Leo Hickman 

Fly-by-night inventions

Concrete furniture and pigeon-guided missiles – why did these ideas fail to catch on?
  
  

Pigeon
US inventors wanted to use pigeons to pilot warheads. Photograph: Alamy Photograph: Alamy

Albert Einstein was on the money about many things, but a tad optimistic when it came to pursuing madcap schemes: "If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."

The truth is that most absurd ideas ultimately turn out to be just that. However a new book, Pigeon Guided Missiles: and 49 Other Ideas That Never Took Off, by James Moore and Paul Nero, sets out to "rescue some of those incredible concepts, which promised to change our lives", such as:

Concrete furniture

By the time he died, Thomas Edison had amassed 1,093 patents. Keen to develop affordable, long-lasting housing, he hit upon the idea of concrete homes. Fine. But he also wanted to fill them with concrete pianos and sofas. He did concede that concrete reinforced with steel rods would prove unforgiving, so developed "foam concrete" – an oxymoron that fooled no one.

Escape coffins

In 1868, Franz Vester applied for the first patent of its type – the "improved burial case", featuring a vertical tube running up to the ground. If the body happened to "wake up" it could ascend the provided ladder. There is no known record of a successful deployment.

Pigeon-guided missiles

During the second world war, US behavioural scientist Burrhus Frederic Skinner loaded three pigeons into their own pressurised chambers inside a missile nose cone. Lenses in the missile threw up an image of the target on a glass screen. As they started to peck at it the movement translated into adjustments in the missile's guidance rudders. Using pigeons didn't involve radio signals that could be jammed by the enemy, but government officials remained unconvinced.

 

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