Do Sparrows Like Bach?: The Strange and Wonderful Things that Are Discovered When Scientists Break Free Read online

  Trials of life

  In 1990, parents looking for a toy to educate their children in the facts of mammalian life needed look no further than the ‘toy birthing apparatus with chugging-like delivery motion’ patented by Douglas Raymond. His toy dog contained a complicated combination of pistons, springs, air-bleed orifices and grommet seals. When a spring was wound up and released, the pistons chugged backwards and forwards forcing a collection of fetal dolls, fashioned as puppies, down a tube and out through a spring-loaded valve at the animal’s rear. Each delivery was accompanied by loud barking from the dog and yelps from the newborn pups.

  Dogs of stun

  In the 1990s, people were becoming so litigious that even criminals were suing if they were bitten by a guard dog. In 1997, things had reached such a state, according to Harvey Allen, William Buerke and Gary Erwin of Orange, California, that guard dogs had to be muzzled. However, as they so succinctly pointed out, ‘criminal suspects are less likely to submit to apprehension by a dog that is unable to bite’.

  So the inventors proposed using the dog as a mobile stun gun. Beneath the dog’s muzzle was a leather or plastic pod containing a pair of metal electrodes. These were connected to a battery-powered circuit that generated brief, high-voltage pulses. When the dog’s handler pressed a button, sparks jumped between the electrodes. The dog would prod the alleged criminal and shock the victim into submission.

  Off the leash

  Keeping pets can be expensive and inconvenient. Back in the 1990s, Daniel Klees and Terri Shepherd of Illinois believed they had the answer. They filed patents for a ‘novelty leash’ that let people pretend they had a pet.

  The leash was a length of thick cord like an ordinary lead, but with a core of strong wire so it kept its shape. The lead contained batteries and a loudspeaker that was preprogrammed to make a variety of animal sounds, such as a dog barking or cat meowing. Owners could take walks by holding the leash out in front of them like a metal detector. The inventors told purchasers that they would need ‘a degree of imagination’.

  Safety brolly

  An ideal present for the anxious is an umbrella that protects them from fire. In 1991, Taiwanese inventors proposed such a brolly: it would look like an ordinary umbrella, but would be clad with ceramic insulation. So if the owner was caught in a fire, the brolly would protect the head. If that failed, said the inventors, the brolly could be used as a parachute ‘to help the user escape from a high-rise building’.

  File nirvana

  Do you feel uneasy when you delete files from your computer? Does it seem somehow wrong to consign all those once-valued words to a state of nonexistence, simply by pressing a button on your keyboard? In 1997, a Buddhist monk in Japan set up a virtual temple on the internet to have memorial services performed for obsolete software, failed business projects and information that had been lost or deleted.

  Shokyu Ishiko, the chief priest of the Daioh Temple in Kyoto, dedicated his virtual Information Temple to Manjusri, the Buddhist incarnation of wisdom. He also offered counselling on his website.

  We reckon the Buddhist approach is more socially acceptable than attacking your PC with your phone handset but we’re not sure it’s as satisfying. And will the Daioh Temple be able to cope with Vogon poetry?

  Poetry website goes from bad to verse

  Vogons, fans of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will recall, wrote poetry so bad it could kill. In 2003, an experiment to create poems on the web looked set to automate the awfulness of Vogon verse.

  David Rea of Greenwich, Connecticut, wrote a program that allowed a poem to evolve, to see if people with diverse tastes in poetry could work together to create attractive verse. Rea’s program started off with 1000 ‘poems’, each comprising four lines of five randomly chosen words. People visiting the website chose between two randomly selected verses from the population. The bad ones were killed off and the fittest—those with the most positive votes—underwent further evolution.

  Each word within a verse was thought of as a poetic gene. There were a possible 30,000 words, and as people voted, some genomes proved more popular than others as they formed semi-meaningful phrases. So the fittest verses were ‘mated’ to form new verses, and the offspring again put to the public vote.

