[The world is full of incredible feats of engineering, but not all are created equal. We look at some of the most useless feats of engineering including the useless machine, the world’s largest Rube Goldberg device, Interstate H-3, the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, and the Do Nothing Machine.]

Most Useless Feats of Engineering

By Kevin Jennings

Engineers have been fascinating the world for thousands of years with the incredible works they are able to accomplish. Whether it is on the smallest scale like a microchip or the largest scale like the skyscrapers that tower over major cities, the only limit to what humans can create seems to be our imaginations.

Sometimes, these creations change all of civilization like the invention of the pulley, the printing press, or the airplane. Other times these achievements are simply marvels of scale, like the pyramids that, even thousands of years later, are so incredible in both size and quality that there are people who genuinely believe they required extraterrestrial technology to construct.

While all of those inventions and megaprojects are impressive for one reason or another, that’s not what we’ll be looking at today. Instead, we’ll be going the complete opposite direction to look at marvels of engineering that, either by design or just in practice, are completely useless.

The Useless Machine

Bruno Munari was born in Milan, Italy in 1907. He came from a family of engineers and Futurists, and he too was an inventor and Futurist. At least for a while. But by his late 30s, Munari began moving away from the traditional ideals of Futurism.

To start, Italian Futurism was closely associated with fascism, a connection he preferred to avoid. Global politics is rarely cause enough to stop scientific pursuits of invention and innovation, but Munari had another concern. While his predecessors had endless enthusiasm for what technology and machines could make possible, Munari saw them as a threat. He envisioned a world in which machined ruled over all, and he sought to counter this threat in the only way he could: by building useless machines that could be seen as works of art.

Munari designed many different useless machines over the course of his life. But the most famous design and the one that is referred to as THE Useless Machine came in 1952 from MIT professor Marvin Minsky, who was inspired by Munari’s work. There have been many variations to Minsky’s original design, but the fundamental concept remains the same.

The useless machine is an electronic device, usually powered by some regular AA batteries. From the outside, it looks like an ordinary plastic or wooden box with a switch on it. When the switch is turned on, the box will pop open slightly, allowing a mechanical hand or lever to turn the switch back off. And that’s the only thing it does.

These machines have become extremely popular, and bored engineers have upgraded the original design. Alternate designs can be seen featuring several different switches for the device to turn off, or one machine with two hands to flip the switch back and forth. You can even find a useless machine shaped life a coffin that uses a zombie hand to turn the switch back off.

While The Useless Machine may not have been designed with any practical purpose in mind, it has accomplished one actual goal: making money. These machines are readily available, and you can purchase either a complete, working machine or a kit to build your own.

World’s Largest Rube Goldberg Machine

Have you ever wished you could flip on your turntable and have your novelty neon sign light up as well? Of course not. Few people actually own a turntable these days, and even fewer have their own novelty neon sign. Even if someone had such a sign, there’s a good chance that it’s been broken for 2 or 3 years at this point. In the unlikely event that you actually wanted to be able to turn on a record player and a light at the same time, the sensible thing would be to just hook them up to the same light switch.

But why do the sensible thing when you can create the world’s largest Rube Goldberg machine instead? Named after American cartoonist and inventor Rube Goldberg, who was famous for drawing these contraptions, the point of these machines is to perform a simple task in the most indirect and overly complicated way possible. If you’ve ever seen the board game Mouse Trap, it’s like that except generally much more complicated.

It seems that every few years there’s a new record for the largest Rube Goldberg machine, and the most recent winners were Chevrolet Menlo, Wang Xiqi, and Guan Jian from China. Their machine began by powering on a turntable with a piece of string attached to it. As it turned, the string was pulled taut until it released a ball, begin a chain reaction of 427 different steps that took longer than four minutes to complete. The machine consisted primarily of strings, ball bearings, dominos, and springs to keep the action going.

