avian benjamin franklin the national archives has roughly four million patents in its holdings and the archivist who works with them shared his own quirky favorite in 1887 application to patent an apparatus for propelling balloons the surprise source of propulsion birds such as one or more eagles vultures condors after today's talk you may discover your own favorites i'm sure jim downey will tell us his jim downey is an author career copywriter award-winning npr essayist and designer jim attended nyu's school of visual arts and worked in the advertising department at new york's bondwood teller department store followed by a stint at town and country magazine's editorial department following a move to westport connecticut he commenced a decades-long career as a freelance copywriter with multiple national and international clients he's also the author co-author and co-producer of over a dozen books including the national best-selling parodies which are in my personal collection martha stewart's excruciatingly perfect weddings martha stewart's better than you at entertaining in the smythe and how come gardening catalog his projects range from humor and satire to pop culture politics design and style now let's hear from jim downey thank you for joining us today good morning are we on are we up there we go i think i'm not seeing any uh art here we get the slide up there we go hello uh hello and good morning from olympia washington in the great pacific northwest uh it's lovely to be here i never thought one thing i never thought i'd see my name in the same sentence as national archives so i'm a proud i'm a proud guy today so my partner tom connor and i uh we've done quite a few books and projects together we love details and we love the inception of things and we love inventions and we're i'm a very technical i mean i kind of like all that technical stuff and tom to a certain extent does too and we thought boy here's an area that hasn't really been looked into as far as um uh being able to uh write a cohen concise book about it but uh we feel like after we look through hundreds and hundreds of these patents some of them dead serious and wonderful and you know telephone radio all that kind of stuff um we ran into time after time we ran into frivolous hard to believe that they're patented inventions it's it's astounding so along with the uh the regular inventions that everybody is familiar with we came up with about half the book as ridiculous uh uh unbelievably strange and weird and you can't figure out what the guy was thinking invention so if we'll put up the first slide we'll take it away next slide okay here is the pencil with an eraser um the pencils gone through went through so many iterations and um it was basically the graphite encased in in a tube of wood that got through first but then people wanted to figure out how can we get this stuff out of there and they finally one guy put this guy h lindman put a rubber hard rubber tip on the end of one of these uh these pencils and lo and behold it erased it and uh uh it's pretty obvious but it took a long time to get there uh we are now into the billions and billions and billions sold every year even in spite of computers they're still selling these pencils and i know for sure the experience i've had with them as i i use them to fill in those little black dots on the on when i was a kid filling the little black dots on the on the test that's about the only only use i ever had for them but boy they they're still there and going strong okay next slide the paper clip so imagine it's turn of the century um and down you're in a downtown business district and uh you're taking a walk along and you turn into what appears to be an office and uh in there are rows and rows and rows of clerks typing you know clacking away all that stuff and there's no barely electricity the cities had been electrified by this point but not by much um and uh compare that to a modern office where it's cubicles or it's just desks in a row and guys sitting there ladies sitting there and they're all on their computer screen and it's silent and it's you know you know we all know what those uh those cubicle farms look like well there's one thing in common that spreads across all these years all these this this time and would be in both these offices the turn of the century and the modern one and that is the paper clip um we don't probably use them as much now obviously because this we're much less paper oriented than we were back then everything was paper but uh five or six iterations and the guy finally got the patent this is the first patent here uh the one the ones we're used to now the oblong ones came along a little bit later but there it was and now it's uh it has never left and these are out there you'll these are in every drawer in your kitchen that has suppliers it'll also have 15 paper clips in the bottom of it and i'm pretty sure i'm right on that so there's the paper clip next up uh here's one of my favorites velcro we've all heard the sound of a who on the planet hasn't heard the sound of a velcro surface being ripped apart from another one um it's it's all athletics it's just everywhere military well this came to be uh in uh 1950 in 1950 or so a gentleman named uh dim a friend a french gentleman named de mestral george de mestral was walking his dog in the in the alps in the in the mountain mountain pathway and along the way he noticed when he'd come home or even as it occurred that these birds kept attaching themselves to his pants i mean we've all been walking in a meadow and you know those little birds that can catch on your pants or especially the coat of your dog which upset him enough so he wanted to see what he could do about it and um he looked under a microscope at these at these little birds and he realized they're basically a hook one one of the little tendrils that comes up off