Guess Again: More Weird & Wacky Inventions

Reading books about some of the more outlandish and oddball inventions will provide you with some unusual and humorous entertainment. At times, you find two aspects of the invention hard to believe, the first is that someone ever thought of it and the second is that someone else actually took it seriously. My favorite in this collection is the "Arcade Game with a Human Target", where a human was sit on a hanging device and pull a lever so that they would bob and weave while the players threw baseballs at them. Yes, the device was patented in 1923. I work in computer software and one of the complaints is that companies have received patents for software "inventions" that are considered frivolous or nonsensical. From this book, it is clear that this is not a recent phenomenon; over the years many people have received patents for the "patently absurd."