  With more than 16,000 votes in, Rea believed poetic structure was emerging. But in evolutionary terms, the poems were still a metaphor short of a mudskipper. When this story first went to press in 2003, one poem read: ‘You with life down the swords / How quieting tressed / Prince held by posers / Could be honking fight trekking.’

  Real ice

  In their efforts to diversify into other technologies in the 1980s, Japanese steel company Nippon Kokan (NKK) came up with ice that crackled. NKK scientists brought back ice from the Antarctic for research but found that when used in alcoholic drinks, it crackled distinctively thanks to the release of air bubbles, which had been trapped inside the ice for thousands of years. NKK managed to improve on nature—their ice, called Exice and based on the Antarctic original, crackled even louder. A glass of whisky on the rocks at about 40 per cent alcohol could produce a 70-decibel crackle every second, while a cocktail with only 11 per cent alcohol gave out 65 decibels every 2 seconds.

  Burnt offering

  In 1986, French inventor Eugene Politzer believed that shaving could, one day, be a matter of burning hair away, rather than cutting it.

  He filed patents around the world on a laser shaver. He said that this would overcome the problem of 5 o’clock shadow, where new growth starts showing through even after a close conventional shave. According to Politzer’s patent, the power for the laser would be generated by a fixed supply connected to a hand-held unit, which contained a small helium neon tube. This would beam laser light along the inside of a protective grid mesh, similar to that used in a conventional razor. Any hairs protruding through the mesh would conduct heat down to their base and be burnt off. To stop the mesh overheating and burning the owner, a small motor and fan would circulate air through the mesh.

  Presumably Politzer was already a big fan of Jan Louw…

  Cutting edge

  In the mid-1980s, a South African designer, Jan Louw, devised an attachment for a vacuum cleaner which let people cut their own hair. The cutter looked like a hair dryer but was connected to the hose of your vacuum cleaner. The air sucked in through the open end of the ‘hair dryer’ nozzle would drive a turbine which rotated one blade over another stationary blade to mimic the action of scissors. The user would slide the end of the nozzle over the scalp and hair would be sucked in to be sliced by the blades. The shorter the nozzle length, the shorter the haircut. Cut hair ended up in the bag of the vacuum cleaner.

  Meanwhile, in a research institute far away from those trying to rectify society’s most obvious ills, a whole different group of inventors was working on ways to help us get about, safely or otherwise.

  The saucer at Platform 9…

  Anyone spurred on by an interest in flying saucers to think of building one for themselves could do little better than to turn to British patent number 1,310,990. Filed in 1970, this described an atomic-powered, saucer-shaped space vehicle. But the patentee, none other than national railways operator British Rail, didn’t pay the renewal fees so the patent lapsed, meaning anyone would be allowed to construct the saucer according to the specifications. These explained that powerful electromagnets deflected charged particles produced by a thermonuclear fusion reaction to create lift and drive. Electrodes in the pulsed field were bombarded by charged particles and generated electric power for the craft. British Rail said the idea was less crazy than it sounded, insisting it was invented by an experienced nuclear physicist.

  On the hoof

  In 1981, Philip Barnes of Cambridgeshire, UK, filed a patent on what was literally a one-horsepower road vehicle. A small minibus with seats for five passengers and a driver was powered by a horse which walked along a conveyor belt in the central aisle of the coach. The conveyor wa
s an endless, free-running loop with its axles connected to a gearbox and alternator. The horse, tethered by a harness, would plod along the conveyor belt to propel the vehicle and charge its battery, while the driver steered with a wheel.

  The inventor claimed several advantages. The horse would be walking on a clean, flat surface so could not damage its hoofs. A thermometer under its collar would alert the driver to any overheating of the ‘engine’. The horse would be fuelled from a food box under its head and panels would protect the passengers from stray kicks.

  The vehicle would be started by prodding the horse with a mop.

