[upbeat music] [alarm buzzing]
- Did you know that there was once a time
when we put out house fires with hand grenades?
- All these things really did
was introduce yet another deadly gas into the situation.
- Oh, and hitting the road
meant climbing inside your tire.
- It feels like something out of science fiction.
Why use a whole car when you can just use
the one part that moves, the wheel?
It's really kind of genius.
- Or when the first noise canceling headphones
could end up canceling you.
- It's vaguely terrifying.
It looks somewhere between a sock puppet
and maybe a thumb with eyes.
- It will put you to sleep,
mostly because you're starving your brain of oxygen.
- These are the things we used to do for fun,
for money, or maybe out of boredom
that we'll never see again.
Were they dangerous?
Certainly!
Deadly?
Occasionally, but boy, wasn't it exciting?
[logo whooshing] [dramatic music]
Ask people what invention they'd love to see most
and many will say a jet pack.
Well, it turns out in the late 1950s
we actually had one,
and it could send you flying like Iron Man
with a few minor drawbacks.
[tense dramatic music]
- [Dan] In 1947, Chuck Yeager does something
that people thought was impossible.
He flies a plane faster than the speed of sound.
- Chuck Yeager becomes a household name,
but they don't know the man
that's behind the development of the technology.
- [Austin] His name is Wendell F. Moore,
an engineer at Bell Aerosystems,
the maker of Yeager's plane.
He's part of the design team
on these special thrusters
that allow Yeager to control the aircraft
at high speed and altitude.
- [Jason] So he wonders about those thrusters
from Yeager's plane.
He wonders if they could actually power
a one man flight system.
In other words, a jet pack.
- [Henry] For three years, Moore wrestles
with different ways to build one,
but in 1961, he really thinks he's cracked the code
and he calls it the rocket belt.
- [Dan] The rocket belt consists
of an aluminum and fiberglass frame
that has tanks on the back.
One of 'em is full of nitrogen
and two are full of hydrogen peroxide.
- [Austin] Hydrogen peroxide is insanely volatile.
It heats to over 1,400 degrees
in less than 2/10 of a millisecond.
It sends supercharged vapor out of the rocket belt
allowing the operator to take flight.
- What it did was you strapped it to you
with the fuel in the jets
and then it shot out super heated air and exhaust
about two inches from all your private parts,
and shot you through the air for about 30 seconds,
and then you landed the hard way.
[air whooshing]
- [Austin] Moore spends months testing the rocket belt
in a Bell hangar.
[air whooshing]
Pretty soon they moved to free flight outdoors.
[air whooshing]
- It's not long before these amateur testers
are getting the rocket belt up over 100 feet
and going 80 miles per hour.
- This all seems cool and fun,
but it's still really, really dangerous.
They're moving at immense speeds
with a very finite time of fuel.
If you misjudge your capacity,
you could fall dozens of feet at a very high speed.
- So if that doesn't kill him or hurt him,
he's got a 125 pound rocket apparatus
strapped to his back
that's gonna come crashing down upon him.
[air whooshing]
- [Henry] But the dangers don't stop the outdoor tests,
and for people who pass by them, they are awestruck.
- So people driving by these airfields
that see these tests, it's a man flying.
They're thinking like, "What is going on here?
What am I seeing?"
- The reaction is complete astonishment.
It looks otherworldly.
- It's the late '50s,
most people don't even have a color TV,
and there is jet pack technology?
- The press catches wind of the rocket belt tests,
and quite surprisingly,
the forces that be allow public demonstrations.
One famously comes in 1961 at Fort Bragg
in front of no other than President Kennedy.
- [Martin] The operator takes off from a boat
and approaches the area of the grandstand
where the dignitaries are,
lands directly in front of President Kennedy,
throws him a salute.
President Kennedy salutes back
and it's a huge crowd pleaser.
- [Henry] These crowds convince Moore
that this is no flash in the pan.
The public is hungry for their own rocket belts.
- [Dan] Pretty soon the press is reporting
that rocket belts are gonna be available
for civilian use in about two or three years,
and Moore is telling the newspapers
these things will be cheaper than cars pretty soon.
- The hype even reaches Hollywood.
Bell loans one of the rocket belts
to the latest James Bond production, "Thunderball."
- [Henry] But despite big crowds and Hollywood cameos,
Moore and his engineers
can't seem to fix a few small problems.
- The jet pack is producing about 130 decibels,
which is deafening.
That's the sound of a B-52 airplane taking off.
