Every product you see on a shelf has gone through some amount of testing in order to ensure the product does what its label claims it does. However, the laws and regulations regarding what a company can put on its label are extremely lax which means they can make a lot of claims without any backing. This is exactly why several companies and inventors have taken insane measures to put their products through the right amount of testing to ensure it works.
1. Elisha Graves Otis
Otis was a brilliant inventor who created a revolution in the way humanity moves in a straight line. He is the man behind the elevator break that led to elevators becoming statistically safer than stairs.
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| image source-Flickr |
His invention consisted of a spring that is kept coiled by the weight of the elevator itself. That way if the elevator suddenly drops or if the cables supporting it snap, the spring will lock the elevator in place and save everyone from falling.
Everyone was skeptical of the effectiveness of this invention so in order to sell his idea Otis went to the 1954 World’s Fair and stood on a platform 20 feet in the air. He had an assistant cut the rope that was supporting him with an axe. His failure to die a horrible death helped him sell his own brand of safety elevators.
2. Steve Gass
Hundreds of injuries take place due to woodworking every single year. Every day there are more than 10 fingers that are cut off due to woodworking. Steven Gass wanted to reduce that number.
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| image source-WOMR |
This machine was tested multiple times in his workshop first with a hotdog and then his own hand. After several large US tool manufacturers turned down his idea on the pretext of it being too expensive, Gass started to sell his invention directly to the public. The machine was marketed at trade shows, where he demonstrated the features of the machine by turning it on and sticking his finger into it.
3. Grant Mackintosh
Draggin’ Jeans is a company that makes jeans from a blend of denim and Kevlar. These pants are specifically designed to protect motorcyclists from injury. Having received multiple safety awards, these pants are a good alternative to riding leathers.
4. Trent Kimball
An advantage of selling bulletproof glass is the fact that 99% of your customers will never find out how efficient the glass really is. However, a bad product will leave 1% of your customers unhappy.
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5. Casimir Zeglen
As an ordained Catholic priest, Zeglen felt obligated to do something in order to prevent the loss of life to a gun. So after years of playing around with different materials, he stumbled upon research that spoke of the impact-resistant properties of silk. Following this discovery, he made a vest of plied silk that was tested in the lab and capable of stopping a bullet.
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This invention was tried and tested on a dog and a corpse, however, the best way to prove it worked was to try it on himself. So in front of a crowd, Zeglen climbed to the roof, put the vest on and allowed himself to be shot 8 times in the chest. Completely unharmed, Zeglen described the sensation of the gunshot as being prodded with a stick. An onlooker was so amazed at this invention, he asked to try it on and was also uninjured by the bullets shot at him.
6. Giles Brindley
Brindley was one of the first few people to prove that pharmaceutical medicine could induce an erection in a man. In 1983, he displayed his penis to an entire group of urologists in order to display the effects of a drug called papaverine.
| image source-Allanshowalter.com |
Brindley took his pants off and asked several of the medical professionals in the room to touch his genitals in order to prove he wasn’t tricking them. This slightly crazy stunt by the scientist attracted a lot of attention and helped to make the treatment of erectile dysfunction with drugs a common practice.
7. 3M
In 2005, 3M set up two panes of their smash-resistant glass at a bus stop in Vancouver with stacks of money in between. The public was then invited to try and break the glass for a change to win $3 million.
Claims reported that the money protected by the glass was not all real money. Additionally, the public was supervised to make sure people did not just drive into it with a car. However, the public was allowed to swing at the glass with weapons including sledgehammers.
At the end of the contest, there was no winner as the frame holding the glass began to give way, hence proving the indestructible nature of the glass.
8. PPSS
PPSS is a UK based company that sells protective clothing like jackets, shirts and vests that they claim are resistant to stabs, cuts and bullets. In order to prove the worth of his product, the CEO – Robert Kaiser, personally appears in a lot of videos where people try to kill him when he is wearing the clothing.
Kaiser is a part of these experiments in order to show his customers that he has complete faith in the products he sells. In the videos, Kaiser is shown getting shot, stabbed and slashed with different deadly weapons.
9. Tesla
The Tesla Model S was revealed in 2013 to be the safest car ever made. It is so safe, it cannot be rated on a five-star system and is reported to have broken the machine that was designed to crush it.
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10. Troy Hurtubise
Troy had a near-crippling obsession with inventing “bear-proof armor”. He wanted to be able to get up close to a grizzly bear without having to be food to the bear.
He spent 7 years and eventually built a suit that he tested by asking people to beat him with sticks, push him down cliffs and run into him in cars while wearing the suit. However, he was never able to test the suit in the wild since it was too heavy for walking on uneven ground.
Troy did get someone to let him into a cage with a Kodiak bear but the bear was so terrified of Troy, it wet itself. Technically the suit worked, just not in the way he had hoped.
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