Wikipedia:Unusual articles/Technology, inventions and products
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Technology, inventions and products
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Tempest Prognosticator
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AT&T Mobility's billing policy for the first iPhone gave a real sense of how much money was being wasted... on paper and printer ink. |
Abraham Lincoln's patent | For lifting boats over shoals. Lincoln is the only US president who held a patent. |
Antikythera mechanism | An analog computer built in Ancient Greece. |
Baby cage | The pre-War way to get your baby some fresh air if you live in a high-rise apartment. Used by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt. |
Bild Lilli doll | A German doll that was the main inspiration for Barbie and is now considered its "grandmother". |
Blåhaj | Stuffed shark, IKEA bestseller, transgender icon. |
Breakout | How this simple 1976 Atari video game, started by Steve Jobs and finished by Steve Wozniak, helped spur the creation of the Apple II. |
Canard Digérateur
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Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting. |
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A light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 119 years.
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Chindōgu | The practice of inventing solutions to everyday problems that just make the problem worse. |
Clock of the Long Now | A clock that, once completed, should be able to keep time for 10,000 years. |
Clocky | An alarm clock that hides from its owner. |
Concealing objects in a book | Hopefully you weren't planning to read it before you hollowed it out. |
Digital sundial | Unlike an analog sundial, a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it. |
Dreamachine | A device made with a Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes .)
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Electronic voice phenomenon | Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference. |
Friendly Floatees spill | Rubber ducks and their friends who went on a long, long journey. |
Gun-powered mousetrap | Patented in 1882. According to its inventor, it can also be used as a booby trap to kill attempted home invaders. |
Hitler teapot | Some people thought that this JCPenney teapot resembled the famous dictator. |
Marvin Heemeyer | Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage. |
History of perpetual motion machines | The concept has eluded and baffled the greatest minds for thousands of years – and will continue to elude anyone who tries to build one. |
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Its manufacturers continue to claim that it's just a massager for health purposes and not, you know, the world's best-known sex toy. |
Jibba Jabber | The hot new stress toy where you simulate shaking a baby to death. |
Klerksdorp sphere | Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old... Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? Who knows... |
Zbigniew Libera | Creator of the Lego Concentration Camp. |
List of inventors killed by their own invention | Perilous parachutes, lethal lighthouses and murderous motorcycles! |
Love chair | Made to allow a fat king to have sex with two women at the same time. |
Mengenlehreuhr | You'll have to read between the lights to see the time. |
Moo box | Cow in a can. |
Mosquito laser | A bug zapper with a difference. |
Museum of Failure | A collection of sorts focusing on... well, failed things. Notably includes the Bic's woman-only pens, and Google Glass .
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My Friend Cayla | That doll is a spy! |
One red paperclip | A man's small piece of metal turns out to be worth more than expected. |
Parking chair | Using household objects to reserve parking spaces. |
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Pigeons were used by the Germans for aerial surveillance in World War I, and apparently also in World War II. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera. |
Predictions of the end of Wikipedia | All good things must come to an end...... but not for now. |
Project Cybersyn | Brit with a gigantic beard.
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Pythagorean cup | When the cup is filled beyond a certain point, it will empty itself. |
Quartz crisis | Not a comic book story arc, but the upheaval in watchmaking caused by the introduction of quartz watches. |
Radio hat | A strange-looking (and strange-sounding) piece of headgear. |
Royal Mail rubber band | One billion are used every year and often seen littering the streets of UK cities. |
Russian floating nuclear power station | Self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants. |
Sony timer | Rumours that Sony uses a particularly aggressive form of planned obsolescence continue to this day. |
Splayd | 33.3% spoon, 33.3% knife, 33.3% fork. |
Tempest Prognosticator
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Meteorology by frightened annelid. |
Turboencabulator
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A device whose sole function is to expose technological ignorance. |
Uncanny valley | How to measure your emotional response to androids. |
Useless machine | In most cases, toys for adults. |
Vin Mariani | A drink made from cocaine and consumed by Thomas Edison, Pope Leo XIII, Ulysses S. Grant and French prime minister Jules Méline. |
Wrap rage | Ever been driven mad by packaging that just won't open? |
Xianxingzhe | A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon. |
Hygiene and sanitation
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Committee to End Pay Toilets in America | A 1970s organization whose campaign was to end pay toilets in the U.S.; its newsletter was humorously titled the Free Toilet Paper.
