If it works, it ain’t stupid. Graceful and smart solutions don’t always have to be complicated—there’s a lot of beauty in simplicity. Especially simplicity that gives great results.
Today, we are featuring some of the coolest, most brilliant moments of out-of-the-box thinking to inspire you to approach challenges in a different way. Internet users took to a fun and enlightening online thread to share the silliest solutions to some of the most serious problems, and the stories are mind-blowing.
#1
Theres a story you get told in engineering school of a company that had a problem of empty boxes without product coming off the line and being shipped to customers. Hundreds of thousands is spent to refine the old equipment but it didn’t solve it. Eventually a monitering system was designed and implemented to weigh each box as it come off the line and to flag and shut down the line each time an empty box made it through. This solved the issue as designed. Several months later the owner decides to check on the syestem and see how many empty boxes are being flagged and finds that in fact none are being flagged, however the problem with empty ones shipping hasn’t reoccured either. He goes to to the plant floor to investigate and discovers that a low level employee, tired of having to restart the line every time a box is flagged has simply placed a large fan next to the conveyor prior to the weigh station, this blows the empty boxes off the conveyor while the ones full of product are to heavy to be moved by the fan.
Image source: 81zedd, David Eluwole/Pexels
#2
We had a material that would seperate and form a crust if it sat in a warehouse too long. Customers would open the can and see the crust and complain. Our competitor had a similar problem with their product. Their solution was to put the cans in the box upside down, thus the crust would form at the bottom and the customer wouldn’t notice until they were basically done using the product.
Image source: vahntitrio, Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels
#3
Warsaw used mussels as part of its water contamination warning system. They literally attached sensors to mussels and watched whether the shells suddenly snapped shut. If enough mussels closed at once, the system would trigger an alert.
Image source: ImOversimplifying, Fat Kathy
Unfortunately, not all massive problems have simple solutions. Some issues—like climate change—are global, complex, and require an interconnected approach to solve not just the ‘symptoms’ but the underlying issues.
Protecting the environment on a global scale, for example, requires a massive shift in values and mindset, economic and business overhauls, changes in social structure, a different way of governing, and action on an individual scale.
The severity of climate change issues can’t be understated. Europe is dealing with massive heat waves right now. Half of France is under red heatwave alerts, as record-level temperatures are hitting the country. For instance, in Bordeaux, temperatures reached a whopping 40 degrees C on Sunday (that’s 104 degrees F).
Meanwhile, later this week, it is predicted that temperatures in parts of England could reach a mind-melting 38 degrees C (100 degrees F).
#4
Aortic sleeves are a common treatment for weakened heart vessels because one patient happened to be an engineer who said “if it’s just a bad pipe, why can’t we put a graft around it to support it”, as he would usually do for plumbing repairs.
Image source: CynicalCosmologist, Yasser Hernandez/Pexels
#5
Rockefeller’s solution to oil transportation has always been funny to me. “Why bother loading up barrels on a train when you can just build a giant pipe to your destination?”.
Image source: BrumaQuieta, Wolfgang Weiser/Pexels
#6
Local pizza joint had a problem with juvenile delinquents hanging out on the stairs in front of the store. The solution was to paint the stairs pink and suddenly no one wanted to hang out there any more.
Image source: not_suddenly_satire, Martin de Arriba/Pexels
The UN explains that some actions that you can take for the sake of a healthy planet include things like:
- Saving energy at home and changing your home’s source of energy
- Walking, biking, taking public transport, or switching to an electric vehicle instead of driving a diesel or gasoline car
- Reducing the amount you fly
- Reducing consumption, reusing items, repairing goods, and recycling
- Eating more veggies, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds instead of meat and dairy
- Throwing away less food
- Planting native species in your garden
- Cleaning up your environment
- Voting with your wallet by supporting responsible products and companies
- Engaging your family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, business owners, and leaders about taking climate action
#7
The original Apple Macintosh would sometimes not properly boot up and just stare at you with a sad Mac face, or it was show a blank screen. The problem was that the DRAM chips weren’t sufficiently soldered to the logic boards so heat from running and (whatever) would cause the board to flex a bit and break the solder. The hac fix was “Lift the mac one inch off the desk and then drop it”. That would usually cause the chips to make contact with the connection points again. It wasn’t an official Apple fix but Customer Service would suggest it.
