Wikipedia:Unusual articles/Technology, inventions and products

Technology, inventions and products

Long-lost remnant of a cricket game? Made by ancient intelligent life? A mysterious natural phenomenon?

Cower, you leeches, in the presence of the Tempest Prognosticator!

300-page iPhone bill	AT&T Mobility's billing policy for the first iPhone gave a real sense of how much money was being wasted... on paper and printer ink.
Abraham Lincoln's patent	For lifting boats over shoals. Lincoln is the only US president who held a patent.
Antikythera mechanism	An analog computer built in Ancient Greece.
Baby cage	The pre-War way to get your baby some fresh air if you live in a high-rise apartment. Used by none other than Eleanor Roosevelt.
Bild Lilli doll	A German doll that was the main inspiration for Barbie and is now considered its "grandmother".
Billy Possum	When Taft tried to get his own Teddy Bear.
Blåhaj	Stuffed shark, IKEA bestseller, transgender icon.
*Breakout*	How this simple 1976 Atari video game, started by Steve Jobs and finished by Steve Wozniak, helped spur the creation of the Apple II.
*Canard Digérateur*	Or "Digesting Duck", an automaton built to simulate a duck eating, digesting, and excreting.
Centennial Light	A light bulb that has been burning nonstop for 119 years.
Chindōgu	The practice of inventing solutions to everyday problems that just make the problem worse.
Clock of the Long Now	A clock that, once completed, should be able to keep time for 10,000 years.
Clocky	An alarm clock that hides from its owner.
Concealing objects in a book	Hopefully you weren't planning to read it before you hollowed it out.
Digital sundial	Unlike an analog sundial, a clock that indicates the current time with numerals formed by the sunlight striking it.
Dreamachine	A device made with a light bulb and a record turntable that reportedly induces lucid dreaming. (And you thought the makers of Die Another Day made it up. There's still no news about invisible Aston Martin V12 Vanquishes.)
Electronic voice phenomenon	Alleged spiritual voices heard in white noise and radio interference.
Friendly Floatees spill	Rubber ducks and their friends who went on a long, long journey.
Gun-powered mousetrap	Patented in 1882. According to its inventor, it can also be used as a booby trap to kill attempted home invaders.
Hitler teapot	Some people thought that this JCPenney teapot resembled the famous dictator.
Marvin Heemeyer	Why it's always a bad idea to put the guy next door out of business if he has a ten-ton armor-plated bulldozer in his garage.
History of perpetual motion machines	The concept has eluded and baffled the greatest minds for thousands of years – and will continue to elude anyone who tries to build one.
Hitachi Magic Wand	Its manufacturers continue to claim that it's just a massager for health purposes and not, you know, the world's best-known sex toy.
I-Doser	Like taking drugs through your ears.
Jibba Jabber	The hot new stress toy where you simulate shaking a baby to death.
Klerksdorp sphere	Spheres with three parallel grooves dated to be three billion years old... Evidence of ancient intelligent life? An unusual natural phenomenon? Who knows...
Zbigniew Libera	Creator of the Lego Concentration Camp.
List of inventors killed by their own invention	Perilous parachutes, lethal lighthouses and murderous motorcycles!
Love chair	Made to allow a fat king to have sex with two women at the same time.
Mengenlehreuhr	You'll have to read between the lights to see the time.
Moo box	Cow in a can.
Mosquito laser	A bug zapper with a difference.
Museum of Failure	A collection of sorts focusing on... well, failed things. Notably includes the Nokia N-Gage, Bic's woman-only pens, and Google Glass.
My Friend Cayla	That doll is a spy!
One red paperclip	A man's small piece of metal turns out to be worth more than expected.
Parking chair	Using household objects to reserve parking spaces.
Pigeon photography	Pigeons were used by the Germans for aerial surveillance in World War I, and apparently also in World War II. Not to forget the CIA's own pigeon camera.
Predictions of the end of Wikipedia	All good things must come to an end...... but not for now.
Project Cybersyn	Chilean robo-socialism control chamber invented by a Brit with a gigantic beard.
Pythagorean cup	When the cup is filled beyond a certain point, it will empty itself.
Quartz crisis	Not a comic book story arc, but the upheaval in watchmaking caused by the introduction of quartz watches.
Radio hat	A strange-looking (and strange-sounding) piece of headgear.
Royal Mail rubber band	One billion are used every year and often seen littering the streets of UK cities.
Russian floating nuclear power station	Self-contained, low-capacity, floating nuclear power plants.
Sony timer	Rumours that Sony uses a particularly aggressive form of planned obsolescence continue to this day.
Splayd	33.3% spoon, 33.3% knife, 33.3% fork.
Tempest Prognosticator	Meteorology by frightened annelid.
Turboencabulator	A device whose sole function is to expose technological ignorance.
Uncanny valley	How to measure your emotional response to androids.
Useless machine	In most cases, toys for adults.
Vin Mariani	A drink made from cocaine and consumed by Thomas Edison, Pope Leo XIII, Ulysses S. Grant and French prime minister Jules Méline.
Wrap rage	Ever been driven mad by packaging that just won't open?
Xianxingzhe	A Chinese robot, according to the Japanese, that will save its country from corporate capitalism with its crotch cannon.