  How to brake blinking fast

  Many car accidents occur because of the relatively long time drivers take to react when driving. Drivers view the road ahead, pass the picture from the retina to the cortex and the brain, then after a lag caused by fear or other psychological reasons, the brain computes the action to be taken and sends messages to the foot to apply the brakes. The total delay can be as much as half a second. Back in the 1960s, Professor Vadovnik of Ljubljana University in Yugoslavia suggested using other muscles closer to the brain to initiate braking under emergency conditions. He elected to use the eyebrow muscles, because these are small and can react in 0.1 seconds if suitably trained. He mounted a pair of electrodes on a spectacle frame—these were kept in contact with the eyebrows by small springs. When drivers encountered an emergency situation, they were expected to blink rapidly to send an electrical signal to the car’s braking system. Professor Vadovnik believed that practised blinkers would be able to cut braking time by 0.3 seconds.

  I’m not moving

  In 1998, Samsung proposed a voice-controlled car with a difference. The dashboard used standard voice-recognition circuitry to respond to such phrases as ‘start engine’. But a sample of the driver’s speech, when sober, was also stored. When the driver spoke to the car, a comparator program looked for any sign of a slur. If the verdict was ‘sober’, the engine sprang into life. If ‘drunk’, a speech synthesiser warned: ‘Please don’t drink and drive as you are putting your life and property at risk.’

  And, perhaps more importantly we reckon, the lives of pedestrians and other road users, even if they were cleaning their teeth with this…

  Warning smile

  In 1967, from the research laboratories of American industry there came a toothpaste which glowed in the dark and reflected the headlights of motor cars. It was the first toothpaste that could be advertised as making a definite contribution to road safety—so long as those who used it remembered to walk facing the traffic and to keep grinning.

  Bulk transport

  In 1994, a design firm called Teague, in Redmond, Washington, proposed carrying tourist-class air passengers in cylindrical pods. The pods would be loaded and unloaded from ‘high-capacity’ planes with the passengers inside. They would include self-contained entertainment systems, plus an ‘adjustable form-fitting cushion’. A life-support system would provide air to the enclosed passenger.

  Down the years a few ideas seem to have gone up in smoke, and not just figuratively.

  Smoker’s cough

  In 1992, Wan Chung of Taiwan filed a patent application for an ashtray designed to turn against smokers. It had a slot at the side for a box of matches, and when a smoker picked up the box, the ashtray would make a coughing sound and warn against smoking.

  Fag end

  In 1986, Danish inventor Kaj Jensen believed that his self-extinguishing cigarette was a world-beating idea. He patented it in no fewer than 37 countries.

  Discarded smouldering cigarettes are both unpleasant and dangerous, claimed Jensen. So his cigarette had a small ampoule of water buried inside it, just ahead of the filter tip. The ampoule was made from polythene and had a weakened thinner wall facing the burning end of the cigarette. As soon as the glow reached the ampoule, it melted, releasing the water and extinguishing the cigarette.

  The ampoule could be placed further down the cigarette, making it impossible to smoke the last part of it and therefore, it was hoped at the time, making smoking safer.

  And imagine having to shovel coal every time you wanted to watch TV.

  Coal-fired television set makes its debut

  In 1896, powdered coal was burnt in an electrolytic cell to generate electricity. Unfortunately, the efficiency was dismally low, about 1 per cent. But in 1965 the idea was given a new twist by scientists at the Westinghouse Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, who developed a television set working from a fuel cell which consumed powdered coal. The experiments were aimed at developing a large-scale coal-burning fuel system.

  Of course, in these carbon footprint-conscious times, coal is a bit of a no-no. But is it any less antisocial than tenderising your T-bone by blowing it up?

  Beef à la dynamite

  A new way of tenderising meat devised in the year 2000 had just one snag—it involved a hefty explosion.

