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.

If you are as persnickety as we are, then you also possibly fantasize about having lots of gadgets that are tiny and foldaway in beautiful, intricate transformer-like fashion.Here are our picks from big to small: houses, helicopters, cars, boats, beds, computers, coat hangers. even if you've seen these things before, there is something satisfying about putting all these things in one place.

There is something fantastically hellish about fiery steel manufacture, nothing seems more gigantic or obviously dangerous looking. The instruments used to transfer molten iron, steel and slag are massive solid items made of the same thing they contain in liquid form and are objects of wonder.Particularly interesting are the torpedo ladle railroad cars, which transfer hot metal from blast to oxygen furnaces. They are dramatic and interesting enough that despite their obscurity they are available in several forms for model railroads. Vote for your faves.

The watches in this list range in price from the half a million dollar Guy Ellia invisible watch to a $40 Swatch by architect, Renzo Piano. While the Ellia watch is a technical tour de force Piano's is a much more satisfying design.Bespoke swiss watch makers use translucent sapphire to hold delicate moving parts, but cheap plastic and electronics can actually be a more practical, elegant, and less willful alternative.And given that the whole concept of a translucent watch is being non-visible, the inherent ostentation of a $500,000 wristwatch seems like a test case in ridiculous bad design. Vote for your faves.

Some of America's best Mid Century Modern architecture is in the form of gas stations, with their simple space requirements and focus on innovative roofs.Several of the best known names in architecture have created gas stations, around the world, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies Van der Rohe, Willem Dudok, Jean Prouve, Arne Jacobsen and Norman Foster, but nobody created a design package that was as enduring and comprehensive as Elliot Noyes for Mobil.

This year is special, in theory it is the first year since 1982 that keytars have not been mass produced as musical instruments, and that would have been something to celebrate if Guitar Hero and Rock Band hadn't brought them back, with a vengeance in the form of game guitars.This list is a warning reminder of what people really look like when they play Rock Band. It features keytars from their earnest debut to parody, to some kind of post-post-modern resolution with self aware but not-really-joking keytarists like Ben Folds.After the Moog Liberation was introduced in 1980, a variety of performers from Thomas Dolby to Jan Hammer made keytars a staple of 80s music, with Devo being the first to seize the ironic potential. Later weird Croation keytarist Belinda Benekovic became an internet meme and more recently Flight of the Conchords took a jab at a Roland Axis player.Her are some videos of keytars in action from classic 80s synths to circuit bent toys. Vote for your worst.

The iPhone is a state-of-the-art, minimalist gadget where a lot of effort was put into the case design. These phones are as precious to people as Gollum's ring and in order to avoid scratching them, many people have attached protective covers. This activity ranges from being like leaving the plastic cover on a new sofa to gilding a lilly.Some people go further, however, and actively defecate on the lilly. There are an amazing variety of iPhone cases which completely ignore the fact that the iPhone is a futuristic design in an appropriately minimalist modernist enclosure. iPhone case are produced using incompatible styles associated with military ruggedness (Oakley unobtainium rubber) or pre-industrial luxury materials (diamond and gold) and made to specifications which are often much worse than the thing they are designed to enhance. Vote for your worst.

The New York Times put together a fascinating list of Olympic flame relay torches. However, the cauldrons that they light are often more interesting being part of the original Athenian games, both figuratively and in spirit. The torch relay is neither, having been created by the Nazis.Dramatic sculptural cauldrons were built for more recent Winter or Summer Games, such as Salt Lake City, Barcelona or most recently, Turin, with its tall fire breathing chimneys, like an oil refinery burn off.Both Barcelona and Sydney introduced spectacle in the way the cauldrons were lit: a single shot, flaming arrow from a remote archer, in Barcelona, and a spectacular self assembling tower emerging, on fire, from a pool of water, in Sydney.The simple, iconic cauldron also stand out, and nowhere more so that the pared down minimalist version at the 1976 Montreal Games, which could not have been more different from the gargantuan vulgarity of the stadium itself.

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.

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.

The essential fashion item if you are going to the Beijing Olympics to watch people compete in air made of Jello - a gas mask. Gas masks are all more or less terrifying to look at, which is why some people get a kick out of them, creating artsy fetish masks, or artists create ironically cute masks such as Bill Barminsky's Mickey Mouse mask.The irony is on the artists, however, since genuine Mickey Mouse inspired gas masks were given to children in both the UK and the US, during wartime, to appear less scary

Gym equipment has a habit of making people look stupid, like that weird guy on TV with the pony tail and the abs machine. These machines are the zenith of fitness absurdity - teaching you to swim on dry land, anywhere. Handy if you are an Olympic swimmer holed up in a hotel room, waiting to be airlifted into Beijing when the smog clears.