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"Darkie" toothpaste | Racist toothpaste from Taiwan. |
Fatberg | A congealed lump of fat and non-biodegradable buildup in sewer systems. A 250-metre-long, 140 tonne specimen was discovered under London in September 2017. |
Female urination device | Used by women when needing or wanting to pee standing up. |
Groom of the Stool | The most intimate Royal office. |
Hotel toilet-paper folding
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Ever wondered why it was so? |
Interactive Urinal Communicator
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A talking urinal made for advertising purposes. |
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Microsoft's attempt to bring you the interwebzzz inside the portable toilet. |
Jack Black | Not the actor , but the 19th century rat catcher who bred unusually colored rats and sold them as pets.
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Japanese toilets | The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights. |
Lloyds Bank turd | Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England. |
Shit flow diagram | This is the technical term. |
Stainless steel soap | Metallic soap that removes odours from the hands, allegedly. |
Toilet-related injury
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Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends. |
Toilet papering | Art or vandalism? |
Toilet paper orientation | On the pros and cons of letting toilet paper hang over or under the roll. |
Whizzinator | A fake penis usually used to beat drug tests, complete with dried urine, a heater, and a syringe. Comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black. |
Clothing and accessories
Aglet | That little plastic or metal thing at the end of your shoelace has a name. |
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The biggest question of 2015: Is it white and gold or black and blue? |
Fatsuit | Yes, this makes you look fat. |
Gorilla suit | What to wear when you don't want to look human. |
Koteka | An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea, also known as the "penis gourd". |
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A dress made of flank steak. Currently preserved as jerky in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. |
Muffin top | A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic. |
Shoe tossing | The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes. |
Sweater curse | Think your loved one will be pleased if you knit them a sweater? Think again. |
Three Wolf Moon | A Amazon.com .
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Tin foil hat | Headgear which allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled. |
Transport
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'til you're back on the floor
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2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident | Two Japan Airlines aircraft were roughly 135 m (443 ft) away from causing the deadliest aviation accident in history. |
2003 Angola 727 disappearance
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A Boeing 727 was stolen, with at least two people aboard, and never found. |
2018 Horizon Air Q400 incident | A ground service agent with no flight experience whatsoever managed to do insanely difficult aerial maneuvers in a stolen plane that was thought to be impossible to do those maneuvers in. |
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A plane that crashed because the pilot let his kids fly it. |
Aeroflot Flight 6502 | A plane that crashed after the pilot made a bet with the first officer that he could land it blind. Unfortunately for 70 people on board, he couldn't. |
Aloha Airlines Flight 243 | Landed safely and with only one casualty, despite the plane's ceiling flying off mid-flight. |
Ampelmännchen | The East German "traffic-light little-man". |
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Various colors of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. |
Animals taking public transportation | Nonhuman commuters. |
AVE Mizar | This nightmare lovechild of a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto eventually killed its inventor. |
Bayside Canadian Railway | A 220 foot (70 meter) long railway created solely to exploit a loophole in the Jones Act. U.S. Customs and Border Protection found out and promptly issued a $350 million fine. |
Billups Neon Crossing Signal | A local inventor's extreme solution to railway crossing safety.
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Boaty McBoatface | What happens when you allow the British public to name a ship in an online poll? |
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway | What do you do when there's water in the way of your train? Just build the rails underwater and make the train a moving pier on 23 foot high legs, complete with lifeboats and a requirement a ship captain be aboard at all times. |
British Rail flying saucer | Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the 10:13 to Venus. |
China National Highway 110 traffic jam | The world's longest-lasting traffic jam, in which some drivers were stuck for up to 5 days, moving only 1km (0.6 miles) per day. |
Crash at Crush | A high-speed head-on collision between two locomotives, staged as a publicity stunt and attended by an estimated 40,000 people. |
Cycloped | The entrant into the Rainhill Trial that placed Horse Power against Steam Power. |
Dagen H | September 3, 1967: The day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality .
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An Airbus A340 that does what she wants. |
Dymaxion car | A 1933 concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet (6.1 m) long, carried up to 11 passengers, could go at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), and had a steering wheel that turned the car in the opposite direction. One of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion concepts. |
Experiment | A boat with eight horse-powers. Literally. |
Fastest Shed | Holder of the world land speed record for sheds. |
Ferry Lina | The world's shortest regular ferry located in Sweden that takes 25-30 seconds (depending on how strong you are). |
Gadgetbahn | Fun fun fun. And useless. |
Get Out and Push Railroad | Just what it sounds like. |
Gimli Glider | A confusion over glider .
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Human mail | Why buy an expensive ticket when you can go by mail? |
Iron Dobbin | A mechanical horse made in 1933 for the Italian Fascist Youth Movement, later copied by the Germans. |
Jesus nut | Not your local Bible-thumping preacher but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades. |
Loose wheel nut indicator | Yes, those little red tags you see on truck wheels really do have a purpose. |
M-497 Black Beetle | The New York Central Railroad decided to see what would happen when they strapped two jet engines on a railcar; this was the result. It currently holds the record for fastest train in the Americas at 183.68 mph (295.6 km/h). |
Mehran Karimi Nasseri | An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006 and again from September 2022 until his death in November that year. |
Men's parking space | An antonym to women's parking spaces. The only known instances are two spaces in a garage in Germany. |
Mile high club | Soaring members. |
Miss Belvedere | A car buried in a time capsule in 1957 and unearthed in 2007, only to discover that it had suffered 50 years of water damage underground and wouldn't start. |
MTT Turbine Superbike | The most powerful street-legal motorcycle is run by a turboshaft engine designed for aircraft and can hit 250 miles per hour (400 km/h). |
Parliamentary train | Have a useless railway station but can't afford to close it? Just run one train every few weeks there! |
Passenger train toilets
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Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station. |
Paternoster lift | Strange European elevators without doors that travel in a loop. Considered by many to be very dangerous. |
Peel P50 | The world's smallest production car. |
Pimpmobile | Drive like a blaxploitation movie protagonist. |
Plastic bicycle | It seems that making bikes out of plastic is not a recipe for success. |
PZL M-15 Belphegor | A crop duster . It is the slowest jet aircraft to enter production as well as the only jet biplane or jet crop duster to exist.
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Reliant Regal | A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license. |
Rocket mail | The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success. |
Rolligon tires | Probably the only way you can survive getting run over. |
RP FLIP | A manned ship that was designed to be capsized at a 90° angle for weeks on end. |
Schienenzeppelin | An unholy combination of a Zeppelin and a locomotive. |
School bus yellow | A color specially formulated for use on school buses in the United States. |
Screw-propelled vehicle | Get there by screwing. |
Shipping container architecture | The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff. |
Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George" | An association formed to oppose the dehumanizing custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name. |
South Pointing Chariot
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An ancient Chinese mechanical compass which took a millennium to reproduce. |
Tall bike | A bike which consists of two conventional bicycle frames connected one atop the other. |
Train surfing | As respectable and practical as drying one's hair in most parts of the world. |
Unused highway | Lost highways, unloved and unused. |
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 | How do you survive on a freezing cold glacier with the impending threat of starvation? Answer: eat your friends. |
USGlobal Airways | An active airline founded in 1989 that has never operated a single commercial flight. |
ValuJet Airlines | Quite possibly the most unsafe airline in history. Think of it as being the air transport equivalent of Action Park. |
Vomit Comet
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Lack of gravity is not good for the stomach. |
Vortech Meg-2XH Strap-On | A discontinued strap-on helicopter designed for amateur construction. Somehow no lawsuits are mentioned in the article. |
Wallsend Metro station | All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans... |
Westray to Papa Westray flight | The world's shortest passenger flight, lasting as little as 53 seconds. Just don't expect an in-flight meal .
