Original subtitles

[pensive music]

Would you believe there was once a human hamster wheel

designed to replace the automobile?

- [Hakeem] He calls it the dynasphere.

- The wave of the future.

- You were thrown forwards and backwards within this wheel.

Talk about motion sickness.

- Or a giant slingshot

invented to rescue humans.

- [Hakeem] This is incredibly dangerous.

- How could the human body

even withstand a type of action like that?

- And what if the future of home security

was a fire-spitting robot dog?

[flames whooshing]

- Therminator is a bad boy.

- Putting a flamethrower on the back of this robot dog

is just awesome.

- These are the innovations so surprising,

they are truly unbelievable.

[dramatic music]

It seems like every year, cars have new safety features,

but before computerized motion sensors,

automatic brakes and even horns,

engineers had to get a little more creative.

- On a hot afternoon in August 1896,

44-year-old Bridget Driscoll is in London

visiting with her 16-year-old daughter

for a religious conference.

She steps off the curb and is hit

by a brand-new thing to hit the London streets.

[car horn honking]

An automobile.

Although the car is going less than 10 miles an hour,

Bridget unfortunately dies,

but she becomes the first person

to be struck and killed by an automobile.

- [Dan] By the end of 1939,

almost 10,000 Brits a year are killed by cars,

with no signs of that number diminishing.

- Because automobile accidents with pedestrians

are now skyrocketing,

two inventors in England

decide that they're gonna take a shot at this.

And by 1939, they have come up

with what they think is the answer.

- [Dan] To demonstrate their idea,

they shoot a short film, starring in it themselves.

- Imagine, you're driving down the road

and a jaywalker isn't paying any attention at all

and steps right out in front of you.

This is really bad, right?

Nope, you just pull on your little lever

and out pops the pedestrian catcher.

- [Narrator] And it folds neatly away

when it isn't eating pedestrians.

- This folded-up canvas scoop

just pops right out of the bumper

and the pedestrian just gently falls

into its waiting trough.

- [Dan] Problem solved, right?

The streets are safe once again for mindless meandering?

- The pedestrian catcher looks like it works

and it gets some attention,

including a writeup in "Modern Mechanics" magazine.

But there's a problem.

- By the time they actually invent this in 1939,

the speed of cars has been increasing,

and now the average top speed

is about 70 miles an hour.

- At those speeds,

either the driver won't have time to deploy it fully,

or even if they do,

that still means the pedestrian

is being hit at 70 miles an hour.

So at higher speeds,

there's just no way this device is gonna work,

and the pedestrian catcher never goes into production.

- Another reason the scoop never quite catches on

is dramatic innovations in car horns in the 1940s.

[car horn honking repeatedly]

Suddenly, car horns go from

these laborious, hand cranked contraptions,

to electric ones you can operate with a push of a button.

Much easier to give 'em a little toot

than try to catch 'em in a scoop.

- If you think getting scooped off the road

at 70 miles an hour might give you whiplash,

imagine getting snatched off the ground

by a screaming airplane.

[intense music]

- After World War II, the military has a problem.

They don't have a way of getting personnel

out of places that don't have a runway.

[gunfire]

- This could be agents who were dropped in

and need to be extracted.

Other times, it was downed airmen.

- At the time, a helicopter wouldn't work,

'cause helicopters are cumbersome,

they're noisy, they attract too much attention,

they're slow to get in and out of the ground.

- So how can you get your person out

in the fastest and most clandestine way possible?

- In 1958, inventor Robert Edison Fulton, Jr.,

who's named after Thomas Edison, by the way,

is working on the problem for the American military.

His idea is to come up with a contraption

that is gonna get personnel off the ground very quickly

and into the back of a speeding plane.

- [Dan] His idea, a human slingshot.

But how could this possibly work?

- So this recovery system,

the way it's designed is it's packaged into a bag.

Aircraft comes over

and they drop the bag to the person

who's down behind enemy lines.

They put on the harness.

Once they put on the harness, they get everything strapped in.

Then they release the balloon into the sky,

and the balloon is attached to a 500-foot cable,

and that cable is designed

to actually be captured by the aircraft.