the surface forms a hook with an open jaw as you can see in this uh right in this illustration right here and then he realized well i'll make i can maybe i could make something that this would loop into and he invented hook and loop which is which is the patent for velcro and and uh it worked and uh that's talk about it's everywhere the astronauts use it everybody has velcro in their life i always they said i remember saying uh that that flashlight that's hanging by your back door that's been there for four years and the batteries are long gone but the velcro is still holding it to the wall so velcro is something we can count on and it's uh it was it's a wonderful take from using a natural idea and making it into a industrial product sold by the billions the world around next slide uh secret communication system in the uh 30s there was a movie actress there was a lovely movie actress named hedy lamarr and she was uh known as the most beautiful woman in the world and uh what very few people knew about her she was signed by mg and she all the movies big big big star lovely brunette but she was she wasn't happy to just be a star she wanted to to do something to be of use um and she had heard that the that they they were having trouble uh the army was having trouble with its communication devices because they could be listened to once some once the enemy uh people locked onto a channel they could hear once they broke the code which was easy back then they could hear everything that was was being said so the the genius thing that hedy lamarr came up with was what if we create a circuit that will channel hop channel hop from one frequency to the next quickly efficiently and and so fast that it would be undetectable but also the fact that it kept changing channels hopping uh means that the enemy couldn't let the minute they landed on one it was on to the next one so it worked and it was a big it really helped in world war ii and it's actually a very sophisticated version of it is being uh still used today um the channel hopping so uh this was a the invention of a movie star in hollywood that helped to win the war so not bad miss lamar uh next slide what needs to be said here wright brothers flying machines these you know the two bicycle mechanics came up with with talk about changing the world and they changed everything forever uh of course uh before them a long way before them as as he was in so many inventions came leonardo da vinci and the exquisite mind of of leonardo had come up with a glider he he began to understood understand the the shape of an airfoil which is the the shape that causes a plane to to lift um the pro the only problem he would have had working stuff except he couldn't find anything to make the plan out of that was light enough back then in 1450 to uh that was light enough to actually uh work because the thing weighed you know a thousand pounds and you couldn't get it off the ground well wright brothers got past all of that stuff and they their their first uh they did a few prototypes and this was the kitty hawk one that's shown here single engine light worked they flipped a coin and you know i think it was will i'm going to get this wrong that was either it was either wilbur or orville let's just presume that and uh they flipped a coin and on that windy day and uh in kitty hawk they they got 12 feet off the ground and flew it and flew it and flew it and here we go next slide yeah here's a good one somebody somewhere this this it's a the patents under a company name airbus this was done hard to believe this was the patent was given in 2015 just six years ago seven years ago the idea here is we know how how crammed it is when you get in in the normal sort of passenger area not first class but the regular coach area in an airplane i personally i'm a big tall guy and i i can't stand it i can't get my feet to move nothing well this idea was we need to get more passengers on a plane so let's what do you say we have a second row above the heads of the bottom row over here and then we stack them like start literally like sardines in a can we'll just stack them up and it apparently gave no thought at all for passenger comfort safety how do you get your peanuts if you've if you're in a stack of humans how do you order a coke all of that stuff it's it's beyond belief that this even got a patent in 2015 but no it isn't not in this book it's not beyond belief next slide aha so here we were in the 80s and uh general motors um one of the vice presidents there a guy named john delorean um was a big it was a big deal he was a young up-and-comer at gm and he's uh his his uh first car that he sort of ran developed on his own was the pontiac tempest and it was uh a big hit and especially when delorean thought we need to expand the market for this this uh these kind of cars what if we take the pontiac tempest body and put a big giant a v8 engine twice the size of the one that's already in there and he invented the muscle car at that point and his success there um lasted quite a while and then he thought he's gonna i'm gonna make my own car so he just had this car designed the delorean made out of stainless steel um a million production problems um it was never a clean sort of effort uh it was sort of doomed and it didn't sell well and uh it sort of went down went down the tubes eventually but he didn't apparently there was a problem with some taxes and and the government sort of entrapped him into saying that he was he did a major he ran out he was paying for the the last development money and manufacturing money on this car design he needed a lot of money and the story goes that he was involved in a multi-hundred million dollar uh cocaine uh importing deal smuggling deal and it was the end unfortunately for him he made the deal with the guys from the fbi who were setting him up so that was the end of delorean um he got