Life Magazine’s gallery of thirty dumb inventions is so funny my instinct would be to repost every single photo here. I settled for Goodyear’s illuminated tires (1961), which I am in fact amazed didn’t catch on - I’m sure many people would love to pimp their rides with those. It’s interesting to note two inventor heroes of mine - Hugo Gernsback (the first television broadcaster and sci-fi pioneer) and Clive Sinclair (of the ZX Spectrum fame) - are present in this infamous list, as apparently both had some kind of miniature TV fetish in the 1960s (still, I wish to know in which way is cellphone television smarter than Sinclair’s miniature television set).

And another thing: what’s the story with all those smoking accessories? A tiny umbrellla for cigarettes? Serial cigarette apparatuses? Come on!

Steven M. Johnson is an inventor with some offbeat interesting ideas - such as human-powered washing machines or mass-producing pre-damaged cars (read on, it sort of makes sense)!

Invisible flash takes photos without the glare

The Null Device links to the ‘dark flash’, which is an infrared flash that could turn bright flashes in the night obsolete (saving all those people in say, football stadiums, the embarrassement of being seen using a light source with a range of 8 meters to snap a picture of the far side goal). But I started thinking, isn’t this something you can already do. There are plenty of tutorials on how to remove your camera sensor’s infrared filter, and I’m pretty sure you can fit a IR-transmitting filter to a flash to achieve the same effect. Lots of interesting exposure calculations (as you need to compensate exposure in higher wavelenghts) will follow, I’m sure.