Throughout history, there have been many stupid inventions.
Take the baby cages of the 1940s, where well-meaning parents gave their children access to fresh air and sunshine by hanging them out of high-rise windows. Or the Foot-o-scope, which measured people’s shoe size by X-raying their feet (dosing them with radiation in the process).
Once thought to be breakthroughs, we now deride them as foolish.
Some inventions, though, were looked upon with scorn when they first appeared, only to go on to revolutionise how we travel, communicate and live.
Here are some of the game-changing inventions of the last 300 years that people once mocked but which we now can’t do without.