Even with hearing protection,
long-term exposure is going to have a negative effect
on the individual's hearing.
- Also, there's a lot of exhaust that comes around.
So you take off in a cloud of rocket exhaust.
Then you have these nozzles
that are just inches away from your body
and they're incredibly hot.
- There are close calls
in these public demonstrations,
and the testers just keep taking it higher and faster.
- In one case, Moore's neighbor
who he convinced to be a test pilot
went careening into a stage during an exhibition,
and there were musicians on the stage
that he almost took out.
- [Dan] But no one puts a stop to this
because of the danger.
No, it's the fact that Moore can never find a way
to make those flights last any longer
than about 30 seconds.
And in the end, that's what kills it.
It turns out people don't just wanna fly,
they wanna be able to fly long enough
to get somewhere.
- [Brian] How, in 70 years since this thing
has been boxed up,
nobody has improved on the jet pack design.
There should be a team of scientists out there
right now working on this.
- If flying around
with a rocket strapped to your back sounds like fun,
how about straddling a cruise missile
just inches from your crotch?
- [Lance] In the 1970s, a military contractor
called Williams Research
designs a new machine that's called the X-Jet.
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]
- [Hakeem] It's about three feet wide, four feet tall,
and weighs about 235 pounds without fuel or a pilot.
- [Lance] Developers give it the nickname the Flying Pulpit.
It's a waist high cylinder
kind of like you're flying around in half a barrel.
There's a rocket pointing straight down
and you control it by leaning
or using a hand throttle.
- It has an engine usually used for cruise missiles.
So in terms of power,
it absolutely blows the rocket belt out of the water.
It can fly roughly 45 minutes at like 60 miles an hour.
- The Army does some test flights in the early '80s
and they find that these things
are pretty impressive.
They can drift, they can move around, they can fly.
- [Lance] The dream of the military
is they have a whole bunch of these X-Jets
zipping around the battlefield,
engaging in reconnaissance,
and maybe even hit and run attacks on the enemy.
- [Henry] The X-Jet could reinvent the battlefield
except that army accountants
would also have to reinvent the budget.
- The military abandons this project
because of costs.
Williams Research thinks,
"Well, listen, if it's not gonna work for the military,
let's pivot to civilians."
And in order to win people over,
they give it a cool facelift.
They paint a nice logo on it,
they give it these awesome looking colors
and they just try to make it attractive
for people to purchase.
- You look a little bit like Oscar the Grouch,
but you're still flying.
- [Henry] But you're flying
if you can keep the X-Jet upright.
- So there's a couple issues with this thing.
It is pretty unstable.
If you lean a little too much
as you're trying to maneuver it,
you can just topple the thing over.
So that's a big problem.
- One test pilot refuses to go above 15 feet
because it's just too scary.
- [Rutledge] It's also incredibly loud
and the exhaust is so hot,
you know, you could scorch concrete
with that thing.
- [Hakeem] But maybe the biggest issue
is that the pilot stands astride the engine.
In most aircraft, the engine is typically placed
somewhere at the extremes,
in the back, on the wings,
right above you in the helicopter.
But in this case, you have a turbofan engine
right between your legs.
- And you are straddling a cruise missile engine.
The thing they use to destroy enemies
thousands of miles away.
- This thing is spinning at tens of thousands of RPMs.
You don't want to think about what would happen
if a fan blade broke off.
-[Rutledge] If there's one tiny problem,
if it kicks off one of those turbofans,
just one little blade, kill, see ya.
- [Henry] And yet it's not the dangers
that ground the X-Jet.
- [Rutledge] Williams was unable to go on
and create the X-Jet
because ultimately no one wanted to pay
to actually produce them.
So really it's more of like a financial issue
than, oh, there's a cruise missile between my legs.
[dramatic music]
- The Flying Pulpit was a real leap of faith
and not a lot of people were willing to take that leap.
- Today we are surrounded by distractions,
but that's nothing new.
In the 1920s, one inventor built a device
to shut out the world
and ended up in over his head.
[dramatic music]
- [Don] During the roaring '20s,
the U.S. is obsessed with innovation.
One of the era's great thinkers
is a guy named Hugo Gernsback,
a writer, publisher, and futurist.
- In 1925, Gernsback has a problem
that people in 2025 will identify with,
and that is that he feels overwhelmed.
He's editing multiple magazines,
he's constantly reviewing new scientific gadgets.