- On the second pass,

the plane comes through with a cable in a yolk,

and it just grabs and slingshots the person up to the plane,

where they're then recovered by the crew on the plane.

[camera shutter clicking]

- [Dan] He calls it the surface-to-air recovery system,

but it quickly becomes known simply as the Skyhook.

- If someone pitched the Skyhook to me,

on paper, I'm saying no.

First of all, how could the human body

even withstand a type of slingshot action like that

from standing on the ground?

And yet Fulton's Skyhook is a total success.

- As someone who specializes in the recovery of downed pilots

and downed and injured aircrew members behind enemy lines,

I've done a lot of wild things

to get extracted off the field,

but I can't imagine what it would be like

with this Fulton Skyhook.

- And Skyhook isn't just a Cold War fad either.

It's actually used up until 1996.

- The sight of a person

dangling 1,000 feet under an airplane

flying through the sky

looks incredibly dangerous.

But in all the decades of its use,

there was only a single fatality.

Like, that's an amazing record of success.

- Yanking stranded soldiers sky high

from a speeding plane is a daring move,

but another airborne innovation

operates at a much lower altitude.

- It's 1959, and we are at the very height of the Cold War.

The US military is looking for a new type of vehicle

to help move troops around.

- They wanna create a vehicle that doesn't need wheels,

that would be able to move over mud,

over water, over rocky terrain.

- At this point, Curtis Wright,

one of the largest aircraft manufacturing firms

in the world,

who made a tremendous amount of aircraft

for the Second World War,

come up with an idea.

- Their idea is to use what is known as ground effect.

By putting a propeller close to the ground,

a cushion of air can be created

that the vehicle can ride on.

- This new vehicle will be nowhere near as vulnerable

as a helicopter in the air

because this will only be about two or three feet

above the ground.

- [Dan] After an impressively quick development

of less than a year,

Curtis Wright has a prototype in 1959

ready to present to the Army.

They call it the Model 2500 Air Car.

It's the world's first real-life hovercraft.

[tense music]

- So they turn it on and it works.

The vehicle lifts off the ground about 10 inches,

and then proceeds to seamlessly cross the terrain

and even water.

It's almost like Luke Skywalker's Landspeeder

in "Star Wars."

- This thing has maneuverability.

It can go forward, backwards,

stop, go left, right.

- It's powered by two 180-horsepower fans,

one in the front and one in the back.

You can control it using a simple steering wheel.

- It uses grille flaps

that redirect the direction that the air flows out.

Air goes that way, craft goes that way.

- [Dan] But as soon as the Army begins to test it,

a few issues start to rev up.

- While the hover car works just as expected on flat surfaces,

once there's a grade of only 6%,

suddenly now, things go awry.

- The ground effect doesn't do well on an up grade

because if the terrain in front of you is suddenly rising,

you don't have the even application of ground effect

all the way around the vehicle.

- So basically, sooner or later,

you do what we call ground out and hit the ground.

- The hover car's top speed is also only 38 miles per hour.

So you're not getting away from bad guys

moving that slowly.

- In addition to that, it's super loud.

Those two 180-horsepower engines

produce a lot of noise.

And so if the idea is to employ stealth on a battlefield

as you rush in at the blistering rate

of 38 miles per hour in your hover car,

the enemy will know you're coming.

- So it's big, it's heavy, it's slow,

and it can't go everywhere.

And then the government scraps the project.

- [Dan] But the engineers at Curtis Wright

aren't ready to be grounded just yet.

- They now see the possibility of a civilian version.

One is a full sedan for the family,

and the other one is a sporty little one,

a two-seater called the Bee.

They actually put on a demonstration

in front of Rockefeller Plaza in New York City

to show off the new cars.

But the price is a whopping $15,000,

which in the 1960s

is more expensive than a Rolls-Royce.

- Despite their marketing and their brilliant engineering,

they don't sell a single hover car.

[fans humming]

- A floating family sedan that can go over water?

I gotta say, there's worse things

to spend your money on.

- Genius inventors have solved countless problems

over the centuries.

How to see at night, how to fly,

how to communicate across oceans.