Image source: ClownfishSoup, Ruben Boekeloo/Pexels
#8
Turning a device off and back on again. it sounds like a joke, but it’s solved an embarrassing number of serious tech problems.
Image source: Expart_Tools, energepic.com/Pexels
#9
Using straw brooms for detecting and finding hydrogen fires around space rockets and launch pads.
Hydrogen is very flammable, very eager to leak, and has the nasty feature that flames are almost invisible (you’d see something if it’s dark around, but in daylight – forget it). So you just walk with a broom, keeping it in front of you and checking any suspect spots. If the broom suddenly catches fire – bingo, you found the burning leak!
Image source: sebaska, Owen.outdoors/Pexels
What are some of the simplest, silliest, and weirdest solutions that you’ve personally seen or come up with for fairly serious problems?
From your perspective, what are the biggest issues that society or the world at large is dealing with? How would you go about solving them, realistically, if you had the power and a substantial budget?
Let us know in the comments.
#10
Fish ladders/elevators to get fish over dams. It is crazy that a fish will enter an elevator and take it up to a reservoir from the lower river.
Image source: itijara, John Pavlish
#11
I worked in a restaurant and we would get big boxes of lettuce that were stapled shut. When you opened them you had to double check to be sure no staples got into the lettuce. If you couldn’t account for all the staples you had to search through the lettuce. Guy comes in from another branch. Lettuce arrives and he flips the box over. The bottom isn’t stapled it’s taped. Problem solved.
Image source: Chewser56, Ketut Subiyanto/Pexels
#12
One way to improve fault detection in factories is to put googly eyes on things.
people get used to them and they notice when they’re acting different, which means the machine is doing something unusual.
Image source: pyr666, Ellin Beltz/Pexels
#13
Beginning in the late 1800s, coal miners brought caged canaries underground to serve as early-warning gas detectors. Because canaries have highly efficient, sensitive respiratory systems, they would show signs of distress and collapse from carbon monoxide and methane long before humans felt the effects.
Image source: TheGirthy1, Fabio Andrés/Pexels
#14
So back in 1980 my dad was a detective and they were working what was called a “sting” where they pose as a pawn shop that also fences stolen goods. The problem was that they couldn’t always get the suspects to look into the two-way mirror so that they could be secretly photographed. The solution was to frame the mirror with pictures of undressed women. They never had a problem with suspects not looking into the mirror after that.
This tactic was used in the hilarious 1979 movie “Hot Stuff” which I remember seeing in the theater with my parents in 1979.
Then dad used it in real life to nab some real life thieves.
Image source: Lord_Dreadlow, Kindel Media/Pexels
#15
Acting silly and goofy when feeling depressed releases the same hormones as being actually happy and silly. Albeit in a smaller amount. But getting those hormones is sometimes enough to give your body a boost in the right direction.
Image source: dreadingstone, Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels
#16
Unsure if it’s silly or genius but here is one
Back when cars were a luxury, a certain tire manufacturer was looking for ways to stay in business. When people aren’t buying lots of tires you don’t get the money – so what did they do? They distributed guides for good restaurants around the country that are worth a visit. Now car owners started going longer distances and had to replace their tires sooner because they would actually wear out.
That company is called Michelin.
Image source: undecimbre, Erik Mclean/Pexels
#17
Turkey vultures like to nest on water towers, and their excrement is corrosive. My public utility company puts wacky waving inflatables on the water towers to keep turkey vultures off.
Image source: that_one_over_yonder, SiffySiffer9
#18
Back when elevators were new, they were so slow that they tested the patience of its passengers. So instead of making them faster (which they eventually did anyway), they installed a mirror and voila, the complaining stopped.
Image source: hrdrv, Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels
#19
Eggs in the radiator to plug the leak just to get you home/to a mechanic.
Image source: UDPviper, Klaus Nielsen/Pexels
#20
The first particle accelerators had a problem: The inaccessible and extremely expensive interior pipes needed to be cleaned, but there was no reasonable way to clean them. They couldn’t be taken out or opened without destroying them, and they couldn’t get anything through the 300ft or so of their length that wouldn’t horribly damage it in the process.
So they came up with a pretty ingenious solution: They trained a ferret to crawl through the particle accelerator while trailing a string behind herself. However this raised a new issue: her droppings wouldn’t be cleaned by anything they could just pull through the accelerator by the string she was carrying…
The solution? Ferret diapers.