He is beginning to feel more and more
like there's so much going on
that I don't have a great deal of time
during which I allow my mind to disengage
and do what it does best, and that is think.
- Between ringing telephones
and the constant hum of civilization around him,
zeroing in at the task at hand is impossible,
and this is before cell phones.
- [Henry] Gernsback's solution:
He dives headfirst into his new invention,
the Isolator.
- [Adam] So the Isolator basically looks
like an old school diving helmet.
It's made of cork and felt
and it completely encases the wearer's head,
leaving only two small slits filled with glass
so you could see out of it.
- [Austin] Gernsback says his invention
eliminates 90 to 95% of all noise.
Think of it like a jazz age noise canceling headphone.
- It's vaguely terrifying.
It looks somewhere between a sock puppet
and maybe a thumb with eyes.
- At first, the Isolator works.
Slip on the helmet,
and the outside world magically disappears.
- [Austin] Gernsback seems intent
on making this a commercial enterprise.
He refines his drawings and his patents
to produce what will look like a consumer product.
- [Henry] But Gernsback soon discovers
that blocking out the natural world
comes with some unpleasant side effects.
- So Gernsback and his other associates
that try the Isolator, after about 15 minutes,
they all have one common thing happening.
It's that they're kind of getting tired,
like almost a little lightheaded even.
- [Martin] The Isolator is poorly ventilated.
There is nothing there that's protecting you
from the carbon dioxide that you exhale.
And so the drowsiness that he's feeling
is the beginnings of a slow moving process
of asphyxiation.
- Oopsie, [laughs] one little design flaw.
It will put you to sleep
mostly because you're starving your brain of oxygen.
- Sure, he may be suffocating some people trying it,
but Gernsback does not give up
and he creates a solution.
He adds a hose that runs directly
to a tank of oxygen.
- There's a legendary photo of this updated model
and Gernsback unveils it
in a 1925 issue of his magazine,
"Science and Invention."
- [Rutledge] Gernsback's just sitting at his desk
and he's wearing the Isolator
with a hose to an oxygen tank.
You could just unplug the phone,
tell your secretary, "Hey, I need 10 minutes.
I have to focus on this one thing."
But oh no, he was like,
"I need to scuba, but out of water."
- [Austin] While the carbon dioxide buildup is solved,
oxygen itself is very expensive
and these tanks only last about half an hour.
And pure oxygen is very flammable.
- In the modern workplace,
you can't mop a floor without putting adequate signage
saying "Wet floor, piso mojado."
An isolation airtight helmet
with a direct line of flammable oxygen
where the alternative is suffocating people?
The Isolator is an OSHA nightmare.
- Also, you wonder about productivity
'cause you could just think a person's really focused,
they're asleep under the gigantic helmet.
- [Adam] Despite all the hype,
Gernsback ultimately scraps the invention
without any explanation.
And let's be honest,
we don't need any explanation.
It's ugly, stupid, unsafe
and will kill everyone in the office.
- Maybe he can really see into the future,
and what he saw was lots of lawsuits.
- A new self-improvement device
always gets attention.
And in the 1950s, one new exercise invention
was more electrifying than most.
- [Don] In the years after World War II,
the idea of achieving beauty or fitness
without much effort really becomes popular.
Heat lamps to give you a tan,
vitamins to keep you healthy and thin.
- [Henry] An engineer named William J. Browner
takes this idea to the next level.
What if the hard work of getting in shape
could be completely replaced by electricity?
- Browner invented a device called the Relax-A-Cizor,
which should kind of tell you what it is
right in the name.
You relax while electrical currents do the exercise.
- When you open it up,
it's all these knobs and wires and dials,
and it kinda looks like you're about
to administer a polygraph.
But instead, what you're gonna do
is a no effort workout.
- If you look at this thing, it screams 1950s, 1960s,
the pink color, the knobs and things for intensity,
and various features.
- Each of these implements
is designed for a different body part, right?
So you have the back beauty belt,
there's an abdominal beauty belt,
and then there's the facial beauty belt.
I think for your double and/or triple chins.
- [Adam] The belief is this:
Once the juice is turned on,
the electrical currents go to work
and they will make the muscles continue to tense,
essentially doing the reps for you.
But the belief is that the electrical current
can shake loose fat cells
and tone these specific body parts.
- [Henry] Browner has early success
marketing the Relax-A-Cizor
on the West Coast, and in the early 1950s,
he goes national with Relax-A-Cizors
regular folks can use right in their homes.
