14 DAY TRIAL // It doesn't take a genius to invent a “revolutionary” product. However, not all inventions manage to impress and reach the expected success, and instead of revolutionizing the market, all they manage to do is attract laughter.
We all have ideas that at first seem brilliant, but at a closer analysis we realize that they are pure aberrations. Luckily, we stop before revealing them publicly and making fools of ourselves.
Unfortunately, not all inventors knew when to stop or had friends to bring them back to reality, so a series of strange and useless products hit shelves at some point, but shortly proved to be unsuccessful and disappeared.
You are probably familiar with scenarios when you stay up too late and watch boring infomercials selling useless products. Well, some of those products made it to my list of meaningless inventions.
I scoured all over the Internet to find some of the best of the worst food-related inventions and decided to present both their bright side and pointless side. Some of them are useless, but others are just funny.
You probably know already that forks and knives have been replaced with crank-fitted cutlery and laser-cutter pizza slicers, so you risk being shamed by the more tech-savvy diners if you use regular utensil to eat your meals.
On paper, the idea of weights-equipped cutlery to exercise while eating might seem brilliant, but in practice it didn’t enjoy too much success, although the product still exists on the market. The Knife and Fork Lift set can be ordered online for about $160 (€115) and could be a good present idea for people who want to lose weight.
However, you should know that the package is really heavy, as each piece weighs one kilogram (2,20 pounds). As for the dessert spoon, it’s twice as heavy, because sweets fatten more than other dishes.
Another silly invention is the Chopstick Straws, which are exactly what their name suggests – soup straws. I hardly can render this as an invention, unless you didn’t know what a straw is.
Next on my list is the 2-in-1 glass that allows you to drink two different beverages at the same time. Definitely designed for booze fans, this could be useful if you are at a party and you can’t decide what drink to choose. Well, you can now have two at once. This is probably the creation of a sheer drunken genius.
And if you are the organizer of that party and you have important guests whom you want to impress, you certainly need the gorgeous Press Art lemon and lime squeezer. It’s made of “almost” unbreakable copolyester and comes with an incorporated spout that allows you to easily distribute the juice, on your meal or your beer.
I think this invention is quite interesting, but it seems that the product didn’t attract too many costumers, perhaps because people thought it was just fancy but not too useful.
When it comes to the world's most popular food, if the sight of a crooked slice of pizza irritates you, the Laser Pizza Cutter might be the right product for you, as it lets you cut your pies with precision. A better option would be to eat the entire pizza by yourself to avoid the situation altogether.
The saddest and most absurd of the food-related inventions I found is definitively the anti-loneliness bowl. Yes, you got that right. Someone invented a bowl with a special slot for a smartphone, just to avoid eating alone. Totally useless in my opinion.
Some of these meaningless inventions are worthy of being nominated to the Ig Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prizes that are given each year at the start of autumn for ten unusual or trivial achievements.
However, some say that, although the Ig Nobel Awards are veiled criticism of trivial research, history shows that trivial research sometimes may lead to important breakthroughs, so keep investigating, experimenting, and inventing.