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The wrong type of snow | Possibly the most feeble excuse for why British trains are so awful. |
Computing
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A top-level domain that isn't being sold, made for an Antarctic island where no one lives. |
.kp | North Korea's top-level domain. Interestingly, some websites under this ccTLD can be accessed outside of the DPRK. |
.nu | Niue's top-level domain, which is regulated by Sweden and almost exclusively used by European countries. |
.su | How a piece of the Soviet Union's internet is not only still online but also still in use to this day. |
.tv | Sales of websites under this top-level domain name make up 10% of Tuvalu's GDP. |
999 phone charging myth | Some people in the UK seriously believe that calling their emergency phone number charges your phone. |
Any key | Press any key to continue. |
Blinkenlights | DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! |
Bogosort | The world's worst sorting algorithm works like this: Randomise the list. Is it in order? If not, try again. Or maybe it is the best… |
The Book of Mozilla | A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers. |
Brainfuck | An intentionally difficult to use programming language containing only eight commands. |
Brian's Brain | He's so smart, he has his own cellular automaton. |
Bush hid the facts | Revelations of a vast right-wing conspiracy, or just a glitch? |
Chudnovsky brothers | A pair of mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of spare parts. |
Creeper and Reaper | The world's very first computer virus and computer antivirus, respectively. |
Conway's Game of Life | A simple game with only four rules that people have made beautifully complex machines with. It even has the ability to self-replicate! See also Brian's Brain above. |
Electric unicycle | The ongoing academic effort to teach robots to ride unicycles. |
Elvis operator | An operator in programming languages with an unusual name .
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Emojli | A defunct emoji-only social network. Started as a parody of Yo (see below). |
Enshittification | Every site you like gets worse and worse. Except Wikipedia (hopefully). |
Esoteric programming language | Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming. |
Evil bit | Indicates if a packet has been sent with malicious intent, so that it can be ignored. |
Guru Meditation error | If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana. |
Heisenbug | A programming bug that stops appearing when you study it. |
Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol | Protocol for controlling and monitoring coffee pots. Attempting to use a teapot while brewing coffee will yield you the "HTTP 418: I'm a teapot" error message. |
I Am Rich | You must be if you could afford this US$999.99 iPhone application that only displayed a red gem and a (misspelled) mantra. |
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage | Internet Explorer users have lower than average IQ, according to this (nonexistent) study. |
International Obfuscated C Code Contest | A competition to create code that no human can read. |
IP over Avian Carriers | An homing pigeons .
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iSmell | A computer PC Magazine .
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Leet | T3h 1@ngu/\&e 0f H@xx0rz. |
Lenna | How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject. |
Loab | According to AI, the exact opposite of many prompts is the same picture of an old woman. |
lp0 on fire | Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire. |
Macquarium | Vintage Macintosh computers-turned-fishtanks .
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Magic smoke | When a chip fails, it's because the smoke has gotten out. |
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A web page sold for advertising space at 1 dollar per pixel. |
MONIAC
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A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity. |
Mystery meat navigation | The process of not telling you what you're about to click on. |
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science | A 1990 academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness. |
Pentium F00F bug | An Intel Pentium bug with an unusual name. |
Reality distortion field | Surely an obscure quantum-physics phenomenon? Nope! |
Red Star OS | North Korea's official Linux distribution. In line with Kim Jong-un apparently being an Apple fanboy, Red Star OS's latest UI design mimics macOS. |
Rubber duck debugging | Code debugging by explaining your code to a rubber duck. Quack! |
RTFM | Four letters that solve most problems. |
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis
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Cryptography by other means. |
Scunthorpe problem | Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems. Just ask the residents of S****horpe. |
Send Me To Heaven
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A mobile game won by throwing your phone as close to heaven as you can without it getting there. |
Tay (chatbot) | An racist to remain online.
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TempleOS | A biblical-themed operating system designed by a single schizophrenic programmer over the course of 10 years after receiving instructions from God. Some assembly required. |
Trojan Room coffee pot | The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: a coffee machine at the computer science department of Cambridge University. |
Utah teapot | A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community. |
Yo | A messaging service whose only function was to send "Yo" to people. |