- [Adam] The ads have aesthetically beautiful people,
buff guys with beautiful women draped over them,
"Get a body like this, you'll get a woman like this."
But also the ads are saying
that there's another enhancement
that women can get from the Relax-A-Cizor
other than a good workout.
- [Lance] The Relax-A-Cizor even makes an appearance
on the TV show, "Mad Men."
- And you have everything when you use the Relax-A-Cizor.
- Where it's marketing around beauty, weight,
and women's attractiveness.
- [Henry] People can't wait to strap
into these new miracle devices
and relax their way to a killer body.
- Over the course of about 15 years,
people buy thousands of Relax-A-Cizors.
- You have people across the country
attaching these electrodes to their body
and without any limits
on how much current they can apply.
This gets dangerous pretty quickly.
- You can actually dial up the electricity.
So yes, you can go full Spinal Tap, Nigel Tufnel,
and take your exercise to 11.
- [Don] Doctors begin seeing people
with deep electrical burns
that match the shape of a Relax-A-Cizor pad,
likely from turning the current up too high
and/or applying it for too long.
- And it really doesn't work.
People have been subjecting themselves
to repeated electric shocks for nothing.
- [JMack] The lengths that people will go to to lose weight
without actually putting in any effort is insane.
If they spent a fraction of the effort
that they put into not working out
into working out,
they'd be so much better.
- [Edward] Eventually the FDA takes a look at this.
They get a lot of complaints
and they decide to sue the company
for this fraudulent product
that actually hurts people.
- 40 different witnesses testified during the trial
about how the device has harmed them.
- [Edward] In the end, the judge rules in favor of the FDA
and they order no more manufacturing, no more sale.
And furthermore,
all existing Relax-A-Cizors need to be destroyed.
They're that dangerous.
- [Henry] Amazingly, the thing even gets
its own wanted poster.
- The FDA goes the added step
and puts it up in government buildings
all across the country, "Beware this machine.
It will shock you and hurt you."
That is how bad and how popular this machine was.
- Today, electric stimulation devices are safer
and heavily regulated,
but we're all still looking for the same thing,
a way to work out without the work.
- Sometimes trying a risky new invention
is like playing with fire.
Well, back in the day, there was one
that actually did play with fire
and it was music to our ears.
- In the 1700s, scientists discover
that if you put flame into a glass receptacle,
it actually creates a sound.
But it's not until 1873
that a French chemist named Georges Kastner asks,
"What if we actually use this dynamic to make music?"
- So Kastner creates a bunch of glass tubes
of different sizes
and attaches it to something
that functions essentially like an organ.
Each key leads to a tiny burner
that's got a gas valve inside the tube.
- The way the instrument is played,
Kastner opens valves that cause different levels
of combustion within different sized tubes.
The hotter the flame, the higher the note.
- [Henry] He calls his invention the pyrophone,
which in Greek translates to "fire sound,"
and it's dazzling to both hear and watch.
-[Jason] Kastner, he hires organists to play the pyrophone
and it's demoed in places like London and Paris.
Now audiences, they are wowed
with these hypnotic dancing flames
that jump in time to the tones of the music.
Newspapers are calling this the singing flames.
Reports describe this haunting, otherworldly music.
It's like nothing they've ever seen.
- [Lance] The idea of a musical instrument
that harnesses fire is really kind of mind blowing,
but there's a reason
that we're not really familiar with it.
It's really dangerous.
- [Jason] The pyrophone is volatile.
Uneven pressure in the tubes
can cause this delicate instrument
to turn effectively into a bomb.
- Reportedly, one of the first models explodes
in the middle of the performance,
injuring an organist.
- [Henry] Kastner tries to refine the design
to control the gas better,
but unfortunately, he's playing with fire.
- This would be like today,
cracking open the gas line that powers your stove
and trying to make a musical instrument out of it.
It's crazy.
- [Jason] Gas, at the time, is hydrogen,
which is not so easily controlled
and there are often leaks.
Hydrogen is also easy to ignite
and can cause large explosions.
- By the late 1880s, the pyrophone is just relegated
to scientific demonstrations.
They're not using it for music anymore.
- [Adam] Believe it or not,
there are still some versions of the pyrophone
that exist today,
but the modern versions use propane or gasoline,
and the original glass tubes have been replaced
with heat safe or safety glass
so that they could actually contain the heat
more safely and not explode and kill people.
- Starting fires was one thing,
putting them out was something else entirely.
- Predecessors of modern day fire extinguishers
do exist and the principle is the same.
