The most Ig Nobel

Lalit Mohan on the award that recognises bizarre inventions

As in the past 18 years, the Ig Nobel Prizes or Igs were awarded a few days before the announcement of the Nobel Prize winners for 2009. This is a parody on the serious nature of the Nobel list and recognises the 10 most bizarre inventions that have been thought of in the previous 12 months. They are "an annual exercise in irreverence that cannot, or should not, be repeated."

Instituted by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, these awards celebrate "research that first makes people laugh, and then makes them think," says their website. The awards ceremony was held at Harvard University.

Of the selections made this year, one stood out and was the most photographed. This was a bra that could be worn as a gas mask in an emergency — one piece for the owner and the other for a bystander. The others were not as exciting.

I have also come across some good ones on the internet. One was mini-fan attached to the wrist to cool hot spaghetti as it dangles from the fork just before it disappears into the mouth. Then there was a tube that dispenses butter on toast in the manner of a glue stick, though it was a little too practical to be considered funny. The best was a tissue roll mounted on a hat that can be pulled down to blow or wipe the nose. This could be very useful in a bad cold condition.

But if the Ig Nobel prize is looking for an all-time winner, then Jonathan Swift is the one. Nearly 300 years ago, the English satirist sent his travel hero Gulliver to the land of Laputa and had him meet, at the Academy of Lagado, a number of inventors who would win the Ig Nobel hands down. They included a man who, "had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put into vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air" in inclement weather.

Next, he had Gulliver walk into an evil-smelling chamber where he witnessed an "operation to reduce human excrement to its original food, merely by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva."

Further ahead, he met an architect who had contrived a method for building houses beginning from the roof and working his way down to the foundation, in the manner of bees and spiders.

Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention — a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander

Another genius he came across was one who used spiders instead of silkworms for producing the thread because this insect could weave as well as secrete, and, if fed with flies of the required hue, produce coloured saliva, and then silk. He then saw the use of bellows with an eight-inch muzzle to cure a dog of constipation by pumping air up the fundament. "This being repeated three or four times, the adventitious wind would rush out, bringing the noxious along with it."

Unfortunately, the dog being experimented upon made so violent a discharge that he died on the spot. Gulliver also visited a school where discourse was shortened by leaving out words altogether, which was considered good for health and brevity, and knowledge was ingested through innovative devices, as in the mathematical section where the "proposition and demonstration were written on a thin wafer, with ink composed of cephalic tincture.

The student was to swallow this on an empty stomach. As the wafer digested, the tincture mounted to his brain, bearing the proposition along with it." An easier way to master mathematics is yet to be devised.

Though the inventions Gulliver saw in Laputa may have worked only in the author’s imagination, if bizarre is the hallmark of ‘Ig Nobel’, it will be difficult to beat Jonathan Swift.