Impossible Inventions

Greek fire, ice aircraft carriers, spaceships riding atomic bombs to Saturn.

22 stories

• The Truck Driver Who Flew a Lawn Chair to 16,000 Feet on 42 Weather Balloons
• The Two Vacuum Cleaners That Learned to Breathe
• The Roman Cup That Was Accidentally Nanotechnology
• The Scientist Who Faced a Charging Bull With a Cape in One Hand and a Radio Transmitter in the Other
• The Seesaw That Was Built to Raise the Dead
• The Sewing Machine Salesman San Diego Hired to Make Rain — Who Filled the Reservoir and Never Got Paid
• The Spaceship That Was Supposed to Ride Atomic Bombs to Saturn
• The Plan to Set Off a Nuclear Bomb on the Moon So Everyone Could Watch
• The Rocket-Powered Wheel That Chased Britain's Admirals Into Barbed Wire
• The Mechanical Duck That Fooled Paris With Fake Poop
• The Motor That Ran for Twenty-Six Years on a Secret Room Full of Compressed Air
• The Flying Saucer the Air Force Built That Maxed Out at 35 MPH
• The Chemical That Sets Fire to Sand — and the Rocket Chemist Who Recommended Running Shoes
• The Coin-Operated Holy Water Machine That Beat the Vending Machine by 1,800 Years
• The Aircraft Carrier Britain Tried to Build Out of Ice
• The Airplane That Carried a Nuclear Reactor
• The Bomb Full of Sleeping Bats That Burned Down Its Own Air Base
• The Bomb Three Pigeons Were Trained to Steer
• Starlite: The Fireproof Plastic a Hairdresser Invented and Took to His Grave
• The 2,000-Year-Old Computer Found in a Shipwreck
• The 3,000 Letters the Post Office Fired at Florida Inside a Cruise Missile
• Greek Fire: The Byzantine Weapon That Burned on Water — and Whose Recipe Died With the Empire

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