This one fell straight into my lap on a single page of the Montgomery Advertiser's Sunday science section, one hundred years ago today, under a header that promised "Latest Facts from Science, Mechanics and Invention."

Five separate inventions, five separate inventors, all convinced they'd just solved something really important.

A few of them never went anywhere. One of them, it turns out, was about a century ahead of schedule.

First up is something called, with admirable honesty, a Real Gymnasium, invented by Joseph H. Shank of Dayton, Ohio. The pitch was that you shouldn't have to choose between sleeping and working out, so why not combine the bed frame and the gym equipment into one object.

The paper describes it as "a whole gymnasium in itself," with a pull-up bar, weights on pulleys hidden inside the bedposts, and a punching bag you could go after either from inside the bed or standing beside it. The write-up notes you could "go through various gymnastic performances in the bed, before he gets up in the morning," which is a sentence I have read several times now and still don't know what to do with.

I don't know who Joseph H. Shank was rooming with in 1926, but I hope they appreciated the speed bag at 6 a.m.

Next to it on the page is a much smaller item: a sleeping jacket designed to keep an infant safe through the night. The problem it's solving is real. As the paper puts it, "It is often difficult to keep an infant or small child from throwing aside its bed-coverings or crawling out of them in the night, thus inviting dangerous exposure."

The solution was a sleeveless jacket tied onto the child, with a tape running from the neck "to a rail at the head of the bed" and another from the jacket's hem "to a rail at the foot of the bed." The paper assures readers the jacket is "comfortably loose" and lets the child turn over freely in either direction, while keeping them from sliding toward either end of the crib. I believe every word of the engineering. I also can't get past the fact that the solution to "baby might wiggle somewhere unsafe" was tying the baby to both ends of the furniture.

Then there's the invention the whole page is named for, and it's the one that genuinely stopped me. A man named Charles Adler, of Baltimore, had a problem he wanted to solve: too many people were getting killed or hurt at railroad crossings and dangerous curves because drivers simply weren't slowing down.

His solution was a magnet, buried in a concrete box under the road a set distance before a railroad crossing. As a car passed over it, a relay mounted on the car's own front axle would sense the magnet and momentarily interrupt the ignition circuit, routing the current instead through a speed governor. The effect: "No matter how hard the driver steps on the throttle, the car will not travel at a speed greater than fifteen miles an hour until it has passed the crossing." Once clear of the danger zone, a second magnet would restore everything to normal.

Adler didn't stop at railroad crossings, either. The article notes the same system could be installed "at any point where the slow and careful operation of automobiles is necessary for the public safety," including school zones, where the magnets could even be wired to the school's own master clock, so the road itself would only enforce a slow speed during recess and the hours kids were walking to and from class.

This is, functionally, a speed-limiting smart road, built from a magnet and a relay, in 1926. Unfortunately it seems only golf courses use this today so you don’t drive into a bunker.

A little further down the page is a much simpler idea: put a radio receiver and a loudspeaker on a tower, and broadcast it to the street. The Advertiser describes one already running in Leipzig, Germany, "a graceful tower with loud-speaking devices placed at right angles so that the programs may be heard in all directions," first used at the Leipzig Fair, with the writer predicting it was "likely to be introduced in America."

There's a nice aside buried in this one too: in Germany at the time, anyone who owned a radio receiver paid a monthly fee, collected door to door "regularly by the local postman," which went toward funding better programming, including full orchestras and opera companies. A radio license fee, hand-delivered by your mailman. Different time, same basic argument about who pays for content.

And finally, the invention I'd genuinely take home with me: a motor buoy for aquatic sport, designed by Jules E. Haschke of Redondo Beach, California. It's a small, sealed, triangular motorized chamber with a propeller underneath, and a crossbar on the back end that a swimmer grabs onto with both hands.

"The swimmer, grasping the handlebar, manipulates the switch to start the motor," the article explains. "Whereupon, clinging to the bar, he is towed along, directing the buoy in any desired course by swinging it with a push or pull on the bar." It's a jet ski with the ski part removed, towing you by the arms instead of standing you on a hull, and it showed up in a newspaper roughly fifty years before Kawasaki made the idea famous.

See you tomorrow.

– Chris

Montgomery Advertiser, June 27, 1926 (Newspaper Feature Service)