Vote for the worlds greatest elevator ride. The contenders include: John Portmans spectacular scenic hotel rides; a James Bond style elevator at the Mercedes Museum; a Chinese cliff face elevator; the construction workers elevator on the Burj Dubai, which is twice as high as the Empire State building; the elevator which climbs through the center of the giant Berlin Sea life aquarium and an enormous, futuristic elevator for boats in Scotland. My personal favorite is the elevator at the Mole in Turin which has a unique history.
A new Oobject chart almost every day, below are the most recent
Gerry Anderson is a cult TV figure because he took the unfashionably low tech world of puppetry and applied it with such skill and design flair to science fiction subjects that the results were highly original and imaginative. From the late sixties to late seventies, Dinky Toys produced die cast model toys of some of the more memorable Anderson craft from Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, UFO and Space 1999. They are now highly collectible. Vote for your faves.
Identified Unidentified Flying Oobjects. A list of some real flying saucers, from the US and Soviet military, a video of the amazing Moller M200x, some flying saucer inspired architecture and a patent for a nuclear powered flying saucer from British Rail, bizarrely. Vote for your faves.
Neutrinos are extremely small and fast, so much so that to detect them you have to build really amazing experiments, such as the ones shown here. Japans Super-K is a 50,000 ton tank of water, half a mile underground, so clear that divers get vertigo. The latest South Pole neutrino telescopes, which point into the earths core rather than at the sky, have arrays of detectors which are much larger than the Empire State building and are frozen deep in the Antarctic ice core.
As gas prices increase so do oil profits and expensive kitsch. There is a correlation between increase money made from carbon deposits such as oil and the availability of horrible diamond or Swarovski encrusted objects. One form of carbon (oil) is swapped for another (diamonds), in exchange for silver (money). Damien Hirsts $100 Million diamond skull doesnt make this chart on account of its priceless irony. Similar lists have been done by others, but we couldnt resist an updated version.
Brain devices tend to look interesting an unusual, from passive, insect like EEG caps with trailing wires to interactive Brain Computer Interfaces. These devices range from largely useless toys to profoundly impressive technology used to control things such as prosthetic limbs. Here is an eclectic mix of our favorites, vote for yours.
Thanks to an intrepid group of urban explorers, some of the most magnificent hidden engineering triumphs that lie, hidden, beneath the streets of the worlds cities are being recorded and posted on underground (no pun intended) websites.<p /><p />Here are some of our favorite sewers and drains, from Paris tourist attraction sewers to Londons Escher-like, arched, Victorian Gothic drains, to still working ancient Roman systems and the infamous giant storm drains beneath Tokyo. Vote for your faves.
There is something inherently fascinating about survival kits. Here are some of our favorites, including those below ejector seats, some nicely designed kits from Japan and at Target, and those that we thought had interesting components. We will add to this list over time, send us suggestions of genuinely interesting or unusual, non-gimmick kits.
Sometimes, making things simpler makes things more complicated. Like telling the time on willfully minimalist watches. Watches can be minimalist and functional, but the examples here put form over function where the aesthetic gain may be questionable. There is one of these we actually really like, but we are not telling which.
Machines designed to smash large tough items into small bits, including a machine that eats trees whole, and yes, a real bone crusher, that makes fertilizer from animal bones.
This is a list of the worlds most beautiful airport terminals, based upon architectural merit rather than crude size, high tech bravado or structural gymnastics. For that reason the beautifully simple Dalaman terminal in Turkey makes the list, for example, but the design compromised Heathrow Terminal Five, does not. Vote for your faves.
Everything from cars to cargo ships can be nuclear powered, not just aircraft carriers or submarines,. If you want a really wild motor for your vehicle here are some real examples of nuclear engines. <p /><p />To avoid more well known examples, we have not included carriers and submarines in this chart, and we have tried to link to images of the actual engines. Vote for your faves.
In this kind of space, no one can hear you scream. Anechoic chambers use spiked walls to eliminate echoes, the end result might literally sound dull but the visual effect can be stunning, such as at the enormous anechoic hangar. Vote for your faves.
Continuous mining machines and Roadheaders are giant automated modern day mining machines that slice through rock at high speed and look like something from hell. Here are some of our favorite examples of these magnificent machines. Vote for your faves.
