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Falling with style

It’s a shame that some inventions never caught on. Imagine how stylish flying would have been if the Hoop-Skirt parachute idea, described in the January 1911 edition of Popular Mechanics, had caught on. It’s possible that the manly men at the time balked at the idea of being seen in something that could at any time resemble a skirt. It’s also possible that the idea didn’t really work and they would simply plummet to their death… leaving a good-looking corpse.

Fiske Reading Machine
Portable library, 1920s style

Another idea in the early 20th century was the first book killer. Long before gadgets like computer tablets, inventors already had their sights set on fixing the problem of carrying around cumbersome books. The June 1922 edition of Scientific American shows one solution. The Fiske Reading Machine printed books in tiny print and provided a modified magnifying glass that you could hold up to your eye to read. One can only imagine how this would work on a bumpy carriage ride.

It’s easy to laugh at these things now, but you never know how the next great thing will appear. It might seem like the famous Inside the Egg Egg Scrambler by Ronco. It might end up being sliced bread.

Think that egg scrambler idea is dead? You haven’t been watching Kickstarter. People will do just anything to avoid cleaning that fork and bowl!

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FBI SET TO CLOSE D.B. COOPER CASE AFTER 40 YEARS

Forty years after a man in a suit commandeered a 727 jet and parachuted into the night carrying $200,000, federal investigators may be close to cracking the only unsolved airplane hijacking in U.S. history.

 

The FBI could soon solve the mystery of DB Cooper, the man sought by authorities since the 1971 hijacking of a Northwest Orient Airlines flight from Portland to Seattle, according to a witness who has been described by the agency as credible,NWCN reports.

Investigators are currently attempting to link fingerprints left behind on the airplane with fingerprints obtained from the toothbrush of a man known as LD Cooper, the uncle of a tipster who contacted authorities with suspicions about her relative earlier this year.

Marla Cooper says her uncle was injured when he arrived at her family’s home in Sisters, Ore. the day after the hijacking, but he blamed his wounds on a car crash.

“I knew he did it, it wasn’t speculation, I was there when he pulled into the driveway,” Marla Cooper told the news station.

LD Cooper died in 1999.

The hijacker bought his ticket under the alias “Dan Cooper,” but news reports misidentified his name as DB Cooper.

The FBI won’t comment on the specifics of the investigation, but Marla Cooper says a lead investigator informed her that the case was winding down.

“Regardless of the findings of the fingerprints, he told me the case was closing because they were certain my uncle did it,” she said, according to told the news station.

The agency recently confirmed that it has started conducting forensic tests on evidence including partial fingerprints that could be linked to the hijacking.

 

Source:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/05/db-cooper-case-solved_n_1129511.html