While that is the largest in terms of mechanical steps, the previous record holder was arguably a more impressive visual sight. Constructed by the company Scandiweb in Riga, Latvia, their 412 step machine took over ten minutes from start to finish, and it occupied the company’s entire office building as well as an area outside.

The mayor of Riga and a representative from Scandiweb stood outside next to the city’s Christmas tree and simultaneously pressed a button to turn the machine on. The first step began inside the building, but their setup was far more like what might be imagined by a cartoonist. Some of the items involved in the mechanical steps included a leaf blower, an umbrella, a dart board, rubber duckies, boxing gloves, a microwave, a coffee maker, a power sander, and a tennis racquet.

After the various steps of the machine made their way through the entire building, the final step inside the building powered on a sound meter located outside that would only trigger the remaining steps if the audience was cheering loud enough. A few wooden trees and oversized presents later, and a sled carrying a snowman slid down a ramp with the broom the snowman was holding hitting the final button to light up the city’s Christmas tree.

Sure, the mayor could’ve just pressed the button to turn the tree on in the first place as it was only a few feet from where he had been standing, but where’s the fun in that?

Interstate H-3

Without any context, it’s hard to imagine an interstate highway being useless. Highways are important parts of modern life. Even for people who spend their whole life in a small area, the existence of interstate highways is vital for the shipment of goods across the country. So how exactly could an interstate be considered useless?

Well to start, despite being called an interstate highway, the road is located entirely in Hawaii on the island of Oahu. It is also only 16 miles (26 km) long with seven exits. Construction began in 1989, and this relatively short stretch of road took eight years and $1.3 billion dollars to complete, or over $2 billion in today’s money. On a cost per mile basis, this made it the most expensive highway in the entire world.

The project was originally proposed in 1960 as a way to connect Pearl Harbor with the Marine Corps Base on the island. However, environmental laws prevented the road from being constructed. It wasn’t until 1989 when these restrictions were lifted that construction could finally begin, albeit amidst great controversy and with many protests. In addition to the environmental concerns, the planned route for the highway included the destruction of many native Hawaiian religious and cultural sites, including some ancient petroglyphs.

While the road was slightly rerouted, in the end construction went largely as planned. H-3 passes through a large valley and a mountain, and its construction and navigation through this difficult terrain truly is an incredible work of modern engineering. Not only is the highway itself a site to behold, but it offers an incredibly picturesque views of the island, not counting the parts that were destroyed to build the road.

But while those views are incredible, the fact that the road offers views of nature rather than cityscapes is also part of the problem. Having the road connecting Pearl Harbor and the Marine base may have seemed necessary in 1960, but by the time construction began in 1989 it could no longer be viewed as an important project for national defense. Without that utility, it’s no wonder that the highway has been nicknamed “the road to nowhere”.

Oahu has a population of just over one million people, with almost half of those living in Honolulu. But interstate H-3 doesn’t even go to downtown Honolulu.  It doesn’t really go anywhere. Some travel sites try to bill that as a feature, not a bug, saying that you can enjoy the view as you drive down the road to nowhere, then turn around and drive back to where you started. While they try to promote it as a relaxing way to pass some time, a useless road to nowhere is hardly reason to have constructed the world’s most expensive highway.

Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository

If you follow our sister channel, Megaprojects, you may have seen a video there on Yucca Mountain. For those who haven’t, you’re about to learn why the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository is regarded as one of the most useless megaprojects in the entire world.

In the 1980s, concerns started to mount about what to do with the increasing amount of highly radioactive spent fuel that was being created by nuclear power plants in the United States. Several different locations were selected for study, but in 1987 Yucca Mountain, which was adjacent to the nuclear test sites in Nevada, was deemed the best possible option.

The idea for the project was simple, even if the execution would not be. One of the proposed ways to handle nuclear waste was deep boreholes: small but extremely deep holes into which nuclear waste could be deposited. It was later decided that instead of digging lots of little holes, they could just build one giant hole deep into Nevada’s Yucca Mountain which could house massive amounts of nuclear waste in one location.

