INVENTIONS

Cure asthma, deafness, and bronchitis! And grow hair anywhere with Dyke's Beard Elixir! Ripped from the pages of a 19th-century marvel.

When you think of madcap inventors and nerd heroes, it's hard to think of someone more inspiring than Homaro Cantu.

Want to see a glider that flies forever? (Or at least until a tiny gust of wind comes along....) BEHOLD!

Not even early adopters were ready for the initial versions of these products.

Constant improvement is what we do. So how amazing is it that there exist a handful of objects that, though 100 years old or more, are still perfect?

A longstanding urban legend goes like this: During the space race of the 1960s, NASA spent millions developing a fancy "space pen" that could be used in zero gravity ... but the Soviets just used a pencil. This story resonates with us because NASA did act

The alphabet, as best as historians can tell, got its start in ancient Egypt sometime in the Middle Bronze Age, but not with the Egyptians. They were, at the time, writing with a set of hieroglyphs that were used both as representations of the consonants

Since the Greeks first told the myth of Pygmalion, who wished the statue he loved would come to life, it seems man has been trying to build a perfect replica of himself. Some would say we're getting closer to that possibility as computer technologies evol

In 1955, a French electrician named André Cassagnes got an idea for a new toy after seeing how an electrostatic charge could hold aluminum powder to glass.