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The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes

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If you have a sense of humor, if you love science and all its endless possibilities, if you have ever been bemused by the minds that devised those improbable patent specifications which proliferated at the close of the last century - then beg, borrow or steal a copy of this book. Or, better still, get Amazon.com to search for one for you.

David Jones's book is a selection of his short pieces that appeared in New Scientist and other publications. No area of science seems too abstruse for him not to know something of its peculiarities or well kept secrets. The delight for readers is Jones's endless ability to make unusual connections between scientific knowledge and worldly problems.

His speculations purport to be the ideas of a butterfly-minded inventor, Daedalus. Daedalus and his research team at his company, Dreadco, are engaged in a perpetual struggle to solve the pressing problems of mankind.

Each sketch begins with the statement of a problem which may be trivial or substantial. Daedalus's solution is always an surprising one - typically it will involve an unexpected interdisciplinary insight. The pleasure of the pieces is that the proposed solutions always seem unlikely but are sufficiently plausible for the reader to wonder whether they really would work. Jones rounds off each piece by extending the idea to comically improbable lengths.

Every piece is thought provoking. Readers are amused and stimulated at the same time. One is always left wondering whether Jones's ideas could work or whether he has fooled us into overlooking some blindingly obvious obstacle.

In fact, Jones has a remarkable track record of predicting unlikely solutions to common problems. I recall reading that something like 70% of Daedalus's inventions are eventually realised. Last week I read that an insomniac's bed had appeared on the market - it claimed to cancel out sounds that would keep the light sleeper awake. It did this by generating sounds of reverse amplitude thus cancelling out the unwanted sound. Daedalus had proposed anti-sound for just this purpose 20 years ago.

Reviewing older Daedalus inventions could yield the entrepreneurial reader a good profit - what was not feasible when written may well be possible now.

Flights of scientific fancy firmly grounded (usually) in facts and figures. Almost every page is pure gold and many have me thinking "Hmmm...I wonder..." If you think you might like it, buy it. You will love it.

Absolutely fascinating book! It really stretched my imagination of what might be possible -- every scheme either made me laugh, left me dumbfounded in amazement, or made me try to invent my own scheme. David Jones' ideas are a modern-day version of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. And some of the wild-sounding ideas proposed in this book have already come true!

This collection of columns from New Scientist deserves more fame than it has received [as does the followup, "Further Inventions"]. His collection of wacky ideas -- scientifically plausible if often economically, practically or politically wildly implausible -- bears some resemblance to the famous 1932 "Absolutely Mad Inventions" by A.E. Brown & H.A. Jeffcott, Jr.

Whereas the latter was all real inventions gleaned from the archives of the U.S. Patent Office, the former are all unpatented (and unpatentable!) ideas from Jones' own fecund imagination, and they cover an astonishing variety. Everything from a precursor of the Segway (envisioned as riding on a 1-foot ball) to 'milk of amnesia' elixir for forgetting to self-cooling brassieres and beyond, the sterling cleverness of the author delights and astounds.

Pity then that the current status of these two books makes them so difficult to obtain.