The 7 Most Absurd Inventions in the History of Alcoholism

Necessity might be the mother of invention, but alcohol is the wish-granting genie: faster, more spectacular and almost infinitely more guaranteed to go wildly wrong and make you look stupid in the morning. Luckily, some people are stupid no matter what time it is and took the ideas that came to them while drunk to the patent office. Only idiots operate machinery under the influence of alcohol, but there must be special super-idiots who invent machinery while drinking the stuff.

7 The Cocktail Hat

Patent #4,681,244 This is a hard hat with more fluid tubes than the human body. It was invented by John D. Geddie, presumably in an attempt to solve his two most common problems: falling off bar stools and hitting his head on the ground, and being subsequently cut off by whoever saw him fall, as well as the guy who rode with him in the ambulance. His solution to these problems is both a testament to his love of booze and a symptom of multiple concussions.

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RoboCop has simpler headgear.

The helmet appears to have plenty of plumbing issues, but the grossest part has to be all the residual alcohol left in the tubes in between uses. Before you get to the daiquiri you just poured, you're going to have to make your way through a couple inches of runoff vermouth from last weekend. Of course, anyone who considers the standard glass-to-mouth drinking method too much work probably isn't going to mind. A more serious problem for the type of person who would own this helmet is the bank of eight tiny controls on the forehead. Any man who is so desperate for alcohol that he will suck sticky liquids through a foot of narrow-gauge pipe should not be trusted to remember which identical knob controls the vodka.

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Several vital plumbing connections run through the inside of the helmet where normal people keep their brain.

Eight controls for only six drink reservoirs may seem a bit odd, but keep in mind that the inventor was probably seeing double when he designed it.

6 Beerbrella

Patent Application #US 2003/0075208 A1

The only way you could not see the problem with the Beerbrella is if you'd already tried to use it and poked out an eye.

Nope, they still can't see the problem.

Three inventors got through seven schematics without realizing that they'd invented an antibeer shield. They're either total idiots or devilishly cunning anti-alcohol crusaders: The Beerbrella itself might only stop you for a second, but clumsily stabbing yourself in the face with this would force bystanders to stage an intervention in the middle of Oktoberfest. They also bring the worst of the world of cocktails to simple beer with a "tropical base" ...

The Thunderbirds built more sensible things around small fake trees.

... which is blatantly unnecessary, because fitting an umbrella to your beer is already ringing a douchebag alarm loud enough to deafen everyone within earshot. Only one of their designs acknowledges that people actually drink beer, including a pivot system and counterweight to double the bottle's weight. And since trash like this is only ever built by the current winner of the "Country With Fewer Human Rights for Workers Than an Ant Colony" award, the only one not designed to poke your eye out is probably going to break after approximately 0.5 uses. We'd make fun of them more, but being the first people in history to prevent beer from working is actually sort of impressive.

5 Meat Beer

Patent #US 7,037,541 B2Mr. Okada says he just wants to provide new drinks for the world and "achieve a wider range of alcohol content." If only every madman cutting up chunks of flesh and dissolving them in acid was so well-intentioned. Combining leftover meat parts and bizarre chemical experimentation isn't brewing, it's how you build Frankenstein's monster. His patent isn't just meat flavoring; the alcohol itself comes from flesh, presumably so that you can get rage-drunk by ingesting both the spirit of the animal and the madness of the inventor. It's the most idiotically manly way to get drunk short of smashing a bottle of whiskey over a Terminator's head and then licking it off.

Experien — Warner Bros, Columbia Pictures

Most beers are already unsuitable for vegetarians because of isinglass -- ground, dried fish bladders mixed into our our magical beer to make it clearer and also sound more like actual witchcraft. This patent uses aqueous animal extract fermented with lactic acid bacteria and yeast, and doesn't involve wriggling maggots because they don't need to make it sound less appetizing. In fact, they probably couldn't. "Drinking the meat beer" sounds like something you have to do to join a fraternity in hell.

4 Deep-Fried Beer

Patent Application #US2001/0014320 A1Mark Zable started with "unhealthy food tastes good" they same way Einstein started with "I don't think space is flat," chasing the thought through an insane level of work to a reality-redefining result: deep-fried beer. His patent-pending process blends beer with acid-dissolved bone meal and animal skin, coats it in batter, throws the whole thing in hot burning oil and screams raw hatred at hearts and livers. But those already dead cannot hear. This is less a fried snack than a personal vendetta against the transplant industry.We're not saying this is a drunken flash of genius scribbled on the back of a napkin four hungry hours into a drinking session, but here's the entire schematic on the front of the patent application.

We're fairly sure sanitary pads have already been invented.

It took Zable three years to work out the recipe because his experimentally fried protosnacks kept exploding. Returning to the same place full of explosions three years running for a ridiculous reason technically means he's an action hero.

Only on a deep-fried beer patent would random stains be a full figure.

