An odd book, and another one from my Christmas backlog. This book lists a number of strange inventions in chronological order. It feels like someone's been mining the patent databases, and occasionally you can find seams of similar patents that reference each other across the decades, so the research style is a little obvious, but the contents are very fun for all that. It turned out to be very useful for surprising Caroline with my obscure knowledge when a few of the inventions featured here appeared on QI. Apparently someone in telly research liked this book too.
Posted 2006-10-09.