Some of the most beautiful mechanisms ever produced, here is a gallery of old and new mechanical movements of planets and their moons, the entire solar system and tides and eclipses. Orreries, Planetaria and Tellurions, respectively.

Forget the kinds of kitchen gadgets you see on infomercials, if you want the real deal you have to go to the pros. Who doesnt want a computer controlled Instant Noodle machine, a bagel production line, a 2000 piece and hour sushi robot or a 60 foot long mobile smoker. Vote for your faves.

One of the most cliched images in technology is that of someone wearing a burka-like clean suit holding a raw silicon wafer, like a trophy.To complete the cliche, a favorite science photo shoot lighting effect, consists of a deep blue, purple or green background. No labs actually look like this. In reality, they tend to be shadowless environments, awash with white light, like something in between a drug store and the spaceship entrance in Close Encounters, but for some reason, pastel lighting indicates hi-tech.Vote for the most cliched image in the list.

A gallery of products using radioactive materials.Because radiation was seen to be new and powerful, at the beginning of the 20th century radioactive material was used in products such as face creams, mineral water and medicine, by equating power with rejuvenation. For similar reasons it was even used in items from spark plugs to condoms. Although many of these items are from an age when the dangers of radiation were not known, radiation is obviously useful as a healing tool for cancer therapy, but it is still used in legal Chinese remedies, which are respected more because of their age rather than efficacy and quack homeopathic medicines which are tolerated while unproven, because they are harmless water.Vote on your fave examples.

Pininfarina made their name as stylists of classic Ferraris. They continued their distinctive design tradition through other exotic sports car brands to ordinary sedans and, since the 80's, household product deign. Some of the latter products are hit-or-miss, but at their best there is no other company quite like them.Andrea Pininfarina, the grandson of Battista ‘Pinin' Farina, the auto design company's founder, and the current CEO was killed today. Trajically and ironically he was hit by a car while driving a Vespa scooter.

The hovercraft will be 50 years old next year. Like supersonic, interplanetary and deep sea travel, the demise of the world's largest hovercraft the SR-N4, joined Concorde, the Saturn V and the Trieste as examples of technological retreat.The SR-N4, which was operated by two companies, for many years, to transport people across the English Channel, could carry over 30 vehicles and 250 people. What made these hovercraft particularly unusual is that they represented an example of a design where the civilian versions were more extraordinary than those used by the military, which are still smaller, even today.

Charles Sheelers iconic image of the Albert Kahns Ford River Rouge Plant, with its criss crossing conveyors and spire like chimneys, is probably the most iconic image of the American Car manufacturing industry whose future, like Kahns original buildings, hangs in the balanceEven among architects, Albert Kahn is less renowned than Louis. But Albert Kahn is far more important in terms of the influence of his buildings. He is sometimes referred to as the architect of Detroit. Kahn invented the American factory style, taking early European modernism to the place where assembly lines were invented and developing an architectural style that was supremely innovative both in terms of construction and design. The plants he built are in many places around America, but most famously in Detroit, where, lie the car industry itself, some of his most important building lie in ruins.We have two favorite images in this list. One if of the abandoned Detroit Public Schools Book depository, with its once minimalist, clean modernism in absolute and total decay, overflowing with rotting books strewn across its floor. The other image is, of course, Charles Sheelers

Nothing less than human made lightning. The massive fields generated by resonance between pairs of stepped up induced capacitors create potential differences greater than the resistance of air between the coil and a nearby conductor. This allows fractal currents to flow as the air itself conducts and ionizes.Although Tesla coils are largely created for fun by dedicated enthusiasts, they originally had a real purpose in mind. Tesla figured that he could create a wireless electrical grid and went as far as to build a tower on Long Island that would be its first transmitter. The idea was never realized, however in Russia really large scale wireless power networks were actually tried, as can be seen in this list.Vote for your faves.

Brittny Badger disassembles everyday appliances, carefully lays them out and photographs them, Paul Veroude takes cars entirely to pieces and suspends them from wires, like a giant real-life exploded isometric drawing, while Holger Pooten photographs gadgets as frozen in time snapshots of parts suspended in mid air. There is something satisfying, not just about the dis assembly of machines, appliances and complex objects, but the arrangement of their parts into a tableau. Here are a dozen.