he got uh he got in trouble for that one uh but but um meanwhile this car gained fame in the back to the future as the had the flux capacitor and all that jazz so there was a a [Music] crazy story and a doomed a doom club the main thing was it wasn't fast that's that's what really upset people it was had a little engine it didn't go fast so that's that next slide aha need i say more than viagra the closest thing to a sure thing that's ever been invented oddly enough in development for a heart medicine uh it was which was the original design it was designed to for heart disease and and implementing help for the heart uh they noticed a side effect uh with viagra and in this in this airspace i'm not going to say what that side effect is but i guess we can all presume to understand what that side effect was and there was a welcome side effect to to uh the company and also to the hundreds of millions worldwide that uh are graced with its uh capacity to uh increase male order shall we say and uh keep things um happy around the household so that's the and but there were lawsuits or early on there was a lawsuit that the guy had a side effect that he accidentally took too much viagra and he claimed he had blue lightning bolts coming out of his fingers so that's we'll see how that went in court okay next slide ah this is there's a woman named elizabeth holmes an inventor a young prodigious sort of smart smartest girl in the room always top of her class i think it was usc or ucla stanford maybe i forget but she hated a finger prick to get when they take your blood that she couldn't stand it it made her crazy and she wanted to do something to help that out so she came up with the idea that uh create an algorithm or a physical machine with also all the software that would go with it that you could put one drop of blood in and it would diagnose she claimed almost all diseases in one drop of blood she could get all the blood analysis you ever would want so she formed uh a company uh theranos which is a portmanteau of therapy and diagnosis theranos and was so good at pitching this idea that she got unbelievable people to sign on to it i think was george schultz secretary of state big corporations she got fun you know she pitched it so well and it seemed so doable and her prototypes looked so promising uh that she got funding and she got funding in the billions unfortunately it never it was never it never worked she never got it to happen she couldn't make it happen for even one one diagnosis on one drop of life so the whole thing kind of fell apart and but she did a sort of a scientific ponzi scheme which is by the way being tried in court right now so all of this is alleged i should say that i'm alleged sheila was alleged to um and uh she's the the couple she's in court the company's gone she was the richest woman in america for a while now she's worth nothing and it's uh it's just a big it's just a big uh a scheme that just never worked so there was a that was uh the blood analysis machine that never was next slide the mail chastity device hmm need i say more it's once again male order occasionally uh needs to be constrained shall we say for whatever the reasons political personal military um and this device uh is is a way of stopping the proceedings shall we say and easy to use well if you can see the drawing it's far from easy to use and i guess the very idea of it would stop the the proceeding so simple but impossible this was again this device was patented in 2013 so they're still trying next slide ah this is this is one of my favorites the forehead support device apparently mr eric page a citizen uh thought that using the facilities in a men's washroom the up the standing facility um was for some reason to him a shaky uh situation he couldn't he he always felt that he needed to triangulate uh his posture so that he was uh would have a place to hold hold his head against the wall and still leave both hands uh free for the uh proceedings uh so this was his design it says you apparently what one does is you go into a male bathroom washroom and you take this invention which has suction cups on it and you stick it on the wall in front of you then it's cushioned and it has four suction cups as you can see right here um and then uh you lean your forehead against it and that you feel you've been it's triangulated and you feel steady like a like a three like a three-legged milking stool so that got patented everybody it's hard to believe but it did that that never last i don't think any anybody ever bought one of those uh next slide ah the self-tipping hat so here we are in victorian times a time of extreme manners uh society was prim and proper there were ways to greet women on the street by men would greet by uh just you know touching their head uh is one way but then occasionally you'd have a full introduction where it would require a bow and a removal of your hat in other words to salute the uh the person you're taught you're describing or talking to um this guy said why should i what all the effort that's needed to reach up and take my hat off my head that's just too much effort for anybody to do so i'm going to invent a mechanical machine that will tip my hat for me so here it is uh and what it does is it's it's first of all the the thing must weigh five pounds because it's got a it's got an automatic clockwork pendulum driven mechanism inside it that requires you to bow as you uses the energy of gravity as you bow forward and reach to your brim of your hat to remove it and you come back up you don't have to touch it anymore because the device inside will will prop it up over your head as if what it must look like to a viewer is crazy but it's a mechanical engine to tip your hat for you i need to say no more they made zero of this one i don't know if they ever made one next slide barbie well this is one of the greatest success