The full descriptions are at the link, here is a taster.
Today’s consumer society has become astonishingly adept at inventing pointless, hopeless, resource-sucking gizmos, but let’s not pretend we have a monopoly on this. Since the Victorian era, some of humankind’s most creative brains have kept themselves busy creating answers for needs that didn’t exist and solutions that are more cumbersome than the problems they promised to tackle. To inspire nominations for the Landfill Prize, here’s our list of the 19th and 20th centurys’ most pathetic, unnecessary and patently daft inventions.
...3. Balloon propelled by eagles or vultures
Patent no 863087, issued 1887
...4. Method of preserving the dead
Patent no 748284, issued 1903
...6. Water-filled brassiere
Patent no US4734078, issued 1988
...8. A glove for courting
Patent application no GB2221607, issued 1990
In the world of invention, romance is never dead. Just complicated. Terry King’s innovation aimed to assist couples who wish to maintain precious palm-to-palm contact while holding hands on cold days. It’s a pair of gloves knitted together into a single glove with a common palm section, but two separate sets of fingers. Bless. However, if you and your lovey-dove find yourselves running blissfully together through a frosty meadow and encounter a tree, the result could be distinctly face-mushingly tragic if you run either side of the trunk. That’s at least one good reason why the courting glove doesn’t seem to have caught on
...
linkNever has so little been achieved by so many.
