Explore 295 Inventions Collections - Atlas Obscura
Places near me Random place

295 Items Tagged

Inventions

Share
Edison’s laboratory
inventors

Inside Thomas Edison’s Botanical Laboratory

How Henry Ford and Thomas Edison forged a friendship that led to Edison’s final obsession: rubber.
Atherton, England

Memorial to Edward Ormerod

A Victorian gravestone has a carving of a safety device invented in the 1860s that is still saving lives today.
Annapolis, Maryland

Governor Calvert House’s Hypocaust

A rare 18th-century heating system tucked inside a historic colonial home.
Kawasaki, Japan

Edison Bamboo

The bamboo that helped Thomas Edison develop a longlasting lightbulb.
arcades

How Three Sisters Revolutionized England’s Penny Arcades

The Dennison sisters amassed a small fortune with their morbid “working models.”
Jenny Elliott July 23, 2024
Battle Creek, Michigan

Graves of the Kellogg Brothers

The final resting place of the visionary founders of Kelloggs, a global leader in breakfast cereals.
Itinerary

The Explorer's Guide to Highway 36: The Way of American Genius

Soak in the brilliance on a road trip along this brainy Missouri route.
Behold the first satellite-like image drawn from observation.
flight

Flying Circuses Led to the First Aerial Maps of Earth

There was vomiting, crashes, fire, and an abandoned cat.
Frank Jacobs January 12, 2024
Social campaigners of the 1920s tried to make mocktails glamorous, but today Prohibition is primarily remembered as the era of speakeasies and bootleggers.
poison

7 Wild Stories From the Prohibition Era

The 18th Amendment had some unexpected side effects, from alcohol prescriptions to the rise of NASCAR.
April White January 12, 2024
Boston, Massachusetts

Birthplace of the Telephone

A stone marker commemorating the first time sound was transmitted over wires.
Ivy grows on an old brick factory building with lots of windows
Cleveland, Ohio

Westinghouse Electric Corp

An enormous factory from the late 1800s sits abandoned on Cleveland eastside.
A stone house with red roof overlooking a green lawn as shown from the side.
Moultonborough, New Hampshire

Castle in the Clouds

The early 20th-century home features cutting-edge technology of the day, such as ammonia refrigeration and needle showers.
People playing instruments at the Gunnar Schonbeck Exhibit
collections

The Museum of Playable Trash Bin Instruments

You too can play a coconut ukulele or 10-foot airplane fuel tank drums—no experience required.
The Podcast Team October 1, 2025
festivals

How Milwaukee Is Celebrating the Typewriter’s Long, Local History

In June 2023, Milwaukeeans celebrated 150 years of typewriter history.
Jennifer Byrne July 5, 2023
Some two dozen white tubes sit in front of a triangle lattice wall
Ibiza, Spain

Bibo Park Ibiza Botánico Biotecnológico

This Ibiza botanical garden showcases some wild machines that run on plants, literally.
nuclear

Podcast: Reed College Reactor

For the past 50 years, undergrads at a liberal arts college have had access to a remarkable scientific instrument.
The Podcast Team June 14, 2023
Nijmegen, Netherlands

Velorama National Bicycle Museum

The only bicycle museum in the Netherlands charts the invention of the now-ubiquitous two-wheeled machine.
Methods for determining if love is true date back centuries. In the early 1900s, serious scientists and penny-arcade entrepreneurs alike tried to measure the emotion.
science

Inside a Decades-Long Quest to Measure Love

The journey of the "Love Tester," from serious-seeming science to the penny-arcade amusements.
April White February 10, 2023