Climbing walls are both functionally and aesthetically fascinating. They often have beautiful abstract shapes reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters Merzbau or are just plain intricate and impressive.<p /><p />Included in our collection here are interactive musical climbing walls, enormous artificial ice towers, surreal climbing forms and a huge climbing wall inside a disused Texan grain silo. Vote for your faves.
What a tech bubble needs is bubble cars like these classics from the 40s to the present. Perhaps they should replace the Google bus with a 1958 Goggomobil?
Want to see some more impressive glass stairs than those at the Apple Stores? Despite the fact that Apple actually has a patent on the glass stairs at some of its stores, their glass staircases are actually not all that innovative. The glass stair at the Carre D art in Nimes is more adventurous and was designed 20 years ago, and Ove Arup have engineered a purely glass stair with no steel fixings.
The interior and exterior of wind tunnels have unusual design requirements that often make them accidental architectural masterpieces.<p /><p />Wind tunnels range from the miniature wooden box that the Wright brothers used, to the gigantic full scale tunnel at NASA Ames in Silicon Valley which drains the power supply for the entire Bay Area, and tests actual planes and space craft. Air speeds within them can reach tens of times the speed of sound, requiring super heated air.<p /><p />All in all, they are definitely object to go ooh about.
Tourbillon watches are the most expensive in the world often costing $500,000. They became fashionable in the last decade as non-forgeable status symbols for billionaires, but that is now being threatened by Chinese imitations.<p /><p />The style of these devices is baroque in the truest sense, but becuase their aesthetic derives from the rational world of mechanics the style jars and they are, to my mind, as grotesque and kitsch as their diamond encrusted counterparts in the luxury watch market.<p /><p />After facing the existential threat of digital which made accuracy cheap, the Swiss watch industry turned to making high end jewelry either directly with diamond encrusted gold watches or indirectly via those that fetishised complex mechanics for the sake of it, such as these. Ironic, since the origins of Swiss watch making came from the ban on jewelry in Calvanist Geneva.<p /><p />These tourbillon (whirlwind) watches are the most extreme example of complex analog mechanics, the most expensive clockwork items in the world, costing between $100,000 and $500,000, they all share a rotating escapement which theoretically leads to better accuracy (even though that does not compare to a $50 swatch).<p /><p />This mechanism is very difficult to make and fascinating to look at, so most tourbillon watches directly expose their intricate mechanics, which originally only the Swiss could make. Recently, however, Chinese watch makers have brought tourbillon watches to market, for a tenth of the price, threatening their cache as a status symbol which is difficult to fake.<p />
Just when people are talking about banning the incandescent light bulb, designers are noticing how beautiful they are and making lamps which show of rather than hide bulbs. Here is an eclectic list of items in honor of the humble light bulb, including a couple of takes on other types of lamp, for good measure
The history of computers is not all digital, from the humble slide rule to hydraulic models of the economy there is a rich history of both electronic and mechanical analog computers. Here are some of our favorite examples. <p /><p />These computers have certain advantages over their symbolic counterparts. They measure continuous variables in parallel and therefore their accuracy is limited only by the granularity with which their results are read and their speed is not limited by sequential operations.
The original yellow submarine may have been aqualung inventor Jacques Cousteaus. Since The Beatles song, all manner of weird and wonderful, quixotic submarines have to be bright yellow, from home made subs, floating human powered septic tanks and deep sea exploration vehicles. Vote for your faves.
Welding goggles are a staple item for Burning Man and Steampunk fans, and the variety of welding masks and visors is impressive and iconic. <p /><p />They range from creepy leather hood "Monkey Masks" to hand held furnace mask derivatives, to sophisticated systems based upon racing helmets, with visors that darken instantly in a fraction of a second, and with customized paint jobs from kitsch to clever. Vote for your faves.
In the pre Pirate Bay days of analog transmission, pirate radio stations were setup in the most bizarre places, to avoid being shut down. Many of these were offshore, in boats, lighthouses, disused forts, or even balloons or planes.<p /><p />The idea for outlaw stations came from the US military who broadcast from B 29 bombers, over Vietnam, ships off the coast of Soviet states and continue to broadcast to Cuba from balloons. Israel is the last remaining country to have pirate radio ships in operation, where they broadcast ultra conservative religious programming.