  Most people tenderise meat with a culinary hammer, bashing it repeatedly to break down muscle fibres. Or you can add meat-tenderising powder, which contains an enzyme that digests muscle fibre and connective tissue. But how do you tenderise meat on an industrial scale?

  Researchers at the US Agricultural Research Service in Beltsville, Maryland, thought they had an answer. They had been blasting meat with water at explosive pressures. And they found their process also killed food-poisoning bacteria, such as E. coli, in the meat. ‘We think it is probably rupturing the bacterial cell walls,’ said lead scientist Morse Solomon.

  The process worked by sending a shock wave through the meat to bust the tough, chewy fibres. To create the shock wave, researchers placed a slab of meat on top of a steel plate at the bottom of a water-filled plastic garbage can. Then they detonated an explosive—equivalent to about a quarter of a stick of dynamite—inside the can. The water transmitted the shock wave through the meat, but the unfortunate garbage can was blown to smithereens.

  Solomon said the shock waves penetrated the entire cut of meat, so bugs deep inside it were killed, achieving a thousand-fold reduction in bacteria levels during tests. The process worked best on small, garbage can-sized batches. A larger tank didn’t work as well, and the meat had to be packaged in robust containers so it wasn’t destroyed.

  Randy Huffman of the American Meat Institute in Arlington, Virginia, welcomed the idea but said: ‘The real challenge will be getting this implemented in a real-world solution.’

  The culinary thread continues with a diet of sediment.

  Edible mud

  In 1957, it was thought that mud dredged up from the bottom of Lake Victoria, 20 metres down, might be turned into food for pigs and chickens, according to the director of the East African Fisheries Research Organisation (EAFRO), Mr R. S. A. Beauchamp.

  After studying the composition of the fauna and flora that are found in Lake Victoria, Beauchamp’s colleagues discovered that there was not as much plankton as they had expected in the water, because of a shortage of sulphur. In lakes in temperate climates, millions of dead plankton, weeds and water animals fall to the bottom every year and when they decompose they return to the water the elements they took from it to grow.

  But the mud found on the bed of Lake Victoria was very slow to decompose because of lack of oxygen. This meant that at the bottom of the lake, locked up in layers of mud which ran to tens of metres deep, was the accumulated richness of thousands of years’ deposits. The water lying above was infertile for lack of nutrients.

  EAFRO suggested that swamps could be filled up with the rich lake mud to make good land for market gardens, but Beauchamp also believed that, dried and powdered, the mud could become nutritious food for pigs and poultry because it contained numerous valuable minerals and also considerable amounts of protein.

  The dried mud was, apparently, not unpleasant to eat—Beauchamp tried it himself and offered it to both his friends and family in order to prove his point.

  While Mr Beauchamp displayed excellent scientific insight, his social ski
lls left a little to be desired. And ironically, at the same time as he was attempting to unearth dead matter, an inventor in Winnipeg was doing the opposite.

  Funerals without fuss

  Back in the 1950s, a gentleman in Winnipeg devised a method of shrinking an adult human corpse to the size of a baby. He claimed that this would be an excellent way to dispose of dead bodies because it would be possible for the shrunken corpses to be slid into underground tubes and buried without any of the fuss that goes with conventional burial and without taking up too much space.

  His shrinking process depended on the application of high pressure to the corpse. This, he said, had the effect of squeezing all the fluids out of the body. The resultant mass of flesh could then be compressed to any desired shape inside a mould, similar to those used for moulding polythene.

  All this was, of course, highly ingenious but it was uncertain why the inventor thought that his proposed form of burial was in any way better than the prevailing and very popular method of cremation. It might have been that he thought the new method would appeal to those who were worried by the high cost of buying plots in cemeteries and who did not wish their dead body to be incinerated.

  It may also have appealed to those whose beliefs suggested that at some point in the future they could expect to be physically reincarnated. Whatever the benefits, however, it appeared that the inventor struggled to find a volunteer for his process.