Hygiene and sanitation

Toilets in Japan have some special features.

Committee to End Pay Toilets in America	A 1970s organization whose campaign was to end pay toilets in the U.S.; its newsletter was humorously titled the Free Toilet Paper.
"Darkie" toothpaste	Racist toothpaste from Taiwan.
Fatberg	A congealed lump of fat and non-biodegradable buildup in sewer systems. A 250-metre-long, 140 tonne specimen was discovered under London in September 2017.
Female urination device	Used by women when needing or wanting to pee standing up.
Groom of the Stool	The most intimate Royal office.
Hotel toilet-paper folding	Ever wondered why it was so?
Interactive Urinal Communicator	A talking urinal made for advertising purposes.
iLoo	Microsoft's attempt to bring you the interwebzzz inside the portable toilet.
Jack Black	Not the actor, but the 19th century rat catcher who bred unusually colored rats and sold them as pets.
Japanese toilets	The most advanced toilets in the world with computers, nozzles and flashing lights.
Lloyds Bank turd	Possibly the largest example of fossilised human feces ever found, discovered under the future site of a Lloyds Bank in England.
Shit flow diagram	This is the technical term.
Stainless steel soap	Metallic soap that removes odours from the hands, allegedly.
Toilet-related injury	Not all injuries and deaths linked to toilets are urban legends.
Toilet papering	Art or vandalism?
Toilet paper orientation	On the pros and cons of letting toilet paper hang over or under the roll.
Whizzinator	A fake penis usually used to beat drug tests, complete with dried urine, a heater, and a syringe. Comes in white, tan, Latino, brown, and black.

Clothing and accessories

Aglet	That little plastic or metal thing at the end of your shoelace has a name.
The dress	The biggest question of 2015: Is it white and gold or black and blue?
Fatsuit	Yes, this makes you look fat.
Gorilla suit	What to wear when you don't want to look human.
Koteka	An unusual traditional garment of western New Guinea, also known as the "penis gourd".
Meat dress of Lady Gaga	A dress made of flank steak. Currently preserved as jerky in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Muffin top	A marketing mishap, many well-meaning young women, and vanity came together to form this demographic.
Shoe tossing	The practice of throwing footwear, whether for humorous or political purposes.
Sweater curse	Think your loved one will be pleased if you knit them a sweater? Think again.
Three Wolf Moon	A T-shirt with wolves howling at the moon that gained popularity after one person wrote a parodic review for it on Amazon.com.
Tin foil hat	Headgear which allegedly prevents a person from having their minds read or controlled.

Transport

Don't reach for that sick bag 'til you're back on the floor.