But one colossal problem has evaded

even the greatest creative minds.

How do you stop a free-range toddler

from wreaking havoc?

In the 1950s,

one inventor is brave enough to try.

[bright music]

- Any parent knows that keeping track of their kids

when they're little, that's a stressful time.

There's a reason we call it the terrible twos.

- You take your eye off them for a second,

they're in another room,

they could crawl into the street,

they could fall out a window.

So in 1953, an inventor comes up with something

to try and fix this problem.

- [Dan] It's called the infant restraining device,

and they're basically baby shackles.

- What better way to make sure your child doesn't wander off

than putting their ankles in manacles

and ensuring their early childhood trauma?

- Now, in theory, it makes sense.

If your kid can't climb on things,

they can't run away,

they'll probably be safe.

But in reality,

it looks like you've put your kid in handcuffs.

They look like tiny baby convicts.

- [Dan] But don't worry,

unlike those worn by a chain gang,

these shackles use stretchy material, not iron.

- [Kavitha] So your kid can walk,

but they can't run or climb on things.

- But the problem is,

you can't restrain a kid from wanting to go running.

The kid doesn't know that they're, well, baby shackled.

So having a kid take off running and face plant in the street

does not look that good for the parent.

- Unsurprisingly, this patent

is never actually brought to production,

but the technology, the innovation of it,

isn't actually lost.

- In 1977, it's repurposed as a prisoner restraint device.

And that 1977 patent

is utilized for a short period of time.

So invented for your toddler,

but strong enough for your dangerous criminal.

[child crying]

- Surprisingly, restraints are at the forefront

of another bizarre baby invention.

[inquisitive music]

- It's the 1960s,

an engineer named George Blonsky and his wife

are at the Bronx Zoo.

And they get to witness the miracle of birth,

an elephant is giving birth.

- But they notice something kinda strange.

The mother elephant who's giving birth

is spinning around as the baby is coming out.

So they ask one of the zoo employees

and they explain that the mother

is using centrifugal force

to help the baby come out.

Think about those merry-go-rounds

that are in playgrounds, right?

The faster it goes, the harder it is to hang on,

and you're probably gonna fall off.

- [Dan] That fateful moment at the zoo

gets George thinking,

could this centrifugal force concept

be applied to human births?

- The Blonskys, who are childless,

have theorized that modern women

have lost their birthing muscles,

have lost their abdominal strength,

and thus might need a little help,

specifically by spinning her

in the same way that the elephant was witnessed

spinning on its own at the zoo.

- Blonsky is not an OB/GYN,

but he is a mining engineer.

- [Dan] Despite this, by 1965,

the couple gets a patent

for what will later be known as the Blonsky birthing table.

- So this thing looks horrifying.

It looks like a medieval torture device.

This woman is strapped on to a wheel

by her neck and her thighs and her waist,

and she's got something covering her face.

But to make sure she's comfortable,

you know, while she's strapped by her throat,

they have given her a pillow.

- [Dan] Once she's strapped in,

it's time to start that spin cycle.

- The idea is that the centrifugal force,

as this woman is holding on for dear life,

will help eject the baby effortlessly from the womb.

- Now, although you might think that the baby

might just fly out and smack against the wall,

the Bloskys have thought of everything,

and the apparatus includes a net,

which is situated between the woman's legs

to catch the baby as it comes out.

- [Dan] It's a truly bizarre concept,

but could it possibly work?

- The Bloskys got as far as making a prototype,

but surprisingly enough, they found zero buyers.

Maybe it's because no one wanted the idea

of spinning a mother around

until the baby was ejected from the womb into a net.

- It's pretty clear that Blonsky didn't do the math

because it would require so much rotational speed

for a baby to actually be mechanically shot out of a woman

that both the mother and the baby would probably die.

[tense music]

- Delivering a baby is one thing,

but keeping them entertained as a child

is a whole other challenge.

Something the world's most famous inventor

tries his hand at.

- In 1887, Thomas Edison is only 40 years old

and already a living legend.

He's invented the automatic telegraph,

the movie camera, the light bulb,

and now, he's filed a patent

for something that's gonna blow everyone's mind again,

the wax cylinder phonograph.

