Streamliners: Locomotives And Bullet Trains In The Age Of Speed And Style
A streamliner is a vehicle incorporating streamlining in a shape providing reduced air resistance. The term is applied to high-speed railway trainsets of the 1930s to 1950s, and to their successor “bullet trains”. Less commonly, the term is applied to fully faired recumbent bicycles. Continue reading »
1935 Mercedes-Benz 540K Streamline Roadster By Erdmann & Rossi
Mercedes commissioned Erdmann & Rossi to produce a special show car for the 1935 Barcelona exhibition based upon their 500K. One of the visitors was King Ghazi of Iraq, who expressed his desire to buy the car and MB built another (540K) car powered by a Straight 8-cyl 5018cc supercharged (180hp) engine with a 4/5-speed manual transmission as a special order and the car was shipped to Iraq. Continue reading »
Destroyed Apple Products As Art In Stunning Photographs By Michael Tompert And Paul Fairchild
When does an iPhone or an iPad cease to be a mere consumer gadget and enter the rarefied world of visual art? How about when someone willfully destroys it, turning it into an abstract, brutalized husk of its former self? Continue reading »
Rita – The Girl Who Happily Lives With A Bionical Hand
The story of a young Russian woman deprived of hands by her jealous husband shocked all the country. Doctors managed to perform a complicated operation and save one hand, and the second one has now been replaced with a prosthesis. Continue reading »
Mercedes-Benz Unveils Scale-Covered Concept Car Inspired By Avatar Movie
Mercedes-Benz has revealed its take on the vehicle as a “living creature” with the Vision AVTR concept, which takes design cues from the sci-fi fantasy film Avatar. Dubbed the Vision AVTR, the design takes its name not only from the Avatar film it was inspired by, but also stands for “Advanced Vehicle Transformation”. Continue reading »
The Best Photos Of The Spectacular One-Off 1965 Dodge Deora Pickup Truck
The Deora is a 1965 Dodge A100 pickup truck that was heavily customized by Mike and Larry Alexander in Detroit for the 1967 Detroit Autorama, also known as “America’s Greatest Hot Rod Show.” Believe it or not, after winning many awards, including the Ridler in 1967, it became the prototype for a Hot Wheels car, and plastic model kit. Continue reading »
An Incredible Jet Engine Barbeque Grill Built By Delta Airlines Techs Using Scrapped Pratt & Whitney Parts
The talented techs of Delta Airlines built a working barbeque grill using scrapped Pratt & Whitney PW2000 series engine parts that looks like a real 757 jet engine. Continue reading »
1972 Toyota RV2: ‘Idea’ Car Turns A Station Wagon Into A Recreational Vehicle
The RV-2 was a 2-door wagon concept car. The rear side windows opened out like clam shells to hold up a tent like covering. This made the rear area into living quarters similar to a popup caravan. A brochure was circulated around to dealers and magazines took the prototype for test drives but it went no further. Continue reading »
1959 Cadillac Cyclone Concept, An Indication Of The United States Obsession With Jet Design And Aerodynamics
In the 1950s the United States was obsessed with jet plane design, which was applied to other non related products including cars. Between 1949 and 1961 General Motors launched their concept cars every year at the Motorama shows, which were highly anticipated throughout the country. Jet design had already inspired the designers of the three Firebird concepts launched between 1954 and 1950. With their gas turbine engines, they were literally road going jets. In 1959 Cadillac joined the ‘jet age’ with the Cyclone Concept. Continue reading »
A Walking Bicycle That Uses The Mechanical Design Of Theo Jansen’s Kinetic Wind-Powered Strandbeest
A craftsman for The Q science channel quite skillfully built a walking bicycle that employs the same mechanical design pioneered by Theo Jansen for his incredible Strandbeests, a series of wind-powered kinetic sculptures. The craftsman carefully designed, cut and welded the piece that would replace the back wheel of a black bicycle. Continue reading »
Martin Caulfield Services Some Of The Last Remaining Gas Street Lamps In The Capital
Matthew Lloyd/Getty Images
British Gas engineer Martin Caulfield, 69, services and cleans a gas lamp in Westminster on October 31, 2011 in London, England. Caulfield has been looking after the traditional lights since 1982. There are still around 1600 left in the capital. Continue reading »
Kazakh Bodybuilder Yuri Tolochko To Marry His Life-Like Sex Doll ‘Margo’
It’s not easy to find that very person you’d wish to be next to for the rest of your life. Yuri Tolochko, a bodybuilder from Kazakhstan, found a radical decision and married a sex doll – beautiful, faithful, patient partner. Continue reading »
The 1958 Plymouth Tornado Concept Car Has Been Found And Restored
The dawn of the jet age in the 1950s had a dramatic effect on the American people and designers of the time. Jets were symbolic of the new modern age of speed, aerodynamics, miracle materials and advanced engineering. Our clothes, homes, workplace and cities all reflected these new modern concepts and approaches, but perhaps nowhere was this influence more apparent than in the auto industry. Continue reading »