They spray chemicals in the form of liquid
that rob the flames of heat and oxygen,
but they're not common
and they have a lot of problems.
- [Dan] They're cumbersome.
They can only spray a few feet,
which means you have to get right up to the fire
to use one,
and the pressure's really inconsistent
so you can't really rely on them.
- [Henry] So how are you supposed to attack
an out-of-control blaze in the late 1800s?
A Chicago company
decides the best answer is a hand grenade.
- The hand grenade fire extinguisher
is a glass orb filled with chemicals.
So if a fire breaks out,
all someone has to do is throw the orb
from a safe distance to the flames.
The glass shatters and releases the chemicals
and puts the fire out.
People snap these things up.
They not only work, but they're pretty,
they look like Christmas ornaments.
- [Dan] Fire companies also stock up on them,
and so do average homeowners.
Finally, a grenade that's perfect for the home.
- [Kavitha] The first hand grenade fire extinguishers
are filled with water and chemical salts,
which work pretty well.
But then in the 1890s,
manufacturers switch to an even better substance,
carbon tetrachloride.
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]
- [Dan] The vapor that comes off of it
works faster than the water and salt mixtures
they've been using in fire grenades up till then.
- [Henry] Firefighters and average citizens
rush to buy these flashy inventions
only to discover they're more dangerous
than the fires they're supposed to put out.
[dramatic music]
- [Dan] It turns out that when you heat it up,
carbon tetrachloride breaks down into phosgene gas
that is literally a chemical weapon
that would be used later in World War I
killing tens of thousands of people.
- [Brian] All these things really did
was introduce yet another deadly gas
into the situation that is filled with heat,
fire, and deadly gases.
- There aren't a lot of things you could add
to an out-of-control fire to make it more deadly,
but it turns out carbon tetrachloride
does exactly that.
- [Henry] At the turn of the century,
these grenades are mounted in homes
and public buildings
quietly waiting to turn a fire
into a chemical attack.
- Sometimes when firefighters use these grenades
in confined spaces, they collapse on the spot.
Finally, a safety bulletin warns,
"Carbon tetrachloride, when exposed to flame,
may produce dangerous decomposition gases
injurious to the lungs."
That's putting it mildly.
- [Brian] I had the honor of being
a New York City firefighter.
We had months and months and months
of intense training on how to fight fires
and not one of those lessons
contained taking a glass bulb about this size
and trying to hit the base of a fire.
It just doesn't work, it's not sound science.
I mean, it looks cool hanging on the wall,
but it's not gonna work.
- Back then, the best way to stop a fire
was to break glass and hope for the best.
- Ever since the first car hit the road,
inventors have chased new state-of-the-art features,
and in 1930, one man delivered an idea
that seemed out of control.
What if the driver rode inside the wheel?
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]
- J.A. Purves, he's an engineer
but he's also a dreamer.
And one day he has this eureka moment.
He sees a sketch by Leonardo da Vinci
of his perpetual motion machine,
and he says, "My God, this is it,
this is the car of the future,"
and he decides to build it with his son.
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]
- The car is christened the Dynasphere,
but reportedly Purves also calls it Jumbo.
The thing is 10-feet-tall
and it weighs 1,000 pounds.
Its top speed is reportedly 30 miles per hour.
- [Jason] The design is kind of nuts.
There's a cabin that sits inside the big wheel
and that's where the driver is.
A 2.5 horsepower engine rotates the big wheel
around the cabin.
This design is basically made
so that the cabin stays stationary
while the big wheel spins.
- [Lance] Purves thinks that driving around
with one simple wheel
is going to be cheaper and easier.
Why use a whole car when you can just use
the one part that moves, the wheel?
It's really kind of genius.
- Purves, he builds different models
that run on gas and electricity.
He even builds multi passenger Dynaspheres,
some that can carry up to eight people.
- [Lance] It feels like something
out of science fiction.
In 1932, there's a "Popular Science" article
that bills it as the car of the future.
Newspaper articles predict
that roads will soon be filled
with these giant wheel vehicles.
- [Henry] But Jumbo has some very large flaws.
- In order to steer, you actually have to shift
from one side to the other.
Not a good way to go about steering.
Later models actually come with the steering wheel,
but the handling of the steering wheel is not easy.
-[Rutledge] There's no windshield,
there's no suspension.
So the line of sight on this thing
is straight through
and you basically can only really see clearly
when you're going fast.