[inquisitive music]

But just having people play records in their living rooms

isn't enough for Edison.

And within a year, he has a patent

for another innovation using sound.

- [Dan] His idea is to put a scaled-down version

of the record player

inside a doll so it can talk.

- So let's keep in mind that

no one's used to hearing recorded anything.

If you like music, you're gonna hear it live.

So for him to not only bring audible recordings

into the world,

but now he's gonna put it into a doll?

This is a new idea on top of a new idea,

wrapped up in a new idea.

- Basically, it's a cute little porcelain and wood doll

with this little crank on the back,

and the sound will come out of the doll.

- Because these records are so small,

they really can only hold about 20 seconds of sound on them.

So Edison chooses really short-snippet nursery rhymes,

like "Mary Had a Little Lamb"

or "Hickory Dickory Dock,"

or "As I Lay Me Down to Sleep."

- [Dan] In 1889, the world's first talking doll

is ready to be shipped.

And the excitement quickly generates hundreds of orders.

- But as people start getting them

and start playing with them,

they realize it's not quite all it's cracked up to be.

- The reaction once the dolls were delivered

is universal creepiness.

To record at the time,

you have to yell into a giant bell

as loud as possible.

So the people performing these nursery rhymes

are not singing dulcet, lovely tones,

they're screaming as loud as they can.

- It's one thing to have these cute little nursery rhymes

coming from these children's dolls,

but instead, you have these middle-aged women

shouting at you.

It's very disconcerting.

[doll shouting indistinctly]

- [Dan] As quickly as the Edison dolls are sold,

they start getting returned with complaints

that they're scaring the children,

and the parents.

- By May of 1890,

just weeks after the dolls are launched,

Edison shuts the entire operation down.

It's a total failure.

In fact, Edison, completely owning reality here,

he dubs the dolls his little monsters.

[doll eerily laughing] [ominous music]

- While the terrifying dolls weren't his brightest idea,

Edison still went on to invent the movie camera,

the world's first storage batteries,

and many other things.

So while he may have caused a few children to lose sleep,

Edison probably didn't lose much himself.

- It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention,

and this need is at the center of a very unusual idea

for a military gadget in the Vietnam jungle.

[tense music] [gunfire]

- During the Vietnam War,

the American Air Force is facing a particular problem,

which is that when they drop radio transmitters

into the jungle to pinpoint

exactly where they want airstrikes to take place,

many times those transmitters

are discovered by the enemy and destroyed.

- So what you need is a homing beacon

that will blend into the natural environment.

- By 1970, they come out with something

that is truly outside the box.

- [Dan] At just four inches long and 1/4 inch tall,

the T-1151 is a fully functional radio transmitter

disguised as animal poop.

- It can be dropped as a beacon for troops to rendezvous

or as a target indicator for a bombing operation.

- It can even monitor ground movements,

so it can send a signal

indicating the movement of an enemy convoy.

This allows the Air Force to hide transmission points

and rendezvous points

for days and even weeks.

It's the perfect combination of disgusting and brilliant.

- It is employed and it is highly successful,

simply because it's disguised as something

that nobody wants to go near, let alone inspect.

- [Dan] It also has a very important number-two function.

[plane whooshing]

- Imagine being a American pilot in the Vietnam War

and you're shot down.

[explosion booming]

Now you're in the jungle.

Who would've thought that the greatest thing

that you could ever see is a little piece of poop?

The T-1151 transmitter.

- He can open it up, press a button,

and that will stop the transmission signal

and allow him to send a Morse code message

back to base.

- It's basically an early form of texting.

This transmitter is actually successful

in the Vietnam War.

So the CIA decides to adopt this thing

and continue using it.

So who knows how many bad guys

have had their secret plans thwarted

due to this 1/4-inch-high transmitter?

- Clearly, when duty calls, inventors answer.

So when one idea-man

sees the need for a better automobile,

he decides to reinvent the wheel.

[inquisitive music]

- In the 1930s, automobiles have only been around now

for about 20 years.

So there are a lot of designers and inventors out there

that are looking for new ways to get people moving.

