Episode
Modern Marvels: Failed Inventions.
Overview
Join us for a salute to the dreamers and schemers who brought the world an odd assortment of flawed ideas–like flying, swimming, and jet-powered automobiles, flying rocket belts, and radium-filled clothes that promised to inflate the owner's sagging love life! And we explore the minds of the off-kilter geniuses who thought up these off-the-mark concepts. Some tinkerers' musings were merely ahead of their time and deemed flops during the inventor's lifetime, but others were just plain bad!
Details
- Series
- Modern Marvels
- Season
- Season 9
- Episode
- Episode 60
- Air date
- 2002-12-05
- Runtime
- 44 min
Episode context
Failed Inventions. is Episode 60 in Season 9 of Modern Marvels. It aired on 2002-12-05. The runtime is 44 min.
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More episodes from this season
Episode 58: Concept Cars
Episode 57: Salt Mines
Episode 56: Digi-Tech
Episode 55: Limos
Episode 54: More Bond Gadgets
Episode 53: Garbage
Episode 52: The Spitfire
Episode 51: High Tech Sex
Episode 50: Secret Life Of The Crash Test Dummy
The crash test dummy, patron saint of vulnerable motorists, has become a modern icon and is a potent symbol of safety in a risk-obsessed age. But what’s the real story behind this blank-faced semi-human? From a case of mistaken identity in the Roswell UFO incident, to the U.S. military’s top-secret research and development programs of the 1950s, to a series of highly sensitive experiments on humans, animals, and corpses, we chart the bizarre and often gruesome life of this mechanical humanoid.
Episode 49: Great Train Disasters
Throughout railroad history, disasters lay at the heart of progress since expansion and profit proved the main goals of management. In 1875 alone, an average of 22 train accidents happened daily; in 1890, over 6,000 people were killed. We’ll examine how safety, once a secondary consideration, became a primary goal.