List of spurious inventions

List of spurious inventions

This is a list of spurious inventions, technologies which are generally considered to not possess their claimed capabilities, to be hoaxes, or to not have ever existed in the first place.

<table><thead><tr><th>Spurious invention</th><th>Description</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Angel Light</td><td>According to its inventor, this device could make walls, hands, and stealth shielding transparent.</td></tr><tr><td>Black box</td><td>Popular name for a diagnostic machine made by Albert Abrams. It supposedly could diagnose diseases based on their special vibrations that can be sensed along someone's spine.</td></tr><tr><td>Chronovisor</td><td>A time viewer claimed to have produced photographs and recordings of the ancient past.</td></tr><tr><td>Cloudbuster</td><td>A device that could purportedly make rain through manipulating atmospheric orgone, a kind of energy considered to be pseudoscientific.</td></tr><tr><td>Edison</td><td>A device claimed to produce numerous analyses of blood very quickly using very small samples.</td></tr><tr><td>Etheric generator</td><td>A generator which John Ernst Worrell Keely claimed could produce a vapor "more powerful than steam, and considerably more economical", by some force affecting the added water, and air.</td></tr><tr><td>Gavreau's infrasonic weapons</td><td>Various whistles and horns, possibly fictional, which could cause serious bodily harm and death by emitting infrasound.</td></tr><tr><td>Mechanical Turk</td><td>An 18th-century chess-playing automaton that appeared to operate autonomously but actually concealed a human operator, deceiving audiences for decades.</td></tr><tr><td>Rife machine</td><td>Devices that can, purportedly, by the use of electromagnetic waves, destroy pathogens, including cancer. There is no reliable evidence that the Rife machine works as a cure for cancer.</td></tr><tr><td>Teleforce</td><td>A weapon, also known as Nikola Tesla's death ray or peace ray, that would accelerate pellets of material to a high velocity so as to cause significant damage from a long distance.</td></tr><tr><td>Nikola Tesla electric car hoax</td><td>Alleged advanced electric car.</td></tr><tr><td>Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion experiment</td><td>Attempt to cause nuclear fusion using electrolysis to achieve the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium.</td></tr><tr><td>Kryakutnoy</td><td>Fictional inventor of hot air balloons.</td></tr><tr><td>Newman energy machine</td><td>Supposed free-energy machine invented by Joe W. Newman.</td></tr><tr><td>Perpetual motion machines</td><td>Hypothetical machines that do not need any added energy or force to continue motion. All attempts as of yet are considered spurious, and such a machine is considered impossible by modern thermodynamics.</td></tr><tr><td>Hyper CD-ROM</td><td>Allegedly created by Romanian scientist Eugen Pavel in 1991, it is a claimed optical data storage device similar to the CD-ROM with a multilayer 3D structure of 2,000 different layers and can allegedly hold up to 1 PB and theoretically up to 100 EB, despite being claimed to have been invented in 1991 and multiple awards were given to Eugen Pavel, it has not shown a working prototype.</td></tr><tr><td>Sloot Digital Coding System</td><td>Allegedly created by Jan Sloot in 1995, it is an alleged technique for data encoding that could represent an entire feature film with only one kilobyte of data, a level of compression which is mathematically impossible according to Shannon's source coding theorem. Contrary to his claims, the playback device he used was discovered to contain a hard drive.</td></tr></tbody></table>