Booksinventions

The Portable Hair Brushing Machine, And Other Bizarre Inventions That Did NOT Change The World

6 Bizarre Inventions That Did NOT Change The World
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The gift-giving season has arrived, which means it's time to peruse SkyMall for a wonderfully useless trinket to bestow upon your favorite relative, or your least favorite in-law (two words: Human. Slingshot.) Had the lovably pointless magazine existed pre-1900, these inventions -- feasibly useful then, and definitely worthless now, with the exception of Henry Sumner's sort of cool glove-purse combo -- would be contenders for its inventory.

While Sumner's contemporaries were busy perfecting the steam engine/changing Western society forever, he devoted his energies to optimizing mitten efficiency. (To his credit, the purse glove looks sleek.) Similarly, John Fuller's "bonafide" ventilating hat and James Beckett's portable hair-brushing machine are two inventions that definitely did not change the world. Check out more below:

All images are from The National Archives, London, England 2014. © 2014 Crown Copyright. Courtesy Thames & Hudson.

Self-refilling inkstand
J. & E. Ratcliff’s Universal Reservoir Inkstand by J. & E. Ratcliff Manufacturers, 1850.
Ventilating hat
The Bonafide Ventilating Hat by John Fuller & Co, 1849
Purse-glove
Design of an Improved Combined Glove and Purse by Henry Sumner, 1861
Expandable bust corset
Design for a corset with expandable busts by F. Parsons, 1881
Portable hair brushing machine
Portable rotary hair brushing machine by James Beckett, 1864
Portable cooking apparatus
Design for a Portable Cooking Apparatus by Henry Madden, 1845

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Before You Go

9 True Crime Stories You Won't Believe
"Thirty Eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case" by AM Rosenthal(01 of09)
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“The bystander effect”: we see this psychological term in news stories even today, and it originated with the murder of 28-year old Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in 1964. Kitty was stabbed to death in an apartment complex in Queens, over half-hour span during which her attacker ran off and returned again three times. It was thought that 38 people had knowledge of the crime as it was happening, but did not report it. A.M. Rosenthal, who covered the story for The New York Times, then wrote a book about the case, examining both the tragedy of Genovese’s murder and what he termed mankind’s “disease of apathy.” In the introduction to the paperback, he writes of “a feeling that the story had turned into a hunt for a target, and the queasy belief that the target was in our own mirrors.”
"The Onion Field" by Joseph Wambaugh(02 of09)
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In 1963, two LAPD officers, Ian Cambell and Karl Hettinger, pulled over a car for a broken tail light in Hollywood. The two passengers were on the run for a string of robberies and took the two officers hostage. Errantly believing their crime was already punishable by death, they took the officers to an abandoned onion field and killed Campbell. Hettinger managed to escape by running four miles to a nearby farmhouse. Wambaugh, a former LAPD sergeant who was on the force at the time of the murder, said Hettinger “never completely escaped from the onion field.” Just this March, an Onion Field memorial was unveiled at the Los Angeles Police Museum, honoring the memory of both officers.
"The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America" by Erik Larsen(03 of09)
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Erik Larsen’s tale, of a serial murderer during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, is one of the most popular books in the true crime genre and appeared on the New York Times bestsellers list for three years. The book recounts how hotel owner H.H. Holmes, lured unsuspecting tourists to his “Murder Castle,” which was equipped with an acid vat, greased wooden chute, and crematorium. In an interview with Larsen, “I Don’t Want to Write Crime Porn” published in True Crime, Larsen says he doesn’t purposefully seek out dark subjects, but that “the darker events in history are often the most compelling.” His latest book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, is about the rise of the Third Reich, as witnessed by the US ambassador and his daughter.
"Shot in the Heart" by Mikal Gilmore(04 of09)
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In Shot in the Heart, Mikal Gilmore tells the story of his brother Gary Gilmore “from inside the house where murder is born…a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to leave.” In 1977, Gary Gilmore, convicted on two counts of murder, was executed by firing squad, after campaigning for his own death. Gilmore’s execution was the first in the United States in ten years, and it ushered in a new wave of capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story may be best known in print through Norman Mailer’s classic, The Executioner’s Song, but Mikal Gilmore’s memoir gets much closer, looking for ways to explain Gary’s troubled life and searching for the genesis of violence in his Mormon ancestry and within their dysfunctional family.
"The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man" by David W. Maurer(05 of09)
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David W. Maurer was a linguistics professor who studied the language of subcultures. His most popular book, The Big Con, published in 1940, was compiled from interviews with con men during the 1930s and became the basis for the movie The Sting. “[Confidence men],” Maurer writes, “are suave, slick, and capable. Their depredations are very much on the genteel side.” Maurer gives us the language of con men through a series of anecdotes, illuminating jargon from ‘tear-off’ to ‘cackle-bladder,’ and giving the reader insight into this strange and fascinating profession. The persona of a con-person has certainly changed throughout the years, and one of the biggest cons today is identity theft, a so-called “faceless crime.” In True Crime, AC Fraser’s “Origami & the Art of Identity Folding” is a first person account of a convicted identity thief who is confronted by one of her victims—a prison guard.
"At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America" by Philip Dray(06 of09)
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In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, more than 3,000 African-Americans were lynched in the United States, crimes which to this day remain mostly unsolved. At the Hands of Persons Unknown investigates the complex social fabric that could allow such horrific murders to take place, the failure of government officials or law enforcement to intercede and investigate, and the people who fought for change and justice. The True Crime collection an in-depth investigation of one of these cases: Ben Montgomery’s “Spectacle—The Lynching of Claude Neal.”
"In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote(07 of09)
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Considered one of the great masterpieces of true crime, In Cold Blood chronicles the murder of an entire family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the aftermath, through the execution of the men convicted of the crime. Truman Capote’s research for the book was notoriously exhaustive; he spent years visiting the town with his friend, Harper Lee, compiling 8,000 pages of notes from interviews. The book is also often referred to as the original “nonfiction novel:” a term which is oft debated, but generally agreed to mean adopting the literary techniques of fiction to tell a true story. Capote, who thought this genre should be free of first-person narrative, is absent from the book as a character. He claimed that every word of the book was true, which—unsurprisingly—has invited numerous critics over the years to question the veracity of certain conversations or events.
"Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith" by Jon Krakauer(08 of09)
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What drives people to fundamentalism? And how does “faith-based violence” originate? Jon Krakauer asks these questions while weaving together the history of the Mormon religion and a double murder in a Utah town called American Fork. In 1984, brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty, members of a splinter sect of Mormonism, murdered their sister-in-law and her 15-month old daughter after Ron claimed he received a revelation from God to “remove” them. Krakauer sets the murders in a historical and scriptural context and raises questions not only about violence and fundamentalist religion, but justification of violence in general.
"American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men" by David McConnell(09 of09)
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In this narrative of hate crime in America, David McConnell tells the stories of six disturbing murder cases that occurred between 1995 and 2008—all motivated in some way by the victims’ sexual orientation. McConnell said of the book on his website, “The murders I write about turn on pride, honor, and an ecstasy in violence among young men. I wanted to make explicit the unnerving parallel between these killings and far-off, foreign-sounding ‘honor killings’.…But we have to realize how clearly these killings reflect, to our dishonor, an entire culture at war with itself.” McConnell, the author of several novels, pays close attention to character, scene, and illuminating details, while questioning masculinity and patriarchal institutions in this country. A chapter from the book—“Parrish, Rawlings, Hollis, and Flythe: 2008,” which focuses on suburban gang-related murder—is excerpted in the True Crime collection.
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