Unfortunately, boring a giant hole into the side of a mountain is neither cheap nor easy. The tunnel boring machine used to excavate the main tunnel cost $13 million. It was an incredible 400 feet long when in operation, and that was just one piece of equipment used. The plan was to make a facility that was capable of storing 300 million pounds of nuclear waste, but it was never completed.

Despite being approved by the federal government in 1987, construction didn’t even begin until 2002. The entire project has been the subject of criticism, most notably from the state of Nevada who referred to the government’s plan as the “Screw Nevada Bill”. There isn’t a single nuclear power plant in all of Nevada, so the people there were none too happy about being designated as the nation’s nuclear landfill.

Between pushback from Nevada and difficulties in funding, the project was never finished and most likely never will be. There are images of the main tunnel from when the project was still active, and they are truly remarkable. To be able to construct such a massive tunnel into the side of a mountain is a spectacular feat of modern engineering, but a feat that wasn’t even half completed.

As of 2016, the project has been abandoned and the tunnel has been boarded up. The United States invested $9 billion on the project ($12 billion today), but changes to the original design mean it would cost another $90 billion to finish and there are currently no plans in place to see the project through.

While the work that has been done thus far is a marvel of engineering, it is also just a $12 billion hole in the ground that has been padlocked shut.

The Do Nothing Machine

All of the other feats of engineering we’ve discussed today had a purpose. These purposes may have been ill conceived or needlessly complicated, and the Useless Machine’s only purpose was to turn itself off. But as pointless as that may seem, it was still designed to do something. Enter the Do Nothing Machine, a machine that was literally designed to do nothing. The machine could be turned on and it would operate, but there isn’t actually any end goal that it’s attempting to achieve.

The Do Nothing Machine was the brainchild of retired clockmaker Lawrence Wahlstrom. He had held several other jobs in addition to being a clockmaker, one of which was a job in the newspaper industry. It is perhaps there that he came to the realization that the public prefers to be entertained than educated.

Wahlstrom’s project began sometime around 1948 when he discovered a complicated clump of gears at a Norden bombsite from World War II. He had a fascination with gears, so he decided to see if he could get the remnants of whatever machine he had found working again. He succeeded, but this was only the beginning. Reports vary on exactly how long the project took, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years.

His plan was to add at least 50 gears to the machine every year, and the parts could come from anywhere. In addition to what he had found on the bombsite, the Do Nothing Machine includes parts from a motorcycle and a slot machine, just to name a few. The device kept growing year after year, and by 1953 it was gaining national attention.

The Do Nothing Machine was featured not only in industry magazines like Popular Mechanics and Mechanix Illustrated, but even in Life magazine. Although Life ran with the headline “Machine-Age Revenge: California’s mechanical clown is built to accomplish nothing.” It’s an unusual headline to be sure, but it wasn’t exactly wrong either. Any time Wahlstrom was pressed as to the actual purpose of his invention, he would give a joke answer like saying it was a flying saucer detector.

By the time it was completed, the Do Nothing Machine contained 764 gears of various sizes and shapes, in addition to pistons and other various moving parts. When it’s turned on, the machine is a rather impressive sight. One part of the machine features a circular gear rotating a square gear which is rotating an ovular gear. All 764 gears rotate in unison, with chains being pulled and pistons firing. And none of it actually does anything.

But Wahsltrom was absolutely correct that people prefer to be entertained rather than educated. If he had used the broken gears he found on the bombsite as the foundation for some sort of academic paper or class on repairs, there’s a good chance that none of us would have ever heard his name. Instead, the Do Nothing Machine is proudly maintained and displayed at the Museum of Craftsmanship in Carlsbad, California. It’s been exactly 70 years since Wahlstrom’s creation was first unveiled to the public, and his machine is still working and on display doing exactly what it was built for: absolutely nothing.