Image source: Turtlelover73, Verina/Pexels
#21
During WW2, British runways were often too foggy for airplanes to land, limiting how many missions the RAF could do.
The solution? Line the runway with pipes full of gasoline and burn off the fog.
Best quote: “When FIDO was needed, the fuel pumps were started to pour flammable liquid into the pipe system and a Jeep with a flaming brand lashed to its rear drove fast down both sides of the runway to ignite the fuel at the outlets in the pipes. The burners were sometimes ignited by men on bicycles or by runners on foot.”.
Image source: CardiologistFit8283
#22
The Judas Goat, radiolab did a podcast episode on it. Goats found their way into this island ecosystem and they were destroying it, so people needed to deal with them. But it was difficult, they tried all sorts of methods, but the population kept rebounding.
Enter the judas goat. It was one goat they tagged and tracked. See, goats are social creatures, the Judas goat would find a group of fellow goats, people would come in and wipe that group out – all of them but the Judas Goat. Then they’d leave and wait for him to make new friends. Repeat.
Iirc it worked. I highly recommend listening to the radiolab episode, google Judas Goat and it should come up .
Image source: MartyrOfTheJungle
#23
Instead of having the confusion of a “men’s” bathroom and a “women’s” bathroom at my work, we just took the signs off the doors. Both are individual bathrooms, and have a toilet, sink, soap, paper towels, and a locking door.
Now, when someone needs to use the bathroom, all they have to do is knock first (courtesy) and then use whichever bathroom is available when they have to go.
No need to worry about men in the women’s, women in the men’s, or any of the nonsense about transgender people using the “wrong” bathroom.
Image source: XavierScorpionIkari
#24
In Zimbabwe they had a prolonged drought that resulted in extreme water rationing. As a result of people not flushing often to save water, the sewage started drying out in the pipes, causing clogs. Their solution was to coordinate city-wide flushing at a specific time so that there was a torrent of water coming down with enough force to clear the pipes.
Image source: andmewithoutmytowel
#25
I heard about this guy with a leaking boat so he stuffed a bunch of bread in the hole to plug it and it floated long enough to get to shore.
Image source: VividCaterpillar439
#26
The apollo spacesuits were made by playtex. the same company that made bras. nasa needed something flexible and airtight and the best people at that were lingerie engineers.
Image source: Doodlemilk
#27
I worked at a large academic library years ago. We got a bunch of new computers that needed installed one summer, but we had a problem. They all came with internal speakers. A library is supposed to be quiet. We didn’t want the speakers to be available to patrons because they will play their favorite music at full volume without any thought to the people around them trying to study. We also didn’t want to disable audio completely. Headphones needed to work for student research or accessibility reasons. My manager figured out the Windows PCs the next day. We just unplugged the internal speaker wire the leads to the motherboard. No problem. The 12 Mac computers were still a problem though. Apple soldered their speakers to the board, and we couldn’t cut the wires without voiding the warranty. Apple support and forums were useless. They basically all said that we should just mute the audio. (Not a solution to our problem) After a month of constantly telling discourteous users they had to turn off their audio and use headphones, I had a great idea. I spent around $30 dollars of the school’s money to buy a dozen 1ft long headphone extension cables. I plugged them into the headphone jack on the back and zip tied the receiving end to the front of the unit. Apples are programmed to disable the external speakers when anything is plugged into the audio jack. Patrons sometimes unplugged the extension on back just to disturb everyone else around them, but most people got the message. They took out their headphones and plugged them into the extension cable.
Image source: qwerty4007
#28
Convenience stores who wanted to stop undesirables from loitering around their stores piping classical music outside the store.
Image source: LuvCilantro
#29
My friends and I used to hang out at “the bench” in our small town when I was in high school. It was literally just a picnic table at the main intersection downtown.
As teenagers are wont to do, we were complete jerks and often got the cops called on us, especially if we were there when the park closed at 11 PM. Sometimes there would be 10 or 20 people there wreaking havoc. One day, the bench was just… gone and like magic, everyone stopped hanging out there. Only took the town like five years to figure that one out.
Image source: marsack
#30
Constipated stomach ache that wouldn’t go away, so eating a cheesy dish while being lactose intolerant to fix it.