Pleasure piers are a unique and interesting piece of architecture in that they are both whimsical and sinister. Inhabited bridges that lead nowhere and aren't meant for ships to dock, they are often abandoned, creepy and decrepit, yet covered in brightly colored gadgets built for amusement. These piers are giant technological follies.One of the few remaining giant Victorian English pleasure piers burned down today. In fact a large proportion of them burned to the ground, which you might think is ironic, since they are surrounded by water. The sea breeze which was the reason they were built in the first place, as health promenades, is what makes them a fire hazard as winds fan the flames of timber buildings.

This is the real business end of $100 oil. An object that allowed Howard Hughes to become the richest man in the world by inheriting the patent. They are the world's most highly engineered pieces of metal. Steel, tungsten carbide or increasingly Polycrystalline Diamond Compact (PDC) toothed drill bits that, in their tri-cone, rotating head form, look like the monster spice eating Sandworms from Dune. Vote for your faves.

Diving helmets are beautiful objects. Here are our favorites from modern versions with amazing visors for undersea welding, to incredible Steampunk style ones that look more other worldly than something from Jules Verne.

The focus here is on a stand that doesn't mess up slick Apple designed laptops, when they are parked on your desk.Closest to the Apple design in terms of looks, is the Mstand. Although the wire hole seems to serve no purpose other than decoration and so misses the Apple spirit of ergonomic simplicity.

Before electricity, lighthouses relied on lamps that would almost be considered mood lighting by today's standards. Mechanisms were clockwork and had to be wound as often as every two hours. In the 19th century, Fresnel designed a lens that could focus this light into parallel rays and project it horizontally, dramatically improving lighthouses. By the end of the century, all lighthouses had Fresnel lenses classified into orders, with first order being the largest and most impressive.These days lighthouses use less elaborate lamps such as the beacons found at airfields, or even powerful, but unremarkable to look at, LEDs. Here is a list of some of the most beautiful and important lights ever made, including some 1st order beauties that stand 20 feet tall, and were floated on a mercury bed. There are no descriptions of each item, for this chart, as the images speak for themselves, however, the sites linked to have information about the lighthouses where they came from.

A gallery of giant ears. Before electronic RADAR, acoustic listening devices were like giant mechanical ear trumpets which could locate sounds and even calculate distances by bouncing sound waves in exactly the same manner that SONAR works in water. Ear trumpets themselves were only fully replaced by electronic devices in the middle of the 20th Century, because of their conspicuous nature, they were often hidden in anything form beards and wigs to table ornaments.

Robots often look insect like, largely because of their jerky movements and exo-skeletal look, both of which are a result of them often being works in progress at the individual and overall state of the art. Making them climb walls and hang effortlessly off a ceiling just adds them looking particularly bug like.There are a variety of movements and gripping mechanisms, from electromagnetic to air suction, however our favorite is the friction based tree climber.

If you thought the Bullet train was the fastest thing on rails, you would be wrong - more than 6000 miles per hour wrong. Rocket sled test tracks were originally designed for the V2 in WWII and can reach up to 6400 mph.They were made famous in the 50s when Lt. Col John Paul volunteered himself to test a 200mph track designed for crash test dummies, called the Gee Whiz. The test was intended to show the effects of deceleration in a plane crash, where it was assumed that nobody could survive more than 18G. Strapp survived an unbelievable 35G.More recently a rocket sled was featured in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.However, the lasting legacy of the Gee Whiz test is Murphy's Law, coined after a real engineer called Murphy who worked briefly at Edwards Air Force Base on the test track.

Aside from their spectacular size, what makes floating cranes unusual and interesting objects is that they are essentially boats. As such, they dont exactly conjure up the idea of stability, which is the primary requirement for lifting things. They also look weird since boats usually consist of large hulls with smaller superstructure, here the arrangement is reversed making them seem very ungainly.Some of these cranes can lift tens of thousands of tons, at sea, and are engineering wonders.

From 3 megawatt offshore monsters to zero energy windmill skyscrapers, kite flown turbines and giant seabed anchored super-turbines, held aloft by blimps. Here is our list of the most futuristic and quixotic designs for wind turbines. By far the most beautiful way to harness energy.