So if you start to slow down,
it means that's opening slower and slower
so you really can't see as well.
- So the problem with breaking
is sometimes the outer ring stops
but the inner cabin does not.
And this is called gerbiling.
You're literally going around
in the inner cabin like a gerbil.
- That's a real tough selling point
'cause now everyone needs to be like harnessed in.
You can't just casually like hit the brakes,
now you're just tumbling around
like you got stuck in the dryer.
- [Nicole] And then what happens
when you're in the multi passenger with eight people?
I mean, [laughs] you guys are gonna get injured for sure.
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]
- [Negin] Turns out like the tumbling and the gerbiling
was just too much for people.
So team Purves is unable to solve the problems
and the Dynasphere actually never goes into production.
- It's pretty interesting to imagine
if this had worked, you go to the grocery
and there's just lines of these
one-wheeled gigantic things
that people hop inside of.
And to be honest, we would brake check those people
all the time just to see them... [blows raspberry]
- J.A. Purves wasn't the only inventor
whose futuristic vehicle made heads spin.
- Buckminster Fuller is this really innovative architect
who has all of these kind of grand ideas
about how to solve societal problems.
For example, he wants to mass produce homes
and have them airlifted,
kind of prefabricated into neighborhoods
and just placed down.
- And he really believes
in kind of what we call minimalism.
He fully believed in doing more with less,
and that really becomes kind of his catchphrase.
- In the 1930s, he sets his sights on a vehicle
that could be both a car and an airplane.
The car's fuselage has to be airworthy
even if it's not quite ready to take off.
Building the car is the first step
before attaching the wings and taking to flight.
- [Henry] Fuller names his new vehicle the Dymaxion,
combining three of his favorite words,
dynamic, maximum, and tension.
[dramatic music]
- [Hakeem] The Dymaxion body is incredibly aerodynamic.
It's like 20-feet long
and shaped like a silver teardrop.
It's powered by a Ford V8 engine
and able to carry up to 11 passengers.
It has three wheels.
Two are in the front
that provide the drive mechanism
as well as stability.
And there's one in the back for steering.
- To test it out, Fuller takes it to a Bronx racetrack
and it ends up shattering the course record,
reaching a speed of over 90 miles an hour.
- Wherever he goes, the Dymaxion causes a scene,
and it's not safe, it steers terribly,
but that doesn't matter.
Look how cool it looks, and the public love it.
- [Henry] The Dymaxion is on the fast track
to becoming a super-fast,
super-efficient vehicle
that can eventually grow wings and fly.
But Fuller's dream car has a fatal flaw
that is about to be exposed on the world stage.
- [Nicole] Fuller is invited to showcase the Dymaxion
at the Chicago World's Fair
and he has enlisted a Gulf employee
by the name of Francis Turner
to drive the vehicle there.
- For the demonstration,
Fuller has Turner drive the vehicle at high speed
around the perimeter of the fair.
[dramatic music]
Before long, the design flaw of this car
starts to rear its ugly head.
- Things go horribly wrong.
Eyewitnesses say it starts to tip and roll
and at that point it's hit by another vehicle.
So now, with that single wheel in the back,
there's really nothing to stop that thing
from just rolling and rolling and rolling.
- The two passengers onboard, they survive.
But Turner, the driver, is killed.
- This accident highlights the issues
with the Dymaxion's handling,
and this pretty much ends it for Fuller,
so no one's interested in it.
He ends up only making three of them,
and that's the end of the Dymaxion.
- Today, the Dymaxion lives in a museum.
Good, 'cause it can't hurt anyone.
- Most inventions solve problems,
but sometimes they create new ones.
In the early 1900s,
one household device did both.
- Obviously, no one likes wrinkled clothing today,
but back then, pressed clothing
isn't just a sign of neatness,
it's a reflection of character.
So a wrinkled collar
could actually cost someone their job.
Irons at the time are super primitive.
They're basically just big hunks of metal
with a flat side..
They're really heavy,
they can weigh up to eight pounds,
and you heat them up
by just kind of putting them in the oven
and waiting until they get hot.
- [Henry] Inventors try various improvements
including electric irons,
which would be great,
except few houses have electricity.
- [Dan] Then in 1902, an inventor comes along
and says, "I got this.
A design that's gonna keep an iron heated
to a consistent temperature.
No more grabbing hot irons off the oven.
This thing only heats the flat part
that touches the clothes.
The handle stays at room temperature."
It's a miracle.