Bladerunner - so where are we now? Particularly where are all the artsy animated building facades?Here are 15 of our favorites, avoiding Vegas style tacky glitz. We have tried to include some of the more recent architectural projects where the media skin is part of the design itself, rather than merely a billboard. Media skins are often designed by specialist firms in concert with the main architect, such as Berlin's, excellent, Realities United, who worked on several of these projects.

Fixed-gear bicycles, without gears or brakes were created for the controlled environment of a velodrome. This environment could not be more different from hilly San Francisco or car ridden New York, but their appeal as being both stripped down and minimalist as well as requiring considerable risk and commitment to learn to ride has made them fashionable in hip neighborhoods of large cities, such as New York's Williamsburg.This has lead to an interesting morphing of a classic post-war track bike design, to city fixies which inevitable become like beefier road bikes to be ridable and more recently to celebrity endorsed and/or fashion branded, limited edition products.The stunningly beautiful 1950's Cinelli, Italian team bike, best represents the classic track bike and the solid titanium saddle and merlin frame captures the road-bike-in-denial urban fixie (albeit, without the current vogue of sawn off straight handle-bars). The fashion house branded versions include graffiti artist, Futura's Colnago track frame, a Kid Robot bike a Fuji and Obey fixie and the surprisingly nice Nike AF1. The fashion bikes are particularly odd, because they are created by designers rather than bike enthusiasts and mix and match components purely on the basis of how they look. In this sense the transition of fixies from track to urban messenger to fashion designer is a continuous trend away from ergonomics to superficiality.Vote for your faves, ours is the 59 Cinelli.

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.

Algorithmic architecture uses computers to generate natural looking aperiodic forms that are are a revolutionary alternative to the extreme crystalline regularity of what has up to now been considered modern. The dreary exhibition of pre-fabricated architecture at New York's MOMA, has a couple of examples of algorithmic designs at its entrance, but that is where it stops. On entering it is an mixture of of the dated, High Tech style and dumbed down Mid-Century Modern boxes for Dwell magazine readers. If you really want to see what is happening at the cutting edge of architecture, look at some of these schemes. This list could go on forever. Drill down on some of the links and explore.

Papercraft, knitting, gardening and weapons.

Airstream was neither the first nor the only manufacturer of streamlined trailers with examples shown here, by Spartan, Silver Streak, Westcraft and Bowlus, among others, yet they are deservedly the best known and continue to thrive. Because of their futuristic design they have a unique place in the history of technology. An Airstream was used for quarantine after the first men returned from the moon and today takes astronauts to the Space Shuttle. Their iconic silver bullet shape still looks modern, yet it dates from the 30s and is based upon a prior streamline designed trailer, called the Bowlus. Here is a list of some of the most beautiful things to have ever been on the roads.

There have been four core audiences for Apple along the years, the original Mac for graphic designers and Desk Top Publishing, the OSX based machines which lured developers, the iPod which brought Apple into the consumer market with lifestyle apps, and the original Apple II which became a computer widely used in schools.Looking at these old commercials from the late 70s and 1980s, including the first ever Apple ad (which was a store ad not produced internally), you can see how much they were aimed at kids. Even then, there is a faint glimmer of the artistry of later Apple ads which aimed for high ideals and changing the world

The Zapruder film of the JFK assassination was shot on a Bell and Howell double 8 camera, at about the time of the introduction of Super 8, which created a ubiquitous format for affordable home movies. The difference in design between the Super 8 cameras and other 8mm cameras from as early as the 30s is clearly visible in this collection. The look changed from rounded shapes dictated by the film canister on early news reel devices, to a counter fashion for extremely orthogonal forms as exemplified here by the Star Trek like designs of the superb Bolex 150 from 1967.

The distinction between early anatomy lecture theaters which dissected the dead and later operating theaters, which attempted to cure the living, is blurred. Both were used for teaching, in broad daylight where lecturers clothes became stiff with blood and the air thick with germs.With highly unusual steep raked galleries these were literally theaters, and the name has stuck. The earliest rooms were often heavily decorated such as the beautifully restored 16th Century wood paneled anatomy theater at the University of Bologna to the crudely utilitarian 19th century dedicated operating theater at St. Thomas', London.

Manhattan is an antique modern city, dark, decaying, malevolent and at the same time wonderful. The most recent screen versions of Batman have captured this dark feel perfectly. Here are our picks for the buildings and elements of Manhattan that make up the real Gotham city.

