Strange Inventions

Contraptions, breakthroughs and gloriously odd ideas from across history.

12 episodes

How We Dodged a Solar Bullet

In 2012, a solar storm narrowly missed causing widespread technological chaos on Earth. This episode delves into the fascinating dynamics of coronal mass ejections and their potential to disrupt our modern world’s infrastructure. Host Clara Vale brings history alive with her insightful storytelling, tracing back to past geomagnetic events such as the Carrington Event of 1859 which caused significant telegraph disruptions. The episode also explores other human innovations shaped by challenges, like Burt’s Typographer in 1829 and Ford’s first car in 1903. These pioneering ideas significantly influenced the development of modern technology and mobility, encapsulating moments where humanity danced close to the edge of cosmic or technological upheaval.

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11 min

Napoleon's engine, the javelin that was too good, and the retired terrorists

On 20 July 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte signed a patent for the world’s first internal combustion engine, the Pyréolophore, built by Nicéphore Niépce and his brother Claude. The small, moss-fuelled engine successfully powered a boat upstream on the River Saône in Burgundy. Niépce would later go on to invent photography, creating the oldest surviving photograph in the 1820s. On the same date in 1984, East German athlete Uwe Hohn threw a javelin 104.8 metres, a distance so extraordinary that it prompted athletics authorities to redesign the javelin itself two years later. Hohn’s record stands permanently under the old specification. And in 1999, fourteen months after the Red Army Faction announced it was dissolving, two of its members attacked an armoured vehicle in Duisburg with a rocket launcher. One of them, Daniela Klette, evaded arrest until 2024, when facial recognition software identified her through capoeira class videos posted online. Three stories of human ingenuity, absurdity, and the gap between intention and outcome.

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12 min

Frobisher's Ghost Island, El Chapo's Tunnel, and the First Phone Photo

On 11 July across three centuries, three men made their mark through confidence, ingenuity, and technological ambition. In 1576, explorer Martin Frobisher sighted Greenland but mistakenly identified it as Frisland, a non-existent island shown on the influential but fictional Zeno Map. His error illuminates the challenges of 16th-century navigation and the consequences of cartographic fiction. In 2015, drug lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán escaped Mexico’s Altiplano maximum security prison through a sophisticated 1.5-kilometre tunnel, exposing security failures and triggering an international manhunt. In 1997, Philippe Kahn shared the first photograph from a mobile phone, an image of his newborn daughter sent while waiting in a California hospital, prefiguring the instant visual communication now used by billions daily. Three stories of exploration, escape, and innovation reveal the enduring human capacity for ambition, both misguided and transformative.

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8 min

Sailing Solo: The Epic Journey of Joshua Slocum

Join Clara Vale as she delves into the remarkable tale of Joshua Slocum, the first person to sail solo around the world. Setting out in 1895 from Nova Scotia with his sloop, ‘Spray’, Slocum faced challenges ranging from treacherous weather to pirates, and even the incredulity of local authorities in Buenos Aires. Despite these hurdles, his successful three-year journey not only made history but reshaped perceptions of solo exploration. Learn about his harrowing adventures, captured in his book, ‘Sailing Alone Around the World’, which continues to inspire adventurers. Clara also explores the revolutionary invention of the ATM in 1967, the signing of the Korean Armistice in 1953, and the controversial beginnings of the Eiffel Tower in 1887. Each story is a testament to human tenacity and creativity.

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4 min

Daring Walks, Typewriters, and Transformative Pills

Join Clara Vale as she navigates through some of history’s most compelling moments. From Nik Wallenda’s nerve-wracking tightrope walk over the Grand Canyon in 2013 to the invention of the ‘Type-Writer’ in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes, we explore feats of courage and innovation. We dive into the shadows of the Watergate scandal, revisiting Nixon’s pivotal misstep in 1972, and recognise IBM’s 1969 decision that shaped today’s software industry by pricing software separately from hardware. Finally, we celebrate the approval of Enovid by the FDA in 1960, a revolutionary development in personal freedom. In our journey, witness human ambition and its eventual impacts on society.

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9 min

Amelia Earhart, Susan B. Anthony, and the Art of Refusing to Stay Put

On 18 June 1928, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to cross the Atlantic by air, though she insisted she was only a passenger. The real pilot was Wilmer Stultz, and Earhart was publicly uncomfortable with the fame that followed. She called herself baggage and spent the next four years planning to do it properly, alone. In 1932, she did exactly that. The episode also revisits 18 June 1858, when Charles Darwin received Alfred Russel Wallace’s paper on natural selection and panicked that his twenty years of work would be eclipsed. Their findings were presented jointly to the Linnean Society weeks later. On the same date in 1948, Columbia Records demonstrated the long-playing record album at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, replacing fragile shellac seventy-eights with vinyl LPs that could hold twenty-two minutes per side. Finally, on 18 June 1873, Susan B. Anthony was fined one hundred dollars for voting in the 1872 presidential election. She refused to pay. The authorities never collected it. Three women, three centuries, each refusing to accept the limits placed in front of them.