stories ever in in in i guess you'd call it toys like you know i presume it would be a toy not to millions of billions of girls around the world so this came out of a toy manufacturer and it was a husband and wife team and they they noticed they were world travelers and they noticed in germany the popularity of a of a doll uh you know a barbie size doll but in germany it was supposed to be a tribute to a sort of shady woman character over there not really a lady of the evening but on the edge perhaps she might have worked in a dance hall kind of thing kind of a little bit of a wild woman but they like the idea of the articulated arms and legs and all that and they came back and after trials and tribulations they uh came up with barbie and uh it's the success story of all success stories it's you can get the now there's everything barbie houses cars uh boats uh mansions the whole barbie everything and it's everywhere and uh it's it's garnered billions and billions of dollars so there's barbie next slide is this is a great one this guy ross eugene long the third thought you know what here's my dog i love my dog what does my dog love to do he loves to chase a stick so i'm gonna grab a stick and i'm gonna throw it all day long until he gets stuck excuse me tired so for some reason he thought that the stick itself could be improved by making a stick out of some other man-made material painting it to look like a stick and having it be as basically a stick and that was his invention and so he took the stick that was on the ground and jettisoned that quickly and and pulled out this man-made stick which my guess is he throw it and the dog would have nothing to do with it because it's made out of plastic but we'll see about that anyway the dog toy which is a stick next slide dish washing machine the 1880s a woman named cochran had married a successful remember all this a successful mercantile guy out west and soon she was the richest person around and um she was famous for uh throwing big parties with all the modern conveniences that she could muster up and this you know back then people that came to her parties didn't know what a convenience was they just came to the party because they just you know watered the hogs and slapped the you know all that stuff so she after one of these parties she goes why should i i just threw the party why should i be the one that has to do the dishes so uh she invented the dish washing machine and out in the barn out back got some hose full of water and an agitator and and did it and miss cochran invented the dishwasher all by her lonesome stuff itself way out there in the in the in the far west uh next one next slide there we go microwave oven this was a a self-taught um physicist and and he had about nine degrees by the time he got very this percy spencer he was working for raytheon um the big military industrial uh uh company and in the late 40s and they were playing around with with microwaves on an industrial level and he was working on a machine you know the size of a big refrigerator and he was standing near it and he was adjusting it and making you know powering it up and down and up and down and he felt something odd in his pocket and he reached in and the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted and he had no idea until he put it together he goes it was the microwaves that melted my chocolate so that's the whole idea how the whole idea to use microwaves in civilian form as a household appliance came out of the chocolate bar melting in in the inventor's pocket and that's where that one come from do we have another one that's it aha uh some questions are coming in here by the way you're free to call in this is live now we'd love to i'd love to not be be not able to answer your question live so you're invited um first one is what do most successful patents have in common the the idea that i think that it's a tr it's kind of a tricky question because these are all so different but i think one thing that's that is in common with all the patent applications is that they can paint a legitimate picture like the guy with this dog stick had to his patent had to describe that in a manner that would be acceptable to the patent office and they go well you know whatever their long list of questions that must be answered all the all the patents have to come up and be described in minute detail the tiniest detail uh and be acceptable as an answer to a problem that perhaps doesn't exist as some as you could see that some of the ones were ridiculous uh but what they have in common is they pitch themselves very well and they make them sound like a lot of people are going to get use out of this it doesn't did the microwave disturb his skin at all as well as mentors i that there isn't any writing that says it did it would it would seem that chocolate would melt before the human skin would would be burned i that's i'm just throwing that out there what do i know but it seems like that would be the chocolate bar would go first did hedy lamarr have a genius level iq they say she did she was a an amazing woman i mean she was she always she said things like to look good what's what's inside your head is much more interesting to me than how pretty you are i mean she was one of those kind of had it all figured out in her head and she didn't the beauty thing turned her off she liked the brain power aspect well i suppose were wrapping up it's been a pleasure um if you have if any of this interested you even in the slightest our book rainstorms and mind farts is available everywhere amazon the works and uh i was happy to be here and best of luck to all of you and to me thanks you

Channel: US National Archives

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Keywords: US National Archives, NARA

Id: gq0MVQM6an8

Length: 39min 50sec (2390 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021