The interesting thing about luxury trains is that they share a common and unintentionally ironic style - that of a stationary, fragile, cut glass and velvet, Victorian brothel interior moving at more than 60 miles and hour.

What do you do when you have lots of cash and cheap oil, but mess around in expensive cars in a manner not much different from America in the 50s. Arab drifting is the name given to handbrake slides, perfected in places like Saudi, where Arabian Stallions have been replaced by metal Mustangs. Here it refers not just to the videos of the stunts which are interesting in of themselves, but the cultural drift, as exemplified by the range of music that accompanies the videos, from rock to rap to house. This list is contains not just Arab Drifts but clips of car culture n the Arabian peninsula, proving Youtube's worth as an anthropological treasure trove.

Our top burglar alarms include an array of guns with trip wires or trigger mechanisms, designed to scare off thieves, including the hellish looking device from a London dock warehouse, a clockwork 19th century doorstop burglar alarm, and a device from the 1930's which dialed an emergency number and played back an alert message from a gramophone record. Vote for your faves.

There is a saturation point where individual pieces of graffiti become a texture, when things are absolutely covered in graffiti. This tends to happen in places that are charged with emotional energy, such as the Berlin wall, however here are some less well known places. From the throne of England which is covered top to bottom in hundreds of years old carved graffiti and equally aristocratic Harrow School which features a wood paneled classroom where every inch is covered by pupils who have carved their names, including Winston Churchill to pop culture shrines such as U2's former recording studio and Elvis' Graceland and not so pop Oscar Wilde, whose grave is covered in kisses.

Henry Ford's car assembly line is a symbol modern manufacture, yet the town where it originated has become a ruin and Toyota is now worth ten times the value of both Ford and General Motors combined.Car manufacture moved to the next level with the widespread introduction of robotics, by the Japanese, however German car factories have recently created a truly futuristic vision of manufacture, where both architecture of the factory and the machinery within it, have become an integrated work of art.The Autostadt visitor center at the VW factory in Wolfsburg, which involved commissioning over 400 architects, features 200 foot tall robotic silos at the end of the production line (reminiscent of the people farms in the Movie, the Matrix), where customers can pick up their newly manufactured cars. In Dresden the VW assembly plant, designed by Hann is an eco-friendly, transparent building right in the center of the city, with glass walls and maple floors, where tourists are encouraged to view the cars being put together in pristine surroundings. Leipzig features possibly the world's most architecturally significant plant, a stunning building designed by the folks working at Zaha Hadid.

Bat houses are like slimline bird houses on stilts. It seems that bats will slither into folder sized slots, and a phone box sized house will carry tens of thousands of bats. Something to think of, if you want to annoy your neighbors. Along with the houses are some artificial bat caves, built by bat men and bat women, such as the Dorset Bat Group.

ts very hot today, so we are giving you some visual ice cream - massive railroad snowplows. These devices which are both terrifyingly impressive, when in action (as the video in the list shows) and dramatically beautiful to look at either in the fan-like rotary versions or the futuristic wedge shaped models. Some of these plows are still being used, having been built in the 19th Century.

A perfect environmental nightmare, these hellish looking open faced mining machines have been largely decommissioned. Luckily some are being preserved as they are staggeringly impressive. The Ferropolis in Germany has many of these machines on display and forms an industrial park which host the famous MELT music festival. There have been several images of these floating around blogs, including the infamous pictures of the bucket wheel excavator that swallowed a full sized bulldozer, however we have tried to find as large a variety as possible.

Manikins (the alternate spelling, mannequin, is usually used for the store window variety) which are used for medical training are extremely interesting devices with accurate and working anatomical elements. This list is larger than usual since the number of interesting items meant that we kept on looking.

Aside from a couple of custom versions that we couldn't resist, the emphasis here is not on novelty but on design, since, as we believe these picks show, sidecars are a genuinely viable and interesting mode of transport.

Historically, military rations, comprised, in significant part, of cigarettes and alcohol, while the quantity of food was far less than today. Current US army field rations are ready to eat and focus on high energy foods including caffeine-infused gum, they must cost less than $7.25 per meal, survive for 3 years at 27 degrees C and after a 100 foot drop.Civilian rations are often far less bountiful, such as WW2 food rations current Cuban rations or the tiny hunk of bread that Gulag prisoners were given. Vote for which items are most striking.

Why would you buy a horrible plastic fan this summer, when Ebay is full of better alternatives at reasonable prices? Vintage fans are a perfect piece of machine age Americana with streamlined Moderne or Art Deco styling. Here are some of our favorite picks, available on Ebay at the time of writing.