Robot farmers
In the age of steam, some people predicted that farmers would be able to put their feet up; steam-powered robots would do all the heavy farming work. Two hundred years later, tractors and harvesters are fast and efficient, but these machines still need to be operated by farmers.

Helicycle
In 1936, Igor Sikorsky’s helicopter became the first practical machine to hover in the air. It caught the imagination of Daniel Gumb in 1945, who invented the personal helicopter based on the design of a motorcycle.

Anti-gravity underwear
This 1878 cartoon illustrates the effect of Thomas Edison’s anti-gravity underwear. If this ingenious idea had become a reality, wearers would have beaten the Wright brothers in the race to become airborne.

Watch out!
In the early days of motor cars, pederstrians and cars were always at odds in the battle for the roadways. The car above was a fanciful invention that vacuumed up "jaywalkers" who strayed onto the road.

Toothbrush
This simple invention, which originated in china, has been the subject of continual "imporovements." This design by Luis Reinold in 1941 may have been good for brushing the back of your teeth!

Up and over
In the early 1900s, many railway systems used single tracks. This patent from 1904 shows how an express train could drive over the top of an all-stations train and doule the number of passengers on the ine. But imagine being a passenger!

It Might Have Been!
The history of invention is full of brilliant, yet crazy ideas. Can you imagine what life might be like today if Thomas Edison had developed his idea of anti-gravity underwear, or if Alexander Bell had persisted in trying to invent a talking fire alarm rather than a telephone? Inventions inspire people to think of the future and its possibilities, but trying to predict the success of inventions and how people will react to them has never been easy. The first motor cars had to travel through towns at walking pace behind a man carrying a red flag because they frightened people and horses. People thought that motor cars would never replace the horse and buggy. In the 1950s, the president of IBM predicted that, at most, no more than one computer per country would ever be built! The computer endured, but other inventions had a short life. This collection from the past 200 years shows you just what might have been.

TRANSGENIC PIGS
The heart of a pig is similar in shape and size to the human heart. People and pigs, however, have very different genes. Scientists in England have developed a virus that carries human genes into pigs. This makes it possible for the human body to accept the heart of a pig in a transplant.

CHANGING GENES
Every living cell has spiral-shaped deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), discovered in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson at Cambridge in England. The DNA is made up of genes that control how the cell works. Biotechnologists have learned how to after the genes and change living cells.

CAT scan
Some of the names used for new medical inventions are as complicated as the names of the diseases they are used to diagnose. Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT scan) converts X-ray pictures into high-resolution video images. These scans can show even small differences between normal and abnormal tissue. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging (NMRI) was invented in England and the United States in 1973. By 1981, NMRI scanners, which use radio waves to produce cross-sectional images of sort tissue, could take three- dimensional pictures of the inside of the body.