12 MOST AMAZING ABANDONED TECHNOLOGY & VEHICLES

12 MOST AMAZING ABANDONED TECHNOLOGY & VEHICLES

 

12 MOST AMAZING ABANDONED TECHNOLOGY & VEHICLES

Cars, planes, and trains of today all have fairly similar shapes. That's because, over a period of many years, designers have been working on the concept of what the perfect vehicle should look like.

And they've refined that concept as time has passed. That meant that some wild and wonderful transport and vehicle ideas have been forgotten along the way.

Ideas like all of the abandoned prototypes and innovations you're about to read in this article with video.

John Blenkinsop built the world's first-ever steam train in 1812.

The world's first ever car was built by Nicholas Josef Kunio in 1769, although it wasn't commercially viable.

Sitting between those two ideas was the London steam carriage devised by Richard Trevithick in 1803.

This was the first steam-powered and self propelled vehicle capable of carrying passengers.

James Watt had patented a similar idea years previously but never followed through with working so travel fix stepped in when the patent expired, as there were no rails to run on at the time.

The London steam carriage had wheels are eight feet in diameter to help it cope with the rough road surfaces of the time, and ran on a six cylinder engine powered by fire and steam.

Initial tests of the vehicle were successful. It drove 10 miles from London to Paddington, and back again, carrying eight passengers and reaching heavy speeds of 9 miles per hour.

Sadly, soon after the test journey Trevithick crashed the carriage into railings and had no money to replace the damaged parts.

It was scrapped before anyone could say whether it would have been a hit with the public.

 

If you think about what an off road vehicle looks like, chances are the first thing that comes to mind is something very similar to a Land Rover.

But the Russians once had a different idea about how to make vehicles for customers who needed to travel across harsh environments.

The GAC 73 was an all terrain car designed for use by Russian farmers, and was years ahead of its time, offering all wheel drive in the mid-1950s.

The engine for the concept car came from Mocksville with the suspension and other runs taken from the GAC 69 Jeep vehicles, all of which were surrounded by a brand new car body.

Initial testing provided mixed results. It was fine on bad roads and steep uphill climbs, but it suffered a little in snow.

Even though it only had 35 horsepower, it could reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.

Despite its size, though it was a little cramped on the inside. When planners in Moscow came to assess it.

They decided no Russian factory was capable of producing it in mass, so they passed on the idea for the shape.

 

During the early 1980s, everyone thought the cars of the future would have cockpits and curved bodies.

Vehicles that people saw in the science fiction movies of the time. Ford was busy at work trying to turn these futuristic designs into reality and demonstrated the Ford cockpit in 1982.

The design of the cockpit was borrowed from a fighter jet and the fuel economy was fantastic. It only consumed one gallon of petrol for every 75 miles driven.

Its biggest problem was that it was nowhere near as fast as it looked like it should be. The engine only offered 12 horsepower, which meant acceleration was sluggish and speed wasn't much better.

 With seating for only two people, this rear wheel drive car was supposed to be the smarter of its day, offering convenience for people living and working in busy city centers.

Sadly, this plastic and glass lightweight car was just a little too far ahead of its time for the market and never made it past the prototype stage.

 

Many people familiar with Russian history know all about the history of the Baronne project.

Orion was supposed to be the Soviet equivalent of the American Space Shuttle program and should eventually have put a Russian on the moon.

It didn't work out that way. Braun made only one journey out into space after years of delays, flying for a little over two hours in November 1988 Before landing safely in Kazakhstan.

The spaceship was destroyed by a roof collapse in its hangar in 2002. Although the ship which flew into space was smashed to pieces, a wooden prototype built for wind tunnel testing is just about still standing.

You can find that ran which is built to a scale of 1/3 of the real thing, slowly rotting away close to Moscow and a forgotten corner of the Zukowski airfield, despite being wooden many of the replicated parts of the fixture and fitting for ice. If wooden ships could fly into space.

In terms of doing battle at sea, battleships fight on the surface of the water and Marines fight below it.

Some ships like the adaptable and the top secret project 1231 are capable of doing both the Soviet built project 1231 also known as the dolphin was envisioned as a diving missile boat back in the 1960s when it was designed that it would have represented an entirely new type of ship.

Khrushchev himself is said to have ordered the design of the ship when the fleet was capable of launching amazing thing if you want to know then watch a video.  from the surface and then diving below to avoid immediate detection.

He initially also wanted the ships to fly, although this proved to be impossible. Planning for the revolutionary military vessels is said to have reached an advanced stage with physical production almost ready to begin when Khrushchev lost his grip on power in 1964.

Experts who later looked at the blueprints and the designs cast doubt on whether the idea could ever have been turned into reality.

Traveling to the coldest extremities of the Earth may not have been such an ordeal for polar explorers had the Fortson snowball become a success.

The engineer's 1920s creation took the body of a tractor, removed the wheels, and mounted the cabin on 2 enormous screws which could shift across ice marshland and other difficult terrains at 8 miles an hour.

