Old-Fashioned High-Tech: Bizarre & Eccentric Inventions 1851 - 1951

by Guy Browning

Watches that doubled as satnavs. Machines to massage the eyeballs of a tired businessman. An early food processor. Spectacles that included electric lights. A cigarette holder - for two cigarettes.

The Victorians and Edwardians were quixotic pioneers of steampunk ingenuity, and the Maurice Collins Collection is a repository of all the bizarre by-products of their inventiveness. Join Guy Browning on a tour through this trove of Heath Robinson-esque zany gadgetry as he brings his uniquely off-kilter perspective to one of the UK's most brilliant and bizarre collections.

112 pages, ebook

First published September 22, 2015

About the author

Guy Browning (born 1964) is a humorist, after-dinner speaker and film director. He wrote the How To.. column in The Guardian from 1999-2009. Before that he wrote about office politics and social climbing. He currently lives in Kingston Bagpuize in Oxfordshire.