- [Edward] The heat comes from an internal burner
inside the iron
that is filled with a new wonder product
called gasoline.
- The self heating iron is patented the next year
and pretty soon manufacturers across the country
are picking up on the concept.
- One thing you notice about this is that,
you know, to us it might look like
a really quaint old timey thing.
At the time, this is absolutely
the most cutting-edge piece of technology.
And like an automobile, the gas tank is in the rear.
"Use only approved fuel," gasoline.
I dunno if they have unleaded in those days.
- [Austin] One company reports selling 850,000 units
over the next 17 years.
That's 50,000 gasoline irons per year.
This is getting into the hands
of a lot of American women
and making their jobs so much easier.
- [Henry] But it turns out this miracle appliance
is also a ticking time bomb.
- A gas leak can cause carbon monoxide to build up.
So it's sort of like running a car engine
inside your home.
- [Dan] Inside the iron, pressurized fuel, the gasoline,
sits just a few inches away from an open flame.
It's kind of like a small camping stove.
- [Negin] The system has no regulators
or only these like kind of crude small vents,
and it could kind of explode at any time.
And women are standing
within very, very close blast distance.
- [Dan] Even if they don't explode,
if you get a clogged jet or a cracked seal
or an overfilled tank,
that can turn your little iron
into a miniature flame thrower.
- [Henry] And all too often,
that's exactly what happens.
For years, headlines show women dying in fires
after ironing.
- Fire officials blame all of these incidents
on self-heating, gas-powered irons.
- [Austin] A handheld gasoline powered object like this
obviously could not be manufactured today,
but in this time before electrification,
gasoline was the way of the future.
So who cares if there's a couple deaths?
Everyone's gonna look really sharp at the office.
- [Kavitha] By the late 1930s, gas-powered irons
are pretty much phased out
by the advent of electric irons and steam irons.
They work faster and they're much easier to use.
So it's not actually safety standards or hazards
that kill the gas iron,
it's just better design coming along.
- By the 1940s, inventors had a handle on machines
that generate heat like irons,
but cooling things down,
well, that was a whole new field
with its own set of perils.
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]
- The great American road trip is born
in the '40s and '50s.
I mean, you think about it, gas is cheap,
people got cars, roads are coming up everywhere.
They really want to go out and explore.
So summertime especially, people just hit the road.
- Problem with cars in the '40s and '50s
is that they didn't have air conditioning.
We all take air conditioning today for granted,
like we believe that we are owed air conditioning.
But not too long ago,
you had to drive through 100-degree day
in a hot metal car with your entire family
with nothing to cool you down
other than the windows.
- [Rutledge] My dad and I would go
from Birmingham, Alabama, to Albuquerque, New Mexico,
and it was so hot
I thought we were driving on the surface of the sun.
- [Henry] Manufacturers answer the call
with ingenious devices
you can pop right on your vehicle
that actually cool off the air inside, car coolers.
- [Dan] They're these shiny futuristic canisters
that are bolted or hooked
right onto the side window of your car.
- Inside the device is a sponge
that's immersed in water.
As you drive down the road at high speed,
air circulates through the device
and into that sponge.
And beyond that, in the interior of the car,
you feel cooler.
- For lots of families, car coolers are a miracle.
I mean, they're relatively affordable.
They're about $15 a pop, which is $180 today.
They'll give you up to three hours of cool air
before needing to be refilled.
- [Henry] It seems like one problem with road trips
has been solved, but users soon discover
that beating the heat means enduring something else.
- These devices smell real bad.
In the Southwest,
they've earned an unfortunate nickname, swamp coolers.
- [Brian] All of the wet rags and stuff
that you're putting into it,
eventually mold, must, and all that's blowing,
and it makes your car smell like a swamp.
Now, some people might have been good
about cleaning it after every car ride.
I still have a chocolate candy bar wrapper
on the floor of my car from 2008.
There was no way a guy like me
was cleaning out that swamp cooler.
- [Henry] But this isn't the end of the story.
[dramatic music]
- A stinky swamp odor
isn't the most dangerous thing about this.
The way that it worked
was you hooked it onto the side of your car
using these little metal hooks.
Hit 50, 60 miles per hour on the highway,
the wind would lift it up
and shoot it out behind you.
- Because you gotta fill these things up with water,
all in, they can be like 10 to 15 pounds.
So if that's suddenly flying off your car
into the windshield of the car behind you,
it's like chucking a bowling ball out at 55.
- It was a disaster,
it was a safety nightmare, they had to go.