- [Dan] One of these inventors is an electrical engineer

named Jonathan Archibald Purvis.

- So Purvis is not really happy

with the concept of the automobile.

There's a lot of drawbacks.

They're not good on rocky surfaces,

they're not good in mud,

or tall grass, or even the sand of a beach.

- So he has in the back of his mind,

"How can I improve this vehicle?"

when he looks at a picture of da Vinci's Vitruvian Man,

the dude in the big circle, right?

And he thinks to himself,

"Why are we driving on wheels

when we can drive in a wheel?"

- [Dan] And if you are in a wheel,

like the Vitruvian Man,

you only need one, not four.

[inquisitive music]

- By 1932, Purvis has his prototype.

He calls it the Dynasphere,

his giant, one-wheel wonder.

- He believes that this is the wave of the future.

- So he and his son, who's also an engineer,

gather a crowd together at a beach

and they bring out this giant monstrosity of a wheel.

It's 10 feet tall, it weighs half a ton,

and at the bottom is where there's a gas engine

underneath a platform for the driver.

- [Dan] But given how bizarre it looks,

will it even work?

- So Purvis is in the vehicle with his son,

who he lets do the driving.

This thing fires up and starts to roll.

- The craft is sort of wobbly when it starts out,

but as they pick up speed,

conservation of angular momentum kicks in

and they stabilize.

And they get up to 30 miles per hour

going down the beach.

Now, this is in contrast to normal automobiles

that just don't go anywhere on a beach.

- So people at this time are absolutely blown away

by what they are seeing.

The Dynasphere is going to give people

who live in outlying areas

where people have to go over rocky ground,

or sand, or mud,

the ability now to do it.

- [Dan] So why aren't we all cruising around

in Dynaspheres today?

- The design has some drawbacks.

For one, the driver needs to stick their head out the side

in order to have a clear vision of where they're going.

On an open beach, that can work out pretty well,

but that's not gonna work in a busy London street.

It also has a problem turning.

- So because the entire vehicle is a wheel,

if you wanna go left, you lean left,

if you go right, you lean right.

So steering it is just like a bicycle,

a 1,000-pound bicycle.

So it's too heavy to lean.

That's usually why in demonstrations,

you only see it going in a straight line.

- [Dan] But the biggest problem occurs

when you slam on the brakes.

- While the outside wheel stops just fine,

the platform you sit in does not.

- So if you slam on the brakes

and that outer wheel stops,

the inner wheel keeps turning,

and so you do just what a gerbil does

when you see it on the wheel,

then suddenly it's going head over heels.

- Sadly, millions of drivers

never experience the joy of commuting

by giant hamster wheel

because the Dynasphere never goes into production.

- They say you are what you eat.

But in the 1930s, an Italian engineer

sets out to prove that you could also wear what you eat.

[pensive music]

- It's post-World War I and Italy is realizing

that it needs to establish some self-sufficiency.

It doesn't wanna be dependent on these other nations

that it was just at war at for key goods and services.

- Mussolini is in power

and his government is extremely interested

in coming up with new ways to make everyday products

that don't require importing.

So Italians are encouraged to be innovative

for the sake of national pride.

- One of Italy's biggest imports is wool from England,

because so much of the clothing in that era

was made from wool.

And so there's a big push

to become less reliant on British wool.

- [Dan] So in 1935, Italian engineer, Antonio Ferretti,

patents something that does the body good,

in more ways than one.

- Ferretti develops a new way of making fabric out of milk.

- It turns out that wool actually comes from a protein

that shares a lot of similarities to casein,

which is a protein found in milk.

Ferretti notices that when preparing milk,

there's a thin layer that has to be skimmed off the top,

basically to ensure there are no chunks in your milk.

- And typically in a milk production process,

this is discarded.

However, Ferretti discovers that this protein

can be re-manipulated and re-bonded again

into an actual fabric.

- The process of turning this milk cast off into fabric

is quite fascinating.

What they do is they add acid

to this skimmed-off product,

and that separates out the casein,

which is then forced through spinnerets like macaroni.

And then that product

is subject to a chemical hardening bath,

which then leaves a product

that can be cut into bolts of fabric.

