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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 |
- ^ a b c d e f Williams, 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.