- [Don] There's also a serious problem with these coolers
blocking the driver's vision.
I mean, at one point, Arizona State Police
begin ordering them removed
after the vision issue causes seven accidents
in a short span, two of them major.
[playful music]
- In the '60s and '70s,
air conditioning became a lot more
of a standard feature in cars.
- I don't know who invented air conditioning,
but I assume you're dead, and prayers,
because there's nothing better than air conditioning.
I would rather live without bread
than air conditioning.
[playful music] [vehicle engine purring]
- The next time your car's air conditioning breaks down
and it's expensive to fix,
just remember what the alternative could cost you.
- Once we invented the combustion engine
and automobiles,
we loved putting motors on anything with wheels.
Some ideas like turning bikes into motorcycles were great.
Others, not quite as amazing.
- In the 1950s, Detroit is a happening place.
I mean, you got the fifth largest city in the U.S.,
plus you got the big three there
making it all happen,
Ford, GM and Chrysler.
- [Natalia] Because of all this,
Detroit is this hotbed of creativity and innovation.
There are all these engineers there and inventors
and there's prosperity.
So people feel like the technological edge is there
and they wanna be part of it.
- [Henry] But one Detroit inventor
has a very different vision
for keeping America moving.
- There's a GM mechanic named Antonio Pirrello
and he wants to really revolutionize
the way people get around.
He wants to make something fast that'll stand out,
but also something that people
know and love already.
How can I make it better?
So he decides he's gonna try to figure out
how to supercharge some roller skates.
- Believe it or not, inventors have been trying to do this
since the early 20th century,
but no one really nails the design.
- Instead of having individual motors on skates,
Pirrello decides to put the motor and the gas tank
on a unit that is worn like a backpack.
- So the idea is that there's a cable
that's run on the engine.
It goes down to the right rear wheel
of the roller skates and it spins that.
So essentially, that's your traction going forward
and you would use your left roller skate
to steer where you want to go.
- There's a handheld throttle as well as a clutch,
and these things can get going really fast.
Pirrello hires a professional roller skater
and they clock in at 40 miles per hour.
On regular roller skates,
a professional can go maybe 20, 25 miles per hour,
so 40, that's really fast.
- [Henry] Pirrello deems his design a success.
Now, determined to sell his skates to the masses,
he has to prove
that powered wheels on your feet
are not only fun, they're safe.
- Pirrello starts going around
Detroit neighborhoods himself
and going faster than cars on the streets
using these crazy roller skates.
- Imagine being a normal pedestrian in Detroit
and you just walk outside of your house
and you suddenly see this guy whiz by
at 40 miles an hour.
You'd probably think,
"Did I wake up in the future?"
- Pirrello gives interviews to "Life magazine"
and "Popular Mechanics"
and he even makes appearances on "The Today Show"
and "You Asked for It."
- These skates are a real gasser,
and I mean that literally.
- [Henry] Customers start grabbing up
these high-powered skates.
But once someone brings a pair home,
the hard part begins.
- [Nicole] It's hard to even keep your balance
on regular roller skates,
but with these skates,
you're gonna keep going faster and faster and faster,
and you know what happens on skates,
you are going to fall.
- Safety wasn't a thing really for roller skating.
So it's not like people are wearing helmets.
I mean, he is cooking, 40 miles an hour
is real fast on roller skates.
- [Hakeem] Essentially you're going as fast as a car
but without the car wrapped around you.
So you know, out in the street,
that is a disaster waiting to happen.
- If the fall doesn't kill you,
there's also an exposed fuel line.
So at any point, you risk getting burned
by the exhaust or catching on fire.
"How are the new roller skates?"
"They're pretty good.
I got 'em from that guy that had 'em that died."
- So the invention sounds fun
and exciting and convenient,
but in reality, speeding through your neighborhood
with a flammable backpack and no safety gear,
it's not a good idea.
- [Henry] After strong initial sales,
accidents rise and sales drop.
- [Rutledge] There's people that said
that they were using these
and their clothes caught on fire,
their skin got burned from the exhaust.
I mean, that's again, if you survive.
Like if you wreck at 40, you may be dead.
- I love fast cars,
but even I don't want any parts of this invention.
- Looking back on the inventions
we thought would be groundbreaking,
like working jet packs to high voltage workouts,
to putting out fires with hand grenades,
sometimes we got in over our head,
but it's that outside-the-box thinking
that made our hazardous history always a good idea.
[air whooshing] [dramatic music]