- [Dan] Once they're ready to wear,

Ferretti needs to figure out a name,

since "milk clothes" doesn't really have a great ring to it.

- So Ferretti comes up with the name Lanital

because the Italian word for wool is lana and Italia,

you get Lanital.

- Even though this product is not as durable as wool,

many people like it.

They prefer it because it's soft, it's smooth,

it feels more like silk.

- By the late '30s,

milk fiber is everywhere in Italy.

It's in their famous suits,

it's used in the official government flags.

It's really becoming a point of national pride.

- Mussolini is thrilled with the success

and points to it as an example of Italian ingenuity

and the ability of Italians to be more self-sufficient.

- [Dan] Italy even begins selling the technology

to other countries.

And by the 1940s,

milk chic is all the rage in New York City fashion shows.

But there's a catch.

- Lanital, should it get wet, has a terrible smell.

As if when regular wool gets wet

and doesn't smell bad enough,

when Lanital gets wet, it smells like sour milk.

- Imagine like you're on a date and you get caught in the rain,

and it's super romantic.

You lean in for the kiss,

and you realize you smell like sour milk.

- [Dan] By the late 1940s,

the milk fiber fad begins to dry up.

- Things in Italy are changing a lot.

Mussolini is gone,

Italy has a new government,

and the world is generally moving away from isolationism.

The other big change is the advent of synthetic fibers.

They're just as cheap, they're strong,

and most crucially, they do not smell like sour milk.

- [Dan] Believe it or not,

milk clothes aren't the most bizarre food product ever made.

That honor belongs to an unusual innovation from Australia.

- Humans love their meat.

In fact, today, humans eat

over 300 million tons of meat a year.

But the problem with meat

is that it's really inefficient to make.

- It consumes a lot of water, a lot of land,

and a lot of resources.

- And it's very clear that at the current rate

of population growth,

this is not a sustainable path forward.

- [Dan] That's why some companies

are making meat in a lab.

They call it cultivated meat.

- Scientists can take cells from a living animal

without killing it,

place those cells in a bioreactor,

and grow meat.

- It's really meat,

not a plant that's made to taste and look like meat,

but actually lab-grown meat.

- You can make chicken, you can make beef,

you can make fish.

Some companies are even trying to make alligator

or kangaroo meat in a lab.

- [Dan] But in 2023, a company in Australia

decides to try for something a bit more exotic.

- So a company named Vow

decides to create meat from the DNA

of a long extinct animal,

the wooly mammoth.

- The challenge to using ancient DNA

is that it breaks apart

and some of the pieces get lost.

But Vow tries to fill in the blanks

with a close living relative

of the wooly mammoth,

the African elephant.

And lo and behold, it works.

- [Dan] Unbelievably, after just a few weeks,

they unveil a wooly mammoth meatball.

- So we now have the first mammoth meat in 4,000 years,

and I'm sure somebody out there is going,

"Can't wait to get my hands

on that tasty, tasty mammoth meatball."

One small caveat.

- We haven't eaten mammoth in 4,000 years.

Our biomes and our enzymes

may have changed in our gut flora,

and therefore we don't know

if we are able to eat it anymore.

It might actually be deadly

to consume this mammoth meat.

- [Dan] So far, nobody's actually tried it.

Maybe it's best to let sleeping mammoths lie.

- The company that made the mammoth meatball,

they said it was just an experiment,

but it does illustrate

what the future could possibly hold.

- Several companies in the US

have actually received permission

to sell cultivated meat.

So if you're gonna make chicken and beef,

why not also try mammoth?

- There's no telling what's gonna be

in our refrigerators in the future,

or in our grocery stores.

It may be extinct meat.

- You know, I'd give that meatball a shot.

Can't be worse than the mystery meat

the cafeteria in school served us as kids.

- Since the brutal days of the stocks or the pillory,

the Brits have always loved

adding a dose of humiliation as a crime deterrent.

So it's no surprise that it's two British inventors

who come up with a strange and embarrassing deterrent

for would-be briefcase thieves.

[inquisitive music]

- In the 1960s,

the city of London sees record crime rates.