And you thought the matrix was fiction? Robots designed to access hostile areas such as radioactive areas are also used beneath the streets to clean or repair sewers or to lay cables. They were among the first things on the scene after 911 or Katrina and have a particular rugged beauty. Vote for your faves.
Watching Wii time lapse is a socio-anthropological experience, if Warhol were alive today perhaps he would be making videos like these. A collection of our favorite videos, proving that not everyone gets off the sofa, and that Wii is so addictive some people will continue to play it while holding their new born child. Vote for your fave.
From giant wind blown animal sculptures to an armored mechanical shark. The number of possible entries in this list is huge. Here is a selection of some of our faves, vote for yours.
These days most cutaways are computer rendered. Here are some physical cutaways that fascinate us as much as when travel stores had elaborate cutaway models of passenger jets.<p /><p />The most amazing is a model of Chernobyl reactor core 4, accurately depicting its ruined state after the disaster.
When you see something familiar that looks unfamiliar it creates an impression. Armor is so iconic that everyone has an image of what it looks like, from Roman to Samurai. Here are some examples that are a little bit different. Vote for your faves.<p />
Balloons formed the origins of what became the USAF, have been used for stratospheric parachute jumps, bungee jumps and even to test nuclear bombs. Vote for your faves.
A bunch of swimming pools have been doing the rounds on blogs lately. Here is the Oobject alternative list of cool pools. Including pools over fake pools, pools hanging off the edge of buildings, 1000 year old pools and spectacular underground pools. Vote for your faves.
Forget the kinds of kitchen gadgets you see on infomercials, if you want the real deal you have to go to the pros. <p /><p />Who doesnt want a computer controlled Instant Noodle machine, a bagel production line, a 2000 piece and hour sushi robot or a 60 foot long mobile smoker. Vote for your faves.
iCandy – the best Apple concept mockups. Despite the huge number of 3d rendered mockups of Apple products on the web, few even come close to genuine Apple design. The exceptions seem to be Isamu Sanada and Yann Le Coroller, who between them account for the majority of well executed 3rd party concepts. Here are our favorites, and why we chose them. Vote for yours.
Although folding bicycles have seen somewhat of a renaissance, there has not been as much innovation compared to mountain bikes, because the market is smaller. <p /><p />This is a shame since although there are some great products such as Bromptons or the Birdy, there is, in our opinion, no ideal foldup. <p /><p />An ideal foldup would be one that folds so small and is so light, that you could take it in a backpack, just in case, like carrying an umbrella in case it rains. <p /><p />A couple of the concept designs here come close – vote for your fave.
One of the negative things about technological progress is when something that was originally intricate and mechanical becomes a ubiquitous piece of cheap technology. This happened in the 70s with watches and more recently has happened with cameras.<p />A modern day spy camera is not that interesting, but the miniature ones here are, similarly the wide range of hardware solutions create much more design diversity in early cameras, from the giant 900lb box camera to the bizarre miniature ones developed for carrier pigeons, from gun like trigger activated shutters to a propeller powered film advance mechanism for a camera mounted below an early aircraft.
A boat that deliberately capsizes to form a research building, a rotating 25 floor hotel with a floating foundation and a floating nuclear power plant. Vote for your favorite.
People sometimes make fun of the Swiss, since all they are famous for inventing is the Cuckoo Clock. Which is not really fair, because they didnt – the Germans did. Here are some post modern alternatives (both intentional and accidental) to the classic Black Forest Cuckoo Clock.
Here are clips of some of Steve Job’s legendary speeches. From the original introduction of the Mac to the triumphant return to Apple from the iPod to the iPhone launch and the famous Stanford speech after surviving cancer. People are expecting something great as a follow up to last years iPhone sermon. Vote for the all time best.
Named after the famous cartoonist, Rube Goldberg machines are unlike ordinary gadgets in that they are deliberately inefficient, taking the maximum number of steps to achieve a goal. Last years winner of the Rube Goldberg competition took over three hundred steps to squeeze a glass of orange juice.<p /><p />To truly appreciate RG machines you need to see them in action. Here is a list of videos of our favorites. Vote for yours.