Pirate-Themed Scanner A Hit At NYC Hospital
The Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian installed a new CT scanner in their radiology testing room, but what separates the machine from others of its kind is that it is designed in the likeness of a pirate ship. Continue reading »
Stunning Photographs From The Inside Of Russia’s Largest Bitcoin Mine
Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg
Bitriver, the largest data center in the former Soviet Union, was opened just a year ago, but has already won clients from all over the world, including the U.S., Japan and China. Most of them mine bitcoins. Continue reading »
Clever Minibikes Built Out of Welded Fenders From Vintage Volkswagen Beetles
Brent Walter, a self-described “maker and builder of a variety of things”, has created a really clever “Volkspod” minibikes that are built out of fenders from vintage Volkswagen Beetles. Walter came up with this idea in March 2019 while working his home workshop in Huntington, Indiana. Continue reading »
This Is How Soviets Imagined 21st Century Will Look Like: The Soviet Eera Sci-Fi Mag That Wanted To Predict The Future
Soviets tried to predict how will future look like, in one of their magazines called “Tekhnika Molodezhi” (“Youth’s Technics”) that was a very popular mag of their time. They were covering all the newest technological trends that would emerge in both close and distant future, and some things they actually guessed. They predicted a lot of crazy things too like Mountain cities (basically a huge building) that would settle millions of people inside (judge dread movie flashback), to underground cities but also a orbital space station that actually did happen. Continue reading »
This UI Engineer Makes Stunning Digital Art Entirely From HTML & CSS Code
Web developers are losing their minds over Diana Smith’s work, and honestly, you should, too, because it brilliantly chronicles the history of the Internet in a way that hasn’t been done before. Continue reading »
16 Bizarre Inventions From The Victorian Era
If you think that organs and bones crushing corsets were the most bizarre creation of the Victorian era, you could not be more wrong. Victorians have come up with its fair share of weird inventions. Even though this era was a long period of peace and prosperity, science was going through a weird phase.
Below are 16 bizarre inventions from the Victorian era, some useful, and some… not so much.
1. THE TRICK PLEDGE ALTAR
Oh, those Victorians! They did love a practical joke. And what could be funnier than encouraging a friend to make a pledge at your new home altar… only for him to be surprised by the abrupt appearance of a human skeleton – which spits scalding water into his face!? Continue reading »
Worlds Largest Jesus Christ Statue From Poland Began Distributing Internet From Antennas In His Crown
Fakt 24
The world’s largest figure of Jesus Christ in Świebodzin has been blessed with newly installed equipment for commercial broadcasting of Internet signals – inform Fakt 24.pl. The antenna assembly was ordered by the parish priest in Świebodzin, the main initiator of the construction of the monument. Continue reading »
BMW Isetta: The Iconic Miniature Bubble Car Of Automotive History
The Isetta is an Italian-designed microcar built under license in a number of different countries, including Argentina, Spain, Belgium, France, Brazil, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Because of its egg shape and bubble-like windows, it became known as a bubble car, a name also given to other similar vehicles. Continue reading »
Concepts From Future Past: Cool Pics Of The 1951 Buick LeSabre Concept Car
The LeSabre was the brainchild of GM Design Chief Harley Earl. The design reflected his attempt to merge the modern jet aircraft into the style of the automobile. Jets symbolized the very latest design and engineering and Earl’s ideas transcended into the LeSabre concept. Continue reading »
Concepts From Future Past: 1963 Chevrolet Corvair Testudo
The Chevrolet Testudo is a concept car built by Bertone on a modified Chevrolet Corvair Monza platform. The name comes from the Latin word for “Turtle”. The car debuted at the 1963 Geneva Motor Show. Continue reading »
Conductive Artificial Skin Covers For Mobile Devices
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researcher and engineer Marc Teyssier has invented Skin-On Interfaces, an artificial skin cover for mobile devices. The realistic texture is highly conductive and encourages users to use natural movements on touch sensitive devices. The top layer of the artificial skin is made from “DragonSkin silicone with beige pigments on a skin-like texture mold”, while the conductivity is implemented with open source hardware. Continue reading »
Concepts From Future Past: 1976 Ferrari Rainbow
Ferrari claims that its new 458 Spider is the first mid-engined sports car with a retractable hard-top, but this isn’t entirely true: the 1976 Bertone-styled Ferrari Rainbow concept car employed the same layout and a similar folding roof setup – 35 years ago… Unlike its modern counterpart, though, the Rainbow’s roof required manual work to remove, fold and stow in the back. Continue reading »
