MoreForgotten Inventions and Curious Contraptions Everyday History’s Strangest Innovations

What happens when human ingenuity solves problems that barely exist?

Forgotten and Curious Inventions explores the strange, ambitious, and often unsettling devices that once promised to improve everyday life—and quietly disappeared. From a snowman sealed inside a can to a helmet designed to block the world from the human mind, this book uncovers inventions that reveal more about cultural anxieties than technological progress.

Written in a clear, accessible academic style, each chapter examines a single invention within its historical moment. Readers encounter machines that tried to control appetite, enforce concentration, harness pets for household labor, or reshape the human body itself. These inventions were rarely useless accidents. They were sincere attempts to solve real social concerns using the tools, beliefs, and assumptions of their time.

Rather than celebrating innovation uncritically, this book asks deeper questions. Why did these ideas make sense when they did? What fears, desires, and values produced them? And what does their disappearance tell us about how societies change their minds?

Blending cultural history, technology studies, and social analysis, Forgotten and Curious Inventions is not a catalog of gimmicks, but a study of imagination. It shows how creativity often follows emotion rather than logic, and how failed inventions can be as revealing as successful ones.

This book will appeal to readers interested in history, design, technology, psychology, and the human tendency to believe that every problem—no matter how small—deserves a machine.