It's post-World War II,

the economy is not as strong as it once was,

employment is not as great as it once was,

and so you have a lot of working-class people

that are worried about pickpockets and thieves.

- Now, at the time, there aren't a lot of options

for self-defense in London.

Handguns are outlawed in the 1930s,

and while pepper spray is invented,

that soon gets outlawed as well.

So the everyday citizen

doesn't really have a lot of options

to protect themselves on the streets.

- [Dan] That's when inventor John Fisher

comes up with a totally bizarre way

to prevent criminals from stealing your stuff.

With anything up to 20,000 pounds in fivers in the case,

the thief has a big decision to make.

Imagine you're walking down the street

and someone runs up

and tries to steal your briefcase.

You just simply hit a button,

and that's where the Arrester security case comes in.

- The first thing it does,

it emits this incredibly loud horn noise.

[suitcase alarm blaring]

So everyone is looking in the direction

of where this horn is coming from.

Secondly, the handle smashes down

onto the thief's fingers,

applying a ton of pressure,

thus causing them to be in a bunch of pain.

- And then, the real cherry on top

is that after your hand is locked to this briefcase,

three extendable poles pop outta the briefcase.

[poles whooshing]

So not only are you locked to this thing,

but now with the three posts sticking out,

you also can't get away.

What a brilliant idea.

- And now you can't get through doorways,

you can't get into a cab.

You're basically arrested by this briefcase.

So the key selling point here is the public shaming.

The bad guy is stuck there with his hand on the briefcase,

alarms going off, these bars shot out of it,

and he basically just has to wait

for the cops to come and get him and take him away.

- As far as we know,

none of these cases were ever sold.

But the demo film for the Arrester

is shown in theaters all over London.

So perhaps that film was the deterrent

that was needed to stop wannabe thieves

from running up on English businessmen

and stealing their briefcases

full of somewhat interesting documents

and half-eaten sandwiches.

- Electronic security has made quite a few advancements

since the Arrester,

like this farfetched version of man's best friend.

[tense music]

- Modern drones are everywhere now.

They're used by the military, police,

filmmakers, you name it.

But drones have limitations.

- For flying drones, they can't fly in bad weather,

they're susceptible to running into obstacles,

like power lines or trees.

And if you want a drone for security,

there are also other drawbacks.

Navigating through buildings is very difficult.

They can't pick things up.

- You also have wheeled drones

and drones that are on tracks.

And these are great for detecting bombs and explosives,

but they have their limitations too.

They can't go upstairs,

they can't go on adverse terrain.

And so this poses a new set of limitations.

- In 2016, Boston Dynamics unveils a new kind of drone,

not one that's gonna get caught in trees,

or blown over by the wind,

or unable to make it up the stairs.

Nope, they create a new type of drone

that has the ability to walk.

- [Dan] They call him Spot,

the world's first commercially available robot drone

on four legs.

- At first glance, when you look at Spot,

Spot is creepy,

kinda looks like a possessed demonic animal.

So maybe they called him Spot

just to sort of brand him

as something a little bit friendlier.

And it kinda looks like a dog.

It's got the four legs.

- Spot also has an optional add-on arm,

so it can do things like open doors,

manipulate objects.

It is a bad boy.

- [Dan] Soon, Spots are mass produced

as commercial security drones

to patrol large businesses and factories,

doing things no junkyard dog could do before.

- Spot is equipped with night vision

and can operate on thermal or electro-optical cameras.

He can be programmed to do self-patrol missions

or he can be operated remotely.

- And the best part,

if it sees intruders,

you can program Spot to call the cops.

- And when the battery gets low,

Spot doesn't even have to be plugged in,

he just walks into his little doghouse

and charges himself.

And unlike traditional guard dogs,

Spot never poops.

- [Dan] But one company decides

it can really turn up the heat on Spot's potential.

- There's a company called Throwflame

that makes flamethrowers,

and they design the Therminator.

It is a flamethrower

that attaches to Spot's back.

So now you have a flame-throwing dog drone

that can go anywhere and set anything on fire.

- [Dan] A flame spitting hell hound

may sound like a gimmick,

but the Therminator actually has practical applications.