Image source: stxxyy
#31
We used to take our 2 dogs out to the park but one had a habit of chasing birds until she was lost. We tried training, distracting with food. Nothing worked. The other one was good as gold. After nothing working. We attached the bird brains leash to the good as gold dog and eventually birdbrain learnt the lesson. .
Image source: TheLegendaryPhoenix
#32
Using F1 pit stop techniques to handle emergency patient bed transfers.
Image source: Poika_Anna
#33
Ice cube. A company was shipping a product that had to stay below freezing. In a meeting they discussed the various sensors that could monitor temperature. The secretary said “Just put an ice cube in the box.”.
Image source: UniqueIndividual3579
#34
My dad had a hard time finding the light switches in the garage in the dark so he painted the light covers with glow in the dark paint.
Image source: Medical_Spy
#35
Years ago I spoke with a retired engineer who worked with NASA on the Mercury program. He said a lingering design problem they had was a mechanical system in the capsule that required a barrier that would need to be removed once the capsule had splashed down. They wanted an automated way to remove the barrier.
He said they discovered that ground up Alka-Seltzer tablets made a fine barrier, which dissolved on splashdown. Problem solved!
Image source: khendron
#36
An error used to occur when exiting the game Wing Commander, so instead of fixing it, they changed the error message to “Thank you for playing Wing Commander” (I guess this isn’t really a serious problem).
Image source: itijara
#37
The synthesis of graphene (graphite but only a few atoms thick) was done by sticking graphite on a piece of scotch tape, applying another piece of scotch tape, and then repeated applying/peeling until the desired thickness was achieved.
Other methods involved caustic chemicals and like 900 degree Celsius temps.
Image source: ShadowFox1289
#38
When I was in college I was on a underwater robotics team. We were having an issue with the water rising our brushless motors. We figured we would need some sort of enamel coating that could be applied in a this enough layer so that it wouldn’t slow down the motor casing.
We looked up how much something so specialized would cost and it was way out of our budget [very small because we were a community college]. Then I remembered some random fun fact that I have no idea where I learned it from: nail polish has enamel varieties and it even came with a tiny applicator [brush]. Cost is about $5 in 2013 money.
We took 5th on that years MATE competition and built the bot for $1500 [we got the “Biggest bang for your buck” award.
Image source: PunishedTlacuache
#39
When milling iron into a long sheet, the speed of the iron on the mill is getting faster and faster. At the end of the milling line, it can go over 60 mph. The steel then needs to coil up by catching it at an axis and rolled up.
The problem was that the end would flutter and sometimes would miss the axis and shoot into the factory. An expensive and dangerous problem.
Multiple solutions were proposed, but the most simple one was also the most effective. At the end of the line a sensor was placed. When the tip of the iron sheet would pass it, a little hammer would hit it and the sheet would be caught. Worked perfect.
Image source: comicsnerd
#40
This one is more “genius” or maybe “evil” than silly, but I love it too much not to share.
Back when “low fat” was the big craze, Pringles was trying to get in on the action. However, they COULD NOT find a way to reduce the fat content in the chip that would let the chip stay intact. The train was pulling out of the station, leaving poor Pringles behind.
Then one guy had the silevius idea to INcrease the fat content of the standard Pringles chip. Those chips retained the original, standard branding. The original recipe, on the other hand, was branded “low fat”.
Image source: InCarbsWeTrust
#41
As a manager of a printing operation I found that to make improvements to production was to watch the laziest worker who always completed his jobs much faster than everyone else. Then apply his methods to genpop.
Image source: Suspicious_Fig_6359
#42
Adapting denture adhesive to an epoxy resin that could hold the Sydney Opera House together. They needed a super light and strong glue for the concrete ‘ribs’ that form the outer sail structure.
Image source: DJVizionz
#43
In Homosassa Springs State Park, Florida, there is an underwater observation dock that floats over one of the springs. To get it into the water they used ramps but needed something to lubricate the ramp to let the dock slide into the water. It needed to be slippery but also environmentally friendly. Inspired by looney toons logic, they used bananans.
Image source: FafnerTheBear
#44
College library had a door that wouldnt lock so they hung a sign saying ‘please keep closed’ and called it policy. worked for like three semesters.
Image source: BlueberryNo586
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