2001 Japan Airlines mid-air incident	Two Japan Airlines aircraft were roughly 135 m (443 ft) away from causing the deadliest aviation accident in history.
2003 Angola 727 disappearance	A Boeing 727 was stolen, with at least two people aboard, and never found.
2010 Filair Let L-410 crash	As Hollywood taught us, letting reptiles loose on a plane is never a good idea.
2018 Horizon Air Q400 incident	A ground service agent with no flight experience whatsoever managed to do insanely difficult aerial maneuvers in a stolen plane that was thought to be impossible to do those maneuvers in.
Aeroflot Flight 593	A plane that crashed because the pilot let his kids fly it.
Aeroflot Flight 6502	A plane that crashed after the pilot made a bet with the first officer that he could land it blind. Unfortunately for 70 people on board, he couldn't.
Aloha Airlines Flight 243	Landed safely and with only one casualty, despite the plane's ceiling flying off mid-flight.
Ampelmännchen	The East German "traffic-light little-man".
Amtrak paint schemes	Various colors of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation.
Animals taking public transportation	Nonhuman commuters.
AVE Mizar	This nightmare lovechild of a Cessna Skymaster and a Ford Pinto eventually killed its inventor.
Bayside Canadian Railway	A 220 foot (70 meter) long railway created solely to exploit a loophole in the Jones Act. U.S. Customs and Border Protection found out and promptly issued a $350 million fine.
Billups Neon Crossing Signal	A local inventor's extreme solution to railway crossing safety.
Boaty McBoatface	What happens when you allow the British public to name a ship in an online poll?
Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway	What do you do when there's water in the way of your train? Just build the rails underwater and make the train a moving pier on 23 foot high legs, complete with lifeboats and a requirement a ship captain be aboard at all times.
British Rail flying saucer	Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's the 10:13 to Venus.
China National Highway 110 traffic jam	The world's longest-lasting traffic jam, in which some drivers were stuck for up to 5 days, moving only 1km (0.6 miles) per day.
Crash at Crush	A high-speed head-on collision between two locomotives, staged as a publicity stunt and attended by an estimated 40,000 people.
Daallo Airlines Flight 159	A terrorist detonated a bomb on a plane and ended up becoming the sole casualty of the incident.
Cycloped	The entrant into the Rainhill Trial that placed Horse Power against Steam Power.
Dagen H	September 3, 1967: The day that Sweden changed its traffic directionality.
Deli Mike	An Airbus A340 that does what she wants.
Dymaxion car	A 1933 concept car with 3 wheels. It was 20 feet (6.1 m) long, carried up to 11 passengers, could go at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour (190 km/h), and had a steering wheel that turned the car in the opposite direction. One of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion concepts.
Experiment	A boat with eight horse-powers. Literally.
Fastest Shed	Holder of the world land speed record for sheds.
Ferry Lina	The world's shortest regular ferry located in Sweden that takes 25-30 seconds (depending on how strong you are).
Gadgetbahn	Fun fun fun. And useless.
Ganz MFAV	An odd-looking train that is designed specifically to be used on the second-oldest underground metro line in the world.
Get Out and Push Railroad	Just what it sounds like.
Gimli Glider	A confusion over units leads to a Boeing 767 plane running out of fuel mid-flight and becoming a glider.
Horsey Horseless	How to stop cars scaring horses? Put a wooden horse's head on the front.
Human mail	Why buy an expensive ticket when you can go by mail?
Iron Dobbin	A mechanical horse made in 1933 for the Italian Fascist Youth Movement, later copied by the Germans.
Jesus nut	Not your local Bible-thumping preacher but the bolt on the top of a helicopter that connects it to the rotor blades.
Loose wheel nut indicator	Yes, those little red tags you see on truck wheels really do have a purpose.