Tensegrity structures are visually stunning and their combination with computer enhanced structures is creating renewed interest for architectural applications.<p /><p />Buckminster Fuller coined the term tensegrity when he saw sculptures by Kenneth Snelson and realized that rigid component geodesics were a special case of perfectly balanced compression and tension. Tensegrity refers to structures where compression members (rods) are only connected to each other by tension members (cables). The end result is that the structures appear to float in air.<p /><p />Despite the fact that tensegrity structures are fantastically efficient, few have been built since they tend to have a single point of failure and need adjustment. Recently however, schemes which combine the intelligence of computing and tensegrity structures have lead to proposals of very large scale structures including sky scrapers.<p /><p />Here are our favorite tensegrity links from around the web. Vote for yours
This is the real business end of $100 oil. An object that allowed Howard Hughes to become the richest man in the world by inheriting the patent. <p /><p />They are the world’s most highly engineered pieces of metal. Steel, tungsten carbide or increasingly Polycrystalline Diamond Compact (PDC) toothed drill bits that, in their tri-cone, rotating head form, look like the monster spice eating Sandworms from Dune. Vote for your faves.
Ever since Evel Knievel attempted to jump Snake River Canyon, by sitting in a rocket powered bomb, dressed like Elvis, Darwin Awards contenders have tried to create inappropriate rocket powered items. <p /><p />These days we have YouTube to show us 10 thousand varieties of rocket powered skateboard. Here are our favorites, vote for yours.
One of Silicon Valleys most famous landmarks, and possibly its only truly monumental one is under threat of demolition. The giant airship Hangar One at NASAs Moffett Field, is one of Americas architectural treasures.<p /><p />Airship hangars were collectively the largest spaces ever built, larger than cathedrals and just as awe inspiring. Vote for your favorite.
By the end of the decade, not one of New York's skyscrapers will be in the top 10 tallest, compared to those in Saudi Arabia or the Arab Emirates. <p /><p />The Burj Dubai, which is nearly completed will be the size of two Empire State buildings on top of each other and it would be completely dwarfed by proposals on either side of the Arabian peninsula for mile high towers. <p /><p />The Emirates contain some of the most surreal, monumental and ironic recent architectural projects, including a mammoth ferris wheel hotel, a twin tower Wold Trade Center and an enormous convention center intentionally modeled on the Death Star from Star Wars. <p /><p />Vote for the most surreal.
Microphones are a classic gadget because, even today, their design is often based upon Art Deco or Machine Age styling. Here is a chart of vintage and vintage style microphones designed to show how that style evolved and how it is still copied today. Vote for your faves.
Considering what guns are actually designed to do, its pretty amazing how many other products and gadgets are designed to look like them. Here are a few of our faves. Vote for yours.
Atomic clocks are accurate to within one second since the period in time when humans and apes diverged. <p /><p />These clocks are literally what makes modern civilization tick, but few people ever see one. Their accuracy is necessary to overcome potential errors caused by relativistic effects in GPS satellites, for example. <p /><p />Here is a gallery of some of the more interesting atomic clocks. Vote for your faves.
Here is a roundup of collectible boomboxes, currently being auctioned on ebay. The mannerist nature of 80s ghetto blasters could not be more different from today’s minimalist trends in consumer audio gear, lead by Sony and Apple. Because of this, these devices now look obviously obsolete and different and are starting to become collectors items. Ugly, but interesting, and representative of their time, some are perfect examples of pointless feature driven design, something which still plagues software.
To celebrate I am Legend, here is a chart of our favorite abandoned technology. Disused military equipment, famous aircraft bone yards, derelict lighthouses, fun fairs subway systems and railway locomotives.
If you want to build a Steampunk – Victorian – Dr. Frankenstein lab in your garage this weekend, here are some suggestions of where to “get that look”. Suggestions always welcome.
A gallery of giant ears. Before electronic RADAR, acoustic listening devices were like giant mechanical ear trumpets which could locate sounds and even calculate distances by bouncing sound waves in exactly the same manner that SONAR works in water. Ear trumpets themselves were only fully replaced by electronic devices in the middle of the 20th Century, because of their conspicuous nature, they were often hidden in anything form beards and wigs to table ornaments.
From 3 megawatt offshore monsters to zero energy windmill skyscrapers, kite flown turbines and giant seabed anchored super-turbines, held aloft by blimps. Here is our list of the most futuristic and quixotic designs for wind turbines. By far the most beautiful way to harness energy. <p />
Fingerprint scanners are a dime a dozen these days. But how about devices which can literally grant access by the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you type or write, bite or grip. Here is a chart of state of the art biometric applications, including futuristic devices like portable Game Boys which are ominously called HIIDE (handheld interagency identity detection).
