Description
A collection of the fifty most offbeat inventions registered with the U.S. Patent Office in the early years of the twentieth century is complemented with actual designs and biographies of the oddball minds behind them
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America is the land of original thinkers, of great ideas - of wacky inventors. For every Thomas Alva Edison there have been thousands of Alden L. McMurtrys, the Connecticut tinkerer who left behind his immortal design for a hat that produced streams of soap bubbles - perfect for show-stopping chorus numbers. Or so he dreamed.Like McMurtry, the zany visionaries who patented their awesomely impractical concoctions missed hitting the jackpot (by a mile!) But they created something the Wright Brothers' flying machine and Edwin Herbert Land's Polaroid camera didn't - the ability to make us laugh. Now, reproduced directly from the records stored in the U.S. Patent Office, are the best of the worst!
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