The highly maneuverable screws each had its own clutch, which helps keep the turning circle of the snow devil down to almost zero.

A company named Armstead patented the design and even released promotional silent movies to cinemas to promote their new idea.

It was hoped that they would be used for work normally reserved for packs of dogs or horses, but sadly, it was never to be.

Three of the Fordson vehicles were being used in Alaska in 1926 to haul goods for a polar expedition. But they didn't cope well with the 15 tonnes of weight they were asked to drag behind.

The Alaskan cold seized up the motor and the fuel demand was too high to be viable.

NASA's enormous crawler transporters Hans and Franz are still in operation. So how can we consider them to be the last technology?

The answer is that if NASA ever needed to replace them, they'd have to start again from scratch.

Hans and frogs which weigh over 2500 tonnes each were built in 1965 for one specific purpose to carry Saturn's five rockets.

Once that purpose was served they were put into storage in the original plans were forgotten.

When NASA decided to press ahead with space shuttle launches, enormous expense had to be undertaken to bring these rolling hydraulic launch pads back into working condition and they're still being patched up and put to work now.

They're two of the most unique load bearing vehicles that the human race has ever produced.

And if one of them ever breaks down completely, we'll never be able to replace it. NASA will have to come up with something new with a top speed of less than four miles per hour. They may be slow, but nothing else has ever been so suited to the job that it performs.

 

Tensions during the cold war between Russia and the United States were high and each side was constantly developing technology to nullify the threat presented by the other.

In the case of the very V V A 14 amphibious aircraft, its purpose was to protect the Soviet Union by destroying American missile submarines.

For this task, it would need to both fly high in the air and low over the water as well as being able to both lands and take off the Italian specialists Robert Bertini was brought in to oversee the creation of the plane and create a prototype in 1972, which proved capable of standard flight.

Flying to and from the water proved more problematic with inflatable rafts proven incapable of providing the necessary support and their subsequent replacement with rigid pontoons.

Making changes to the fuselage of the aircraft is necessary. Further problems with the battery followed and Martini passed away in 1984, before the project could be completed without him working, faltered and then shut down entirely.

One prototype remains and belongs to the Soviet Central Air Force Museum, or it's been slowly drifting into a state of disrepair since 1987.

 

Like the bereave vva 14, the American Convair F two YZ Dart was a plane built for a specific military purpose.

American naval commanders of the time were concerned about the difficulties involved in supersonic aircraft taking off and landing on aircraft carriers at sea.

So they wanted to develop something that could land on water. For a short time in the 1950s. The sea Dart appeared to be the answer.

Its novel design, including hydro skis, meant that takeoff and landing could be achieved from almost any surface.

The hole was watertight and so it seemed ideally fit for this purpose. There were issues though, the skis caused heavy vibration when landing and taking off and transonic drag issues were limited.

Its top speed, which was already hampered by the underperforming J 46. Engines.

The first prototype managed to break the sound barrier only once on a shallow dive, but would later disintegrate in front of a horrified crowd during a demonstration flight in November 1954.

The crash was terminal for the project, and the remaining three prototypes were never flown. Despite that, it's still the only seaplane in history to have achieved supersonic speed.

 

Why build a vehicle to run on wheels if the wheel could be the whole vehicle?

That was the idea behind Dinah's fear, which was patented by British designer Dr. John Purvis in 1930.

Dinah's fear was a moto wheel loosely inspired by the artwork and sketches of Leonardo da Vinci.

 It's a strange thing to look at. But Purvis was convinced that his idea had practical value.

So much so that he designed two separate prototypes, one which ran on gasoline, and a smaller version powered by electricity.

The big wheels, the larger of which was 10 feet high, came with a two cylinder engine and could reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour when they were on a roll.

Steering was a little difficult with the prototype, you had to lean in the direction you wanted to go and hope for the best.

The driver's seat and the motor all formed one cohesive unit, which sat on rails within a larger outer hoop.

It never became anything more than a curiosity. Purvis could never solve the steering problem & braking hard often left the occupants spinning around the inner wheel like hamsters.

 

In modern times, we accept it as a fact that a motorcar needs a combustion engine. Back when the car was a new idea, though, people were still willing to challenge this idea.

 

Frenchman Marcel's layout was convinced that using a combustion engine made cars too slow and too heavy, and in a lot of ways he was right.

The layout had an experience in aeronautical design and believed that fitting a propeller to the front of the car was the easiest way of moving around.

Layout invented the Holika, a propeller driven vehicle back in 1913. It was crude and a little dangerous.

But the French authorities of the time were sufficiently satisfied with its design to allow him to drive it on roads.

That's despite the fact that they could reach speeds of over 100 miles per hour, and their plywood design was far too lightweight to survive any form of collision.

They managed to sell a few helicopters to brave and curious members of the public between 1913 and 1925.

But as he built them all by hand, they never entered mass production.

 

The All Terrain Rhino vehicle was so many years