Duane Beckett
U.S. patent history holds plenty of serious inventions, but it also preserves some very strange ones.
The ones we’ve picked out made us stop, blink, and wonder whether somebody really thought the public was waiting for this exact idea to arrive.
Unsurprisingly, many of these patents never made it into real production.
6. Rocking bath tub, 1900
Back in 1900, Otto A. Hensel patented a “Rocking or Oscillating Bath Tub,” and WIPO highlighted that the point was simple, to splash water against the person inside. That’s it.
Effectively, it was a bath that rocks so your soak feels more active than relaxing. It’s not evil, and it’s not even especially complicated. Just weird. It is the kind of thing that belongs in an old black-and-white comedy, where somebody ends up soaked, dizzy, and somehow still insisting it was progress.
5. Device for waking someone up, 1882
Dennemeyer reported that Samuel S. Applegate’s 1882 “Device For Waking Persons From Sleep” connected a wall-mounted alarm to a frame hanging above the sleeper.
When the alarm went off, light wooden blocks dropped onto the person’s face. The part that really stays with you is the patent language itself. As the filing put it, “These cause pain.”
Forget waking sounds or a gentle nudge, they wanted a wake-up call with the energy of a punishment from another century.
4. Pierced glasses, 2004
I read the description for this one and winced a little. Inventor John Rose’s 2004 patent took the old pince-nez idea, glasses that stay on by pinching the nose, and turned it into something harsher by using studs that pierced the nose to hold the frames in place.
Even by early 2000s standards, that sounds like a rough sell. I like odd collectibles and unusual design, but this crosses from quirky into genuinely unsettling faster than most patents on a list like this.
3. Yard work by walking, 2003
Google Patents shows that US6604245B1 described leaf-gathering trousers with two leg stalls and a net stretched between them, so the wearer could gather leaves into a pile just by walking normally.
The patent argues that rakes are strenuous and leaf blowers can be expensive and awkward, so these modified pants were supposed to work with natural body movement instead. It’s the kind of logic I almost admire. Almost. Then I picture somebody waddling across the yard in netted leaf pants, and the spell is broken.
2. The butt-kicking machine, 2001
Google Patents says the 2001 “User-operated amusement apparatus for kicking the user’s buttocks” used a hand crank to power rotating arms with flexible extensions that repeatedly smacked the user’s backside under their own control.
A later 2004 application for a “Manually self-operated butt-kicking machine” explicitly pointed back to that earlier idea.
There’s something almost charming about the commitment here. Somebody didn’t just joke about this. They wrote it up, filed it, and tried to formalize the whole science of self-inflicted butt-kicking.
1. Doll urn, 2009
This one could turn a little spooky in the wrong hands and I’m not sure if it’s genius or terrifying. Regardless, it’s hard to forget once you know about it. Google Patents US7627935B1 shows that the Doll Urn, issued in 2009, was designed to hold the ashes of a person or pet inside a doll-shaped container, with a voice recorder built in so it could play a saved message.
It’s a combination that makes sense, but is also potentially unsettling. It wasn’t just meant to memorialize someone, it turns grief into a keepsake, with a voice. It’s easily one of the most bizarre patents because you can imagine people buying and cherishing such an item, while at the same time, others would be terrified by the prospect.