The process of frying liquifies the jellied beer, and Zable can see absolutely no problem with a piping-hot dough shell full of liquid. His text describes a fried dough snack with "an aliquot of a beer-flavored component," and honestly, we weren't expecting the guy throwing pizza dough and beer into a deep-fat fryer to teach us new words. We understand that the guy approaching the government with scribbled sketches of things thrown into boiling oil in the name of hungry science has to prove he's not stupid, but by the time you've finished reading about trapezoidal farinaceous wrappings around aliquots, you'll know what "sesquipedalian" means. And still want to try one.

3 The Worst Game in the World

Patent Application #US2004/0188942 A1Mark Trokan's invented a "nonalcoholic beer-pong game system," so his other inventions must be a social network for Halo players and a flavorless inhaler with all the health benefits of regular bacon. The only other people to extract the horrible parts of something so precisely are cancer surgeons. The whole point of beer pong is getting drunk enough to engage in unhygienically sticking things into fluid with strangers.

Patenting this game means they want to sell it and are therefore insane. Drink pong is less sanitary than bobbing for apples after the Toxic Avenger.The patent makes the usual polysyllabic attempts at intelligence, describing "a plurality of colored beer-pong balls" aimed at "frustoconical shapes." They also realize that sober beer pong misses the point of everything so hard it's almost an antimeaning of life, so they write challenges on the balls to add a "degree of edginess." They're the sort of humorless assholes who'd write "zany" in cold blood. When your invention is "something college students do, but stupider," it's not a patent, it's dangerous proof that the nurses let you have something as pointed as a pen.

2 Beer Bottle Fruit Clip

Patent Application #US2011/0042343 A1

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Jeffery Bartucci's patent reads like a dictionary cheating at Scrabble. He wants to patent keeping fruit wedges proximate a bottle spout using the distal end of a cantilevered containment arm, and when he describes his childhood he describes gustatorily investigating domicile coloration fluid.

secured to the rim of the bottle. A fruit wedge is inserted into the bottle, being secured between the interior surface of a neck of the bottle and th

This guy uses more steps to put fruit in a bottle than the Ghostbusters did to put ghosts in the Ecto-Containment Unit.

If you need mechanical assistance to put fruit in your beer, that's a level of impotence dick doctors don't have a word for yet. They only know that every time you fail to have sex you fade out of old photographs. The clip also has a smaller target market than giraffe leashes for dwarfs, because if you're prepared to make an effort to use special equipment for drinking, you've probably found a beer you can bear the taste of in the first place. Shoving citrus chunks into a bottle is how bartenders say, "We understand you desire our cheapest alcoholic water and have already placed vomit mops on standby."

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That's not a clip, that's a kickass Need for Speed level.

A truly terrifying amount of design has gone into this thing. It's got more carefully artificial curves than Cher, and you'd have to drink several beers before considering using either. He's also designed more special-function variants of this equipment than the Batman.

I feel the sudden need to apologize to the inventor. And sleep with my dick in a safety deposit box.

1 The Beer Belly

Patent Application #US2007/0056998 A1The "system for beverage storage and concealment" is the exact same idea everyone who's ever paid for stadium beer has had. And Lee Tyler Olson is the worst inventor of all of them.

The 7 Most Absurd Inventions in the History of Alcoholism

I'm really glad he's designing beer-smuggling equipment or I'd feel bad mocking the child with a newly discovered syndrome who drew this. I don't know if the U.S. Patent Office gives gold stars for effort, but that smiley face radiates such brain-damaged joy at his beer, body armor, carefully drawn abs and huge swinging dong that I'm seriously considering buying one for Brockway. It looks like a child drawing the worst father ever as a superhero, knowing that his parents love beer because that's what he had for amniotic fluid. Our only proof that it wasn't drawn by a child is that a young boy would have been giggling too hard to finish scribbling a penis on the cover of a patent application. This design is actually a cunning strategy: By not threading the tube through the bag, and instead having you hunch over to suck on your own crotch, you gain several minutes of drinking time as security guards wait for police backup before even attempting to stop you.There may be a few problems with prior art, but as we've seen, art is Olson's fatal weakness. The way this exact device was used in several comedies in the '80s and was already for sale before 2007 might also be an issue.

I often find that it's chiseled-jaw hunks who need to sneak drinks in public places. In the mirror.

The provisional application was made in 2005. Olson was working on this for over a year, and this was still the best he could do. Babies improve at drawing faster than that. He didn't even use a ruler. This may be the only patent application completed during product testing.

It's a tragedy, because the basic idea of body armor made with alcohol instead of Kevlar is sound: We've been threatened by sobriety far more often than by bullets.

Luke McKinney spent the last week shoving scorpions into his face and discovering that 911 needs to add an Emergency Natural Selection service.

For other inventions of insanity, check out The 7 Most Terrifying Sex Toys Ever Patented and 9 Self-Defense Gadgets Your Mugger Will Find Hilarious.