- Putting a flamethrower on the back

of this robot dog is just awesome.

Flamethrowers are used to clear agricultural brush,

to melt snow, to clear away any sort of debris.

[flames whooshing]

- A flying drone can't handle the payload of a flamethrower

and a wheeled drone can't get the flamethrower

out on challenging terrain.

So if you're gonna mount a flamethrower on something,

it's gotta be Spot.

- To be clear, flamethrowers are legal in the United States,

however, deadly use of a flamethrower

is definitely not legal or recommended by anybody.

So do not put a flamethrower on its back

and try to incinerate trespassers.

Instead, you can program Spot

to call the police right away.

- I don't wanna use my Spot and a flamethrower

for any bad guys, but what a cool way

to start the barbecue in the summertime.

[flames whooshing]

- We've explored some zany ideas,

from centrifugal birthing tables

to flame-throwing drone dogs,

but this next innovation

is a lot more up close and personal.

- In the mid-1950s, a doctor named John Farrar

is looking for a way to measure pressure changes

inside human intestines.

- Recording pressure information

inside a human digestive tract is actually quite useful.

It could be blockages,

other diseases, or even cancer.

- The typical way this is done

is by having a sensor on the end of a tube

and that tube is snaked down the patient's throat

into their esophagus, into their stomach,

and then through the tens of feet of intestines

that we have.

Talk about uncomfortable and disgusting.

- [Dan] So the doctor has an idea,

what if the patient could just ditch the tube?

- How does it get down there?

The patient will swallow it in pill form.

His idea is to put inside the pill

a little transistor radio,

and the radio will deliver the signal

outside the body.

So Dr. Farrar teams up with the people at RCA

and they make it happen.

- By 1957, Farrar has developed the radio pill.

It's a 1 1/2-inch-long pill,

and it measures the pressure changes inside

using a flexible membrane.

Changes in internal pressure

affect the pitch and tone of the radio signal,

enabling the doctor to ascertain

what's going on on the inside.

- They could have perhaps obstruction

inside their intestines,

they could have cancer.

Once we have this information about the pressures,

we can now form a proper treatment plan for the patient.

- So you might be wondering how you get the pill out.

It's actually comes out the natural way.

And given the fact that the pills cost

approximately $160,000 in today's dollars,

they're likely used more than once.

- Initially, there's great excitement about this pill.

It even gets a writeup in "Life Magazine."

But the big problem is the cost.

So the pill never gets past the trial runs.

- Around the same time the radio pill is being tested,

a physicist is also thinking about ways

to go where no person has gone before.

- In 1959, theoretical physicist, Richard Feynman,

the guy who basically created quantum mechanics,

is working with his assistant, Albert Hibbs,

and Albert has an idea.

He suggests that with the current rate

of advancement in microtechnology,

in the future, we might not only be able to swallow sensors,

but we might also be able to swallow the surgeon.

- [Dan] While he wasn't suggesting that we eat doctors,

he was suggesting

the revolutionary concept of nanomedicine.

- Nano means very, very small.

- We have meters, and millimeters,

and micrometers, and nanometers.

So anything that's super small,

we just put nano in front of it.

- By the 1990s, scientists are able to create

nanostructures so small

that they can bring medicine not only to organs,

but to individual cells.

- [Dan] Then scientists start to wonder,

"What if we could make robot doctors that small?"

- Imagine just injecting little robot surgeons

into your body to do surgery on you,

or to kill cancerous cells.

- And so while you're playing basketball,

they can repair whatever needs to be repaired

without having a surgeon slice you open.

- It's like "Innerspace"

when Dennis Quaid flies that spaceship

into Martin Short's body,

but ends up winning Meg Ryan's heart.

Same thing.

- Nano robots have applications far outside of medicine.

They can clean up toxic waste.

They can be used for space exploration.

There is no limit to the applications.

We're at the very beginning, and so

this is something that's gonna blow up with time.

- [Dan] The desire to improve the world around us

has led to some remarkable things,

some that are truly amazing,

and some that are truly bizarre.

But as long as we strive to innovate,

we'll keep creating new things

that are truly unbelievable.

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