This is a list of spurious inventions, technologies which are generally considered to not possess their claimed capabilities, to be hoaxes, or to not have ever existed in the first place.
+Spurious inventionDescriptionAngel LightAccording to its inventor, this device could make walls, hands, and stealth shielding transparent."The Bell"Purported top-secret scientific technological device, wonder weapon, or Wunderwaffe developed in the 1940s in Nazi Germany.Black boxPopular name for a diagnostic machine made by Albert Abrams. It supposedly could diagnose diseases based on their special vibrations that can be sensed along someone's spine.ChronovisorA time viewer claimed to have produced photographs and recordings of the ancient past.CloudbusterA device that could purportedly make rain through manipulating atmospheric orgone, a kind of energy considered to be pseudoscientific.EdisonA device claimed to produce numerous analyses of blood very quickly using very small samples.Etheric generatorA generator which John Ernst Worrell Keely claimed could produce a vapor "more powerful than steam, and considerably more economical", by some force affecting the added water, and air.Gavreau's infrasonic weaponsVarious whistles and horns, possibly fictional, which could cause serious bodily harm and death by emitting infrasound. Mechanical Turk An 18th-century chess-playing automaton that appeared to operate autonomously but actually concealed a human operator, deceiving audiences for decades.Rife machineDevices that can, purportedly, by the use of electromagnetic waves, destroy pathogens, including cancer. There is no reliable evidence that the Rife machine works as a cure for cancer.TeleforceA weapon, also known as Nikola Tesla's death ray or peace ray, that would accelerate pellets of material to a high velocity so as to cause significant damage from a long distance.Nikola Tesla's electric carNikola Tesla allegedly remodeled a Pierce-Arrow luxury car into an electric vehicle that directly extracted vacuum energy from the "aether".Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion experimentAttempt to cause nuclear fusion using electrolysis to achieve the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium.KryakutnoyFictional inventor of hot air balloons.Newman energy machineSupposed free-energy machine invented by Joe W. Newman.Perpetual motion machinesHypothetical machines that do not need any added energy or force to continue motion. All attempts as of yet are considered spurious, and such a machine is considered impossible by modern thermodynamics.Hyper CD-ROMAllegedly created by Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 1991, it is a claimed optical data storage device similar to the CD-ROM with a multilayer 3D structure of 2,000 different layers and can allegedly hold up to 1 PB and theoretically up to 100 EB, despite being claimed to have been invented in 1991 and multiple awards were given to Eugen Pavel, it has not shown a working prototype.Sloot Digital Coding SystemAllegedly created by Jan Sloot in 1995, it is an alleged technique for data encoding that could represent an entire feature film with only one kilobyte of data, a level of compression which is mathematically impossible according to Shannon's source coding theorem. Contrary to his claims, the playback device he used was discovered to contain a hard drive.Sonora Aero Club's AerosPrussian-American artist Charles Dellschau created drawings of fantastic flying machines that he claimed have been invented by members of the "Sonora Aero Club," of which he was a purported member. Dellschau alleged that one of the club members discovered a formula for an anti-gravity fuel called "NB Gas", which has been used to fuel the vehicles.The Secrets of Dellschau: The Sonora Aero Club & The Airships of the 1800s
See also List of hoaxes List of lost inventions
References