Nut rage incident	Macadamia nuts: delicious, instigator of air rage. Helped coin a neologism to describe hierarchical social systems in South Korea.
M-497 Black Beetle	The New York Central Railroad decided to see what would happen when they strapped two jet engines on a railcar; this was the result. It currently holds the record for fastest train in the Americas at 183.68 mph (295.6 km/h).
Mehran Karimi Nasseri	An Iranian refugee who lived in Charles de Gaulle Airport from 1988 until 2006 and again from September 2022 until his death in November that year.
Men's parking space	An antonym to women's parking spaces. The only known instances are two spaces in a garage in Germany.
Mile high club	Soaring members.
Miss Belvedere	A car buried in a time capsule in 1957 and unearthed in 2007, only to discover that it had suffered 50 years of water damage underground and wouldn't start.
MTT Turbine Superbike	The most powerful street-legal motorcycle is run by a turboshaft engine designed for aircraft and can hit 250 miles per hour (400 km/h).
Northwest Airlines Flight 253	Bombing a plane with an exploding underwear is never a good idea.
Parliamentary train	Have a useless railway station but can't afford to close it? Just run one train every few weeks there!
Passenger train toilets	Why passengers must be discouraged from flushing or using toilets while the train is at a station.
Paternoster lift	Strange European elevators without doors that travel in a loop. Considered by many to be very dangerous.
Peel P50	The world's smallest production car.
Pimpmobile	Drive like a blaxploitation movie protagonist.
Plastic bicycle	It seems that making bikes out of plastic is not a recipe for success.
PZL M-15 Belphegor	A Soviet attempt at a turbofan-powered crop duster. It is the slowest jet aircraft to enter production as well as the only jet biplane or jet crop duster to exist.
Reliant Regal	A three-wheeled car formerly manufactured in England that could be driven with a motorcycle license.
Rocket mail	The delivery of mail by rocket or missile, attempted by various organisations in many different countries, with varying levels of success.
Rolligon tires	Probably the only way you can survive getting run over.
RP FLIP	A manned ship that was designed to be capsized at a 90° angle for weeks on end.
Schienenzeppelin	An unholy combination of a Zeppelin and a locomotive.
School bus yellow	A color specially formulated for use on school buses in the United States.
Screw-propelled vehicle	Get there by screwing.
Shipping container architecture	The concept and art of using intermodal containers to build stuff.
Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters "George"	An association formed to oppose the dehumanizing custom of addressing railway sleeping car porters as "George" regardless of their actual name.
South Pointing Chariot	An ancient Chinese mechanical compass which took a millennium to reproduce.
Tall bike	A bike which consists of two conventional bicycle frames connected one atop the other.
Train surfing	As respectable and practical as drying one's hair in most parts of the world.
Unused highway	Lost highways, unloved and unused.
Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571	How do you survive on a freezing cold glacier with the impending threat of starvation? Answer: eat your friends.
USGlobal Airways	An active airline founded in 1989 that has never operated a single commercial flight.
ValuJet Airlines	Quite possibly the most unsafe airline in history. Think of it as being the air transport equivalent of Action Park.
Vomit Comet	Lack of gravity is not good for the stomach.
Vortech Meg-2XH Strap-On	A discontinued strap-on helicopter designed for amateur construction. Somehow no lawsuits are mentioned in the article.
Wallsend Metro station	All railroads lead to Rome. With "no smoking" signs, although tobacco was unknown to ancient Romans...
Westray to Papa Westray flight	The world's shortest passenger flight, lasting as little as 53 seconds. Just don't expect an in-flight meal.
The wrong type of snow	Possibly the most feeble excuse for why British trains are so awful.

