A while back I wrote a post called “Weird & Wacky Inventions”. While researching all the thousands of inventions that have been made over the decades, I came across a few that were less weird and wacky, and more dumb or useless. After all, for every invention that makes it big, there about a million if not more, that don’t quite make it.

The world is full of inventors, but only a few are worthy of carrying that honorable title that people like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell…are attributed with.

“An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”

Charles F. Kettering (1876 – 1958)

“We are but cogwheels in the medium of the universe, and it is…an unavoidable consequence of the laws governing that the pioneer who is far in advance of his age is not understood and must suffer pain and disappointment and be content with the higher reward which is accorded to him by posterity.”

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943)

Below is a small compilation of some of the dumbest inventions ever made.

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You can see these as well as many other funny but useless contraptions – along with their descriptions and inventors – at www.life.com.

[image credit: all images from Izismile.com via Life]