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11 min

The Day James Joyce Fell in Love and Invented Bloomsday

On 16 June 1904, a young James Joyce went for a walk with Nora Barnacle through Dublin. That single date became the setting for Ulysses, one of the most experimental novels in English literature, and gave rise to Bloomsday, an annual celebration now observed worldwide. The same date saw LaMarcus Adna Thompson open America’s first commercial roller coaster at Coney Island in 1884, launching the modern amusement park industry. In 1961, ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev made a dramatic defection to the West at a Paris airport, beginning a legendary career but losing the ability to return home. And in 2010, Bhutan became the first nation to ban tobacco sales entirely. From literary romance to Cold War drama, 16 June has been a day for unexpected leaps and quiet revolutions.

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Episode 14 11 min

The Vatican's Four-Hundred-Year Reading List Closes Forever

On 14 June 1966, the Catholic Church quietly abolished the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, ending 409 years of official literary censorship. The Index, first published in 1557, had listed thousands of forbidden books, from Galileo’s astronomy to Simone de Beauvoir’s feminism. Its dissolution marked a profound shift in how the Church engaged with modern thought. But 14 June holds other surprises: in 1789, Captain William Bligh completed a 7,400-kilometre navigation in an open boat following the Bounty mutiny, arriving in Timor without losing a single man to the sea. In 1822, Charles Babbage proposed his Difference Engine to the Royal Astronomical Society, sketching the conceptual foundation of the computer a century before the technology existed. And in 1949, Albert II, a rhesus macaque, became the first mammal in space, launched from White Sands aboard a V-2 rocket. Clara Vale guides us through a day that spans censorship and freedom, survival and ambition, human brilliance and the quiet cost of progress.

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Episode 12 8 min

The Dandy Horse and the Channel Crossing: Human-Powered Dreams

On 12 June 1817, German forest official Karl von Drais rode his Laufmaschine roughly 14 kilometres in under an hour, solving a transport crisis caused by the volcanic winter following Mount Tambora’s eruption. His wooden two-wheeler had no pedals, no chain, no gears. Just a frame, two wheels, and human determination. It became the dandy horse, a fashionable craze that faded but eventually evolved into the modern bicycle, one of history’s most democratising inventions. Exactly 162 years later, on 12 June 1979, cyclist Bryan Allen pedalled the Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, covering 35 kilometres in two hours and 49 minutes. His human-powered aircraft, made of aluminium tubes and Mylar film, weighed just 32 kilograms and won the second Kremer Prize. Both stories share a common thread: human ingenuity applied to legs, wheels, and the belief that you can get somewhere nobody expects. Clara Vale explores two moments when moving forward meant making it up as you went along.

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Episode 11 10 min

Alcatraz, Smoke-Filled Rooms, and a Ship Meets a Reef

On 11 June 1962, Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin vanished from Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, using homemade tools, stolen raincoats, and soap dummy heads to execute one of America’s most audacious prison escapes. Whether they drowned in San Francisco Bay or reached the mainland remains unresolved to this day. The same date in 1920 gave us the phrase ‘smoke-filled room’, coined after Republican party bosses met in a Chicago hotel suite to select Warren G. Harding as their presidential candidate. In 2002, the US Congress belatedly acknowledged Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone, over a century after Alexander Graham Bell claimed the patent. And in 1770, Captain James Cook’s HMS Endeavour struck the Great Barrier Reef, forcing the crew to jettison cannons and spend weeks repairing the ship on the Queensland coast. This episode examines human ambition, historical footnotes, and the remarkable habit of turning up in the wrong place at the wrong time.

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Episode 8 9 min

The Day the US Postal Service Tried Missile Mail

On 8 June 1959, the United States Navy fired a Regulus cruise missile from the submarine USS Barbero off the coast of Florida. Inside, replacing the nuclear warhead, was a postal canister containing three thousand letters. Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield watched the launch and declared it of historic significance to the peoples of the entire world. The missile travelled roughly one hundred miles, landed at Naval Air Station Mayport, and the mail was retrieved and stamped with a special ‘MISSILE MAIL’ postmark. Summerfield genuinely believed this was the future of postal delivery, envisioning coast-to-coast routes by cruise missile. The programme was never repeated. Also on this date: Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being in 1794, weeks before his own execution; banker Alexander Fordyce fled to France in 1772, triggering a credit crisis across Britain and the Dutch Republic; two pilots died when an F-104 Starfighter collided with an XB-70 Valkyrie in 1966; and the descendants of the Bounty mutineers arrived at Norfolk Island in 1856 to begin a new settlement.

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Episode 2 8 min

A Lacrosse Match That Took a Fort, and the First Double Channel Crossing

On 2 June 1763, Ojibwe warriors executed one of the most audacious military captures in North American history. Using a lacrosse match as cover, they took Fort Michilimackinac during Pontiac’s War, a coordinated Indigenous resistance against British colonial expansion across the Great Lakes. The fort fell not through siege, but through patient planning and brilliant tactics. Nearly 150 years later, on the same date in 1910, Charles Rolls became the first person to fly across the English Channel and back without landing. The co-founder of Rolls-Royce completed the double crossing in 95 minutes, piloting a Wright biplane with just 35 horsepower. Tragically, he died in a flying accident weeks later, aged 32. Two events, separated by a century and a half, united by audacity and the willingness to attempt what looked impossible. Sometimes the move that shouldn’t work is exactly the one that does.

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