Computing

.bv	A top-level domain that isn't being sold, made for an Antarctic island where no one lives.
.io	How is a top-level domain for a group of islands with a population of about 3000 military personnel and contractors where leisure tourism is banned so popular?
.kp	North Korea's top-level domain. Interestingly, some websites under this ccTLD can be accessed outside of the DPRK.
.nu	Niue's top-level domain, which is regulated by Sweden and almost exclusively used by European countries.
.su	How a piece of the Soviet Union's internet is not only still online but also still in use to this day.
.tv	Sales of websites under this top-level domain name make up 10% of Tuvalu's GDP.
999 phone charging myth	Some people in the UK seriously believe that calling their emergency phone number charges your phone.
Any key	Press any key to continue.
Blinkenlights	DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN!
Bogosort	The world's worst sorting algorithm works like this: Randomise the list. Is it in order? If not, try again. Or maybe it is the best…
The Book of Mozilla	A well-known computer Easter egg found in the Netscape and Mozilla series of browsers.
Brainfuck	An intentionally difficult to use programming language containing only eight commands.
Brian's Brain	He's so smart, he has his own cellular automaton.
Bush hid the facts	Revelations of a vast right-wing conspiracy, or just a glitch?
Chudnovsky brothers	A pair of mathematicians who built a supercomputer out of spare parts.
Creeper and Reaper	The world's very first computer virus and computer antivirus, respectively.
Conway's Game of Life	A simple game with only four rules that people have made beautifully complex machines with. It even has the ability to self-replicate! See also Brian's Brain above.
Electric unicycle	The ongoing academic effort to teach robots to ride unicycles.
Elvis operator	An operator in programming languages with an unusual name.
Emojli	A now-defunct emoji-only social network. Started as a parody of Yo (see below).
Enshittification	Every site you like gets worse and worse. Except Wikipedia (hopefully).
Esoteric programming language	Refers to programming languages designed as a test of the boundaries of computer programming language design, as a proof of concept, or as jokes, and not with the intention of being adopted for real-world programming.
Evil bit	Indicates if a packet has been sent with malicious intent, so that it can be ignored.
Guru Meditation error	If you thought the blue screen of death was bad, this computer error would hamper your quest to reach Nirvana.
Heisenbug	A programming bug that disappears when you study it.
Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol	Protocol for controlling and monitoring coffee pots. Attempting to use a teapot while brewing coffee will yield you the "HTTP 418: I'm a teapot" error message.
I Am Rich	You must be if you could afford this US$999.99 iPhone application that only displayed a red gem and a (misspelled) mantra.
Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and Browser Usage	Internet Explorer users have lower than average IQ, according to this (nonexistent) study.
International Obfuscated C Code Contest	A competition to create code that no human can read.
IP over Avian Carriers	An Internet protocol for sending data packets using homing pigeons.
iSmell	A computer peripheral designed to emit smells for websites and emails, later named one of the "Worst Tech Products" by PC Magazine.
Leet	T3h 1@ngu/\&e 0f H@xx0rz.
Lenna	How an image of a nude Playboy model became the industry-standard digital image compression test subject.
Loab	According to AI, the exact opposite of many prompts is the same picture of an old woman.
lp0 on fire	Want to panic a Unix user? Display an error that their printer is on fire.
Macquarium	Vintage Macintosh computers-turned-fishtanks.
Magic smoke	When a chip fails, it's because the smoke has gotten out.
The Million Dollar Homepage	A web page sold for advertising space at 1 dollar per pixel.
MONIAC	A water-based analogue computer used to model the United Kingdom economy, bringing a new meaning to the term liquidity.
Mystery meat navigation	The process of not telling you what you're about to click on.
Not a typewriter	Well, what is it, then?
On the Cruelty of Really Teaching Computer Science	A 1990 academic paper which argues that computer programming should be understood as a branch of mathematics, and that the formal provability of a program is a major criterion for correctness.
Pentium F00F bug	An Intel Pentium bug with an unusual name.
Reality distortion field	Surely an obscure quantum-physics phenomenon? Nope!
Red Star OS	North Korea's official Linux distribution. In line with Kim Jong-un apparently being an Apple fanboy, Red Star OS's latest UI design mimics macOS.
Rubber duck debugging	Code debugging by explaining your code to a rubber duck. Quack!
RTFM	Four letters that solve most problems.
Rubber-hose cryptanalysis	Cryptography by other means.
Scunthorpe problem	Spam filtering based on text strings can cause problems. Just ask the residents of S****horpe.
Send Me To Heaven	A mobile game won by throwing your phone as close to heaven as you can without it getting there.
Tay (chatbot)	An artificial intelligence chatbot designed by Microsoft to learn the speech patterns of the Twitter users who interacted with it, Tay lasted 16 hours before becoming too racist to remain online.
TempleOS	A biblical-themed operating system designed by a single schizophrenic programmer over the course of 10 years after receiving instructions from God. Some assembly required.
Trojan Room coffee pot	The fascinating target of the world's first webcam: a coffee machine at the computer science department of Cambridge University.
Utah teapot	A 3D model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community.
Yo	A messaging service whose only function was to send "Yo" to people.