Nothing less than human made lightning. The massive fields generated by resonance between pairs of stepped up induced capacitors create potential differences greater than the resistance of air between the coil and a nearby conductor. This allows fractal currents to flow as the air itself conducts and ionizes.<p /><p />Although Tesla coils are largely created for fun by dedicated enthusiasts, they originally had a real purpose in mind. Tesla figured that he could create a wireless electrical grid and went as far as to build a tower on Long Island that would be its first transmitter. The idea was never realized, however in Russia really large scale wireless power networks were actually tried, as can be seen in this list.<p /><p />Vote for your faves.
A gallery of products using radioactive materials.<p /><p />Because radiation was seen to be new and powerful, at the beginning of the 20th century radioactive material was used in products such as face creams, mineral water and medicine, by equating power with rejuvenation. For similar reasons it was even used in items from spark plugs to condoms. <p /><p />Although many of these items are from an age when the dangers of radiation were not known, radiation is obviously useful as a healing tool for cancer therapy, but it is still used in legal Chinese remedies, which are respected more because of their age rather than efficacy and quack homeopathic medicines which are tolerated while unproven, because they are harmless water.<p /><p />Vote on your fave examples.
Some of the most beautiful mechanisms ever produced, here is a gallery of old and new mechanical movements of planets and their moons, the entire solar system and tides and eclipses. Orreries, Planetaria and Tellurions, respectively.
As flat screen TVs become ubiquitous, vintage TVs look more and more interesting and unusual. From early mechanical TVs consisting of a spinning disk and lens (which look even better without an enclosure), to Sony’s original transistor TV and portable LCD sets from as early as the 80s. Here are some of our favorites from collector sites around the web.
Not long till the awesomeness of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Oobject has some ideas for alternative inflatables. Vote for your choices.
Top500.org have just released their updated list of the worlds most powerful supercomputers. In June all of the top 5 were in the US, now only 2 are, with India, Sweden and Germany appearing.<p /><p />Here’s an interesting thing, you can make it into this list for less than the cost of a family house in Manhattan.<p /><p />The fact that a Swedish Military computer is at number 5 indicates that either the Swedish military require the world’s most powerful computers, or they are just unusually unsecretive, and that there are many machines we don’t know about.<p /><p />Here are the top 15, with pictures of the actual machines, where they have been built. Although the IBM Blue Gene has a simple and striking case, only the Barcelona Computer Center and Leibniz Rechenzentrum are contained in rooms that are at all impressive. Vote for which ones you think are worthy of note.
A gallery of incredible streamline design. No other period in product design is more important to American history than the Streamlined period. Here are our favorite gadgets and vehicles from the Sky Captain World of Tomorrow.<p /><p />Ironically the streamlined shape is less aerodynamic than it looks. It came from the high speed steam trains designed by people like Raymond Loewy or cars by Norman Bel Geddes (the father of the actress who played Miss Ellie in Dallas) and still exists in kitchen and bar-ware and the 40s style Airstream trailers which escorted the Astronauts off the Space Shuttle today and still look futuristic.
Until very recently, people still used the same principal that Newton had proposed, to derive latitude from the angle of the sun or stars at known times. The sextant (or originally octant) allowed people to do this relative to the horizon, rather than the instrument itself.<p /><p />Later versions of the sextant included a very simple version for emergency use, called the Bris sextant (not a great name for a device to be used on a rolling ship) and until the advent of GPS systems, bubble sextants were used on aircraft.
RIP Google Phone, long live concept phones. A roundup of the best cellphone concepts and prototypes. Vote for your fave.
From a skyscraper’s lights that can be controlled by passers by, to the legendary rock set design of Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park here are some examples of the worlds largest screens. Vote for your faves.
Halloweenerdy is a term often used to refer to costumes favored by geeks. These costumes appear at events such as Sci-Fi conventions, Burning man and, of course, Halloween. Halloween is like Burning Man but without the corrosive dust, a perfect excuse to spend three and a half thousand hours building a hollywood quality prop and to gawk at co-workers in marketing, wearing bondage gear.<p /><p />Here are our all time favorite costumes. Vote for yours.
