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Everything filed under inventions.
Fact-based How It Started
Two inventors sealed a pair of plastic shower curtains together in 1957 hoping to make stylish textured wallpaper, and it took them years and a computer to find out what they had really made.
Fact-based Nature Did It First
A gecko can hang from a glass ceiling on perfectly dry feet, and once scientists looked at the whole foot rather than just its tiny hairs, they built a pad that grips like one.
Fiction Useless Inventions
It learns the exact shape of the person who sits there most, and when anyone else settles into that spot, it inflates, very politely, until they move.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A clip-on whistle that shows you a yellow card for a loose shoelace, which sounds pointless until you meet the one person who truly needs it.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A desk machine that prints a formal, gold-bordered certificate for achievements such as remembering to take the washing in before it rained.
Fiction Useless Inventions
Two brass posts and a length of burgundy velvet rope, for cordoning off the one corner of your house that is currently tidy.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A vacuum cleaner that stops the instant anybody in the room begins to speak, so that it never once interrupts, and therefore never once finishes.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A handsome coir mat with a small display in the corner, which tells you, as you come in, exactly what the weather was doing an hour ago.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A toaster that marks the completion of your toast with a short brass fanfare, played approximately three minutes after the toast is done.
Fiction Useless Inventions
A shopping trolley engineered, at considerable expense, to turn only left, on the grounds that a trolley which can go anywhere encourages a shopper who has thought about nothing.