List of spurious inventions
This is a list of spurious inventions, technologies which are generally considered to not possess their claimed capabilities, to be hoaxes, or to not have ever existed in the first place.
| Spurious invention | Description |
|---|---|
| Angel Light | According to its inventor, this device could make walls, hands, and stealth shielding transparent. |
| Black box | Popular name for a diagnostic machine made by Albert Abrams. It supposedly could diagnose diseases based on their special vibrations that can be sensed along someone's spine.[1]: 37 |
| Chronovisor | A time viewer claimed to have produced photographs and recordings of the ancient past. |
| Cloudbuster | A device that could purportedly make rain through manipulating atmospheric orgone, a kind of energy considered to be pseudoscientific.[1]: 55 |
| Edison | A device claimed to produce numerous analyses of blood very quickly using very small samples. |
| Etheric generator | A generator which John Ernst Worrell Keely claimed could produce a vapor "more powerful than steam, and considerably more economical", by some force affecting the added water, and air. |
| Gavreau's infrasonic weapons | Various whistles and horns, possibly fictional, which could cause serious bodily harm and death by emitting infrasound.[2][3] |
| Mechanical Turk | An 18th-century chess-playing automaton that appeared to operate autonomously but actually concealed a human operator, deceiving audiences for decades.[4] |
| Rife machine | Devices that can, purportedly, by the use of electromagnetic waves, destroy pathogens, including cancer. There is no reliable evidence that the Rife machine works as a cure for cancer.[5] |
| Teleforce | A weapon, also known as Nikola Tesla's death ray or peace ray, that would accelerate pellets of material to a high velocity so as to cause significant damage from a long distance.[6] |
| Nikola Tesla electric car hoax | Alleged advanced electric car. |
| Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion experiment | Attempt to cause nuclear fusion using electrolysis to achieve the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium.[1]: 56–57 |
| Kryakutnoy | Fictional inventor of hot air balloons.[1]: 236 |
| Newman energy machine | Supposed free-energy machine invented by Joe W. Newman.[1]: 236 |
| Perpetual motion machines | Hypothetical machines that do not need any added energy or force to continue motion. All attempts as of yet are considered spurious, and such a machine is considered impossible by modern thermodynamics.[1]: 248, 262 |
| Hyper CD-ROM | Allegedly created by Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 1991, it is a claimed optical data storage device similar to the CD-ROM with a multilayer 3D structure of 2,000 different layers and can allegedly hold up to 1 PB and theoretically up to 100 EB, despite being claimed to have been invented in 1991 and multiple awards were given to Eugen Pavel, it has not shown a working prototype. |
| Sloot Digital Coding System | Allegedly created by Jan Sloot in 1995, it is an alleged technique for data encoding that could represent an entire feature film with only one kilobyte of data, a level of compression which is mathematically impossible according to Shannon's source coding theorem. Contrary to his claims, the playback device he used was discovered to contain a hard drive. |
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f Williams, William F., ed. (2000). Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience. Book Builders Incorporated. ISBN 0-8160-3351-X.
- ^ Eveleth, Rose (21 November 2012). "You Can't Blow Somebody's Brain Up With Sound". Smithsonian Magazine.
- ^ Pilkington, Mark (19 June 2003). "Extreme noise terror". The Guardian.
- ^ "Mechanical Turk". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2025-03-08.
- ^ "Rife machines and cancer". Cancer Research UK.
- ^ Reece, Gregory L. (2009). Weird science and bizarre beliefs : mysterious creatures, lost worlds, and amazing inventions. I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. pp. 200, 203. ISBN 978-1-84511-756-6.