The two cardboard box halloween outfit is a halloween icon. Why they are always funny, we’re not sure, perhaps its the irony of the fact that they are cheap and low tech and without any organic curves. Here are some instruction of how to make your own: 1. Take 2 boxes. 2. Wear them.<p /><p />We not quite sure what to vote on here. Most iconic?
Before electricity, lighthouses relied on lamps that would almost be considered mood lighting by today’s standards. Mechanisms were clockwork and had to be wound as often as every two hours. In the 19th century, Fresnel designed a lens that could focus this light into parallel rays and project it horizontally, dramatically improving lighthouses. By the end of the century, all lighthouses had Fresnel lenses classified into orders, with first order being the largest and most impressive.<p /><p />These days lighthouses use less elaborate lamps such as the beacons found at airfields, or even powerful, but unremarkable to look at, LEDs. Here is a list of some of the most beautiful and important lights ever made, including some 1st order beauties that stand 20 feet tall, and were floated on a mercury bed. There are no descriptions of each item, for this chart, as the images speak for themselves, however, the sites linked to have information about the lighthouses where they came from.
If you want to re-model your home in the style of an Apple store, here are links to the suppliers of the actual items they use.<p /><p />The designs of the Apple stores may not be particularly original in terms of architecture, however they break new boundaries in retail design with an attention to detail that is normally only found in major public buildings. The principal inspirations for Apple’s interiors range from Norman Foster’s Mediatheque in Nimes, with its central glass staircase and I.M. Pei’s entrance to the Louvre which is the inspiration for the fifth avenue store. Although the cube itself (particularly when it was shrouded in black) is more like the Kaab at Mecca, proving that Apple is a religion after all.<p /><p />Many of the fittings they use, such as Erco lighting are used by people like Pei and Foster (where I used to work) and the exterior panels are made by the same firm that provided the panels for San Francisco’s greatest modern building – the De Young Museum.
Included here are the RC helicopters that filmed New Orleans streets after Katrina, a seven foot Yodeling man and a remote controlled zombie for halloween. Vote for your fave.
As people blow each other to pieces, daily, on the planet below, the silently floating Hubble telescope seems to represent everything great about humankind. Here are our other favorite telescopes.<p /><p />Update: Have been in continuous operation since 1963, the Arecibo project is in danger of closing due to cuts in funding. Jonathan, who is a researcher working at the Arecibo dish has posted a link in the comments to its website where you can donate or voice your support. http://www.arecibo-observatory.org
The Oobject Rotten Apple Award. To mark this week’s 10th anniversary of the death of the Newton we have picked some of the products from Apple, that we’d rather forget.<p /><p />We could have picked many more from the years when Jobs was in the wilderness and Apple attempted to be market driven rather than design driven, under Sculley. Reactive rather than pro-active. One problem, the gallery would have been a sea of similar, anonymous items. For the Sculley era machines, assume that we mean every product in the range.<p /><p />(update: Apple’s earnings are just in and they are blow-out. After hours trading shows that as of today, Apple is worth more than IBM.).<p /><p />Vote for your all time worst product.
For sheer baroque complexity of appearance, planetarium projectors are among the most amazing gizmos ever built. They range from enormous machines more than 20 ft. high to a soccer ball sized $300 home version.<p /><p />Their purpose is a bizarre reversal of a large optical telescope, taking an internal view of the the universe and projecting it on a dome, rather than creating a view from peering outside of one, but the aesthetic is somewhat similar. Another curious similarity is how much they look like some early satellites.<p /><p />Our personal favorites are the original Zeiss, Mark I and the truly amazing machine built by the Korkosz brothers for the, appropriately named, Seymour Planetarium.<p />
At first glance you think, wow a tie camera, a camera in a case, mirror, plant, cigarette packet, cell phone. How cool would that have been when I was a kid? Then you think, hmm …cell phone. Cell phones already have cameras, its a pretty dumb place to put a spy cam.<p /><p />The progress of technology has overtaken the mystique of the hidden camera such that we have been invaded by a million spy cams embedded in wholesale crap.<p /><p />Vote for the silliest. Oh, and do check out the rather great antique watch camera which is from the days when spy cams were actually impressive.
Singapore Airlines has this week banished the mile high club, with the introduction of on board double beds. The rest of the interior, however is fairly bland. Here is a list of some of the best aircraft interiors.
Quite often a company will release a limited edition item to mark a product’s anniversary that is actually worse than the original. We trawled the web to find examples of well designed anniversary gadgets, including our favorite, the 300lb limited edition espresso machine that was used by the Pope. Vote on your favorite.
Acrylic cases, cut aways and even solid glass mechanisms, allow for transparent enclosures where you can see the intricate workings of a machine.<p /><p />This tradition of ’skeleton’ cases comes from watch making, but there are versions of everything from Nikon cameras to cars that show off their innards. In putting together this collection we were trying to imagine if you could have a fully glass house (several have been designed, none built) where every item in it was as translucent as possible. Vote for your faves and recommend any we can add.
Cheap hi-fis sometimes come with lots of flashing lights and buttons, sound terrible and are difficult to use. Expensive ones often to come with not much more than an on/off switch and volume control, and sound great.<p /><p />One of things that happens in a mature market is that people go for quality rather than quantity – what this means in technology is less features and better design. Apple is the first technology company to go mainstream with a minimalist, mature-market design ethos, but there are others. Here are our current favorite (non-Apple) minimalist gadgets. This is a chart that we will be continually updating, over time. Vote for your favorites:
Diving helmets are beautiful objects. Here are our favorites from modern versions with amazing visors for undersea welding, to incredible Steampunk style ones that look more other worldly than something from Jules Verne.
What passes for interactive clothing often consists of a button to control your iPod from your sleeve.<p /><p />Here is a roundup of some more interesting interactive clothing ideas, including a jacket whose fur stands on end like a scared cat, a bikini whose breast pads inflate as a life saver and a jacket with a digital organism that grows as you wear it. These are alongside some more serious ideas such as a medical monitoring clothing and a robotic jacket to aid the paralyzed. Some are fairly well known, but others are hopefully new to you.
The stuffed chick with light bulb, understandably caused some fuss when it was created. Other strange lights here include pear lights which can be plucked out of a tree, paper plane lights lights that look like water dripping out of a tap and a lamp from a spinal column cast.
Here is a collection of lamps, lights and chandeliers made from everything from car parts, umbrellas, bicycles, tableware, old globes, tape measures and speaker parts.<p /><p />Hopefully this will whet your creative appetite.<p />
If you want to survive a shark attack, the surface of the moon, sub zero polar temperatures, fires, or crashes, insects or vegetarians these clothing items are the ones to be wearing.<p /><p />We’ve looked through some of the most innovative new textiles, such as an aerogel jacket to bring you the definitive list. And we didn’t include the ‘thong’. Vote for your faves.
Mechanical calculators are the genealogical ancestors of today’s computers. They also occupy a special place in the cultural history of gadgets, since they form the essential component of the mythical Steampunk alternative reality.<p /><p />Even if these clockwork beasts were steam driven, however, their electro-magnetic counterparts would inevitably have eventually replaced them. Vote on your favorites.
An Alarm clock is one of those gadgets that is simple enough to warrant a thousand different design variants. Here are the ones we consider most innovative or fun.<p /><p />Be awoken by a muezzin or a drill sargent and switch off by feeding money, doing a puzzle, diffusing a bomb, stepping on scales or grabbing a swinging pendant. We’ve included everything here except the Clocky, which you can see on a hundred thousand other blogs. Vote for your faves.
Ray guns originated in the US in the 30s, from shows like Buck Rogers. What makes them a particularly interesting object is that despite, for all practical purposes, having never existed, there is an almost endless variety of designs for toy ray guns, from around the world.<p /><p />Here are some of the best we could find. Most are for sale, and are posted without description, since the images speak for themselves.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, here are some of the other lesser known Soviet satellites.<p /><p />Soviet space gear looked different to NASA space gear. There was something alarming about this, since it meant that there was a cultural and aesthetic aspect to the type of their design that we expect to be based purely on rational criteria.<p /><p />These days the variety of satellite design does tend to reflect their function more than their provenance, however here are our picks of the ones that were quintessentially Soviet. Vote on your faves.
In the Avengers, Steed carried a sword cane. A sword cane was only one of a variety of gadget or system canes that were made popular in the Victorian era when everything from automatons, whiskey flasks, pipes, lighters, guns, umbrellas and golf clubs were combined in these antique gadgets.<p /><p />Here are some of the best ones we could find. Vote on your faves.<p />
In order to create musical mashups, its good to have some mashup instruments.<p /><p />We love the names of some of these, like the the chairello, however our favorites are the amazing musical instruments made by Iner Souster, out of chicken cookers, golf carts, refrigerators, and a violin that is made out of a violin case.
Our favorites here are the food based instruments of The First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra and the spectacular Atlantic City Convention Hall Organ which is practically the 8th wonder of the world.
n honor of the Frankfurt Motor Show, record oil prices and the end of Burning Man – we’re doing a non car list as a green alternative.<p /><p />Here are the strangest bikes we could find, propelled sideways, backwards, in reverse or by climbing up a ladder. Vote on your faves.
The fact that vinyl is somewhat obsolete is exactly what drives the quixotic ambitions of high end turntable manufacturers to produce ever more extreme engineering solutions to sliding a diamond through a wavy notch and amplifying the wobble.<p /><p />The common ground here is to make a very heavy and rock solid platter and to move the motor as far away from it as possible, to avoid interference. The prices of these things range from under $1000 to a staggering $150,000<p />
Time Machines come from two places: Ebay and movies. They also come in two varieties: hat with wires and vehicle, depending on whether the trip is physical or metaphysical.<p /><p />A notable exception is in the machine used in the TV show The Time Tunnel where the black and white spiral induces the effect of an acid trip to the extent that it doesn’t matter that it is neither a hat or a car.
A collection of ‘personal helicopters’ and flying machines.<p /><p />As the T-shirt says – “the is is the future, where is my Jetpack”. It seems that Jetpacks are basically dangerous, and since the appearance at the Los Angeles Olympics, nothing much has happened. Still, there are two manufacturers that will actually build one for you, for $250,000, and you can buy a glorified fan that will propel you on an ice rink at the same speed as a puck.<p /><p />If you want rotor blades rather than rockets, the current options are a bit cheaper and more practical, but are still less cool than the Soviet Fold-up helicopter, from the Cold War era.
Guiness’ law states that there is almost always more than one person who claims to have created the biggest, smallest fastest etc.<p /><p />Some of these items are disputable, but they are all cool. Our fave is the tiny combustion engine made at Berkeley.<p />
When I was a nipper… boy’s pockets were filled with bits of old string a couple of bits of candy and perhaps a penknife.<p /><p />Now, apparently you could find anything from a DVR to a miniature helicopter in there. As part of a series about everything small, here is our pocket sized chart. Vote for your faves.<p />
The iPhoney award.<p /><p />There were enough iPhone and iPod rip offs, that we found when searching for general copies of Apple design, to warrant their own chart. To celebrate the announcement of the merging of the iPod and iPhone line up, here are the iPhoneys. Vote for the most blatant.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Apple is getting it in spades.<p /><p />For those that worry about Apple blazing a trail for others to copy less expensively, its not that simple. A product like the iPhone is heavily tooled rather than fabricated. The hole for the headphones is actually drilled. To do this, Apple have hogged the world’s supply of the type of high tech, multi-dimensional machine tool needed.<p /><p />While companies like Nokia may copy, they may not be able to get the same build quality, even if they want to. Vote on the most blatant copy and post tips in the comments.<p />
Tube testers are machines to test the notoriously unreliable predecessor of the transistor – the vacuum tube, or valve. If you are a hi-fi nut with a tube amp you might actually even need one of these.<p /><p />What makes them special as vintage gadgets is that they have that particular density of retro buttons and switches that spells complicated and releases Serotonin in male humans.<p /><p />The link to the Catalog for the ‘Supreme’ brand on Steven Johnson’s site is particularly fine. Tube testers can be picked up on Ebay, fairly often, for reasonable prices.
Some of these are very high end audiophile speakers and others are those that we think are well designed from a product point of view. Extremely well designed or extremely well engineered.<p /><p />The Kef Muon’s are an unbelievable $140,000 while others are as low as $100. Our favorites are the 1960s Quad Electrostatics which are unlike anything ever made since and go nicely with a classic Quad 33 and 303 Pre and Power Amp.<p /><p />Its somewhat unfair to vote on something that is to be listened to and not looked at, so vote with your gut.
The earliest wrist watches were made for soldiers, where fumbling around for a pocket watch was dangerous. The very earliest examples were from the Boer War, however the idea caught on in the first World War.<p /><p />Some of these watches were actually designed to be worn around the leg (for airmen), and many have the distinctive protective grille that gives them a medieval look.
