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Not to be confused with List of lost inventions or List of obsolete technology.
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.
Spurious invention
Description
Angel Light
According to its inventor, this device could make walls, hands, and stealth shielding transparent.
Black box
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.[1]: 37
Chronovisor
A time viewer claimed to have produced photographs and recordings of the ancient past.
Cloudbuster
A device that could purportedly make rain through manipulating atmospheric orgone, a kind of energy considered to be pseudoscientific.[1]: 55
Edison
A device claimed to produce numerous analyses of blood very quickly using very small samples.
Gavreau's infrasonic weapons
Various whistles and horns, possibly fictional, which could cause serious bodily harm and death by emitting infrasound.[2][3]
Rife machine
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.[4]
Teleforce
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.[5]
Nikola Tesla electric car hoax
Alleged advanced electric car.
Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion experiment
Attempt to cause nuclear fusion using electrolysis to achieve the high compression ratio and mobility of deuterium.[1]: 56–57
Kryakutnoy
Fictional inventor of hot air balloons.[1]: 236
Newman energy machine
Supposed free-energy machine invented by Joe W. Newman.[1]: 236
Perpetual motion machines
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.[1]: 248, 262
^ abcdefWilliams, William F., ed. (2000). Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience. Book Builders Incorporated. ISBN 0-8160-3351-X.
^Eveleth, Rose (21 November 2012). "You Can't Blow Somebody's Brain Up With Sound". Smithsonian Magazine.
^Pilkington, Mark (19 June 2003). "Extreme noise terror". The Guardian.
^"Rife machines and cancer". Cancer Research UK.
^Reece, Gregory L. (2009). Weird science and bizarre beliefs : mysterious creatures, lost worlds, and amazing inventions. I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. pp. 200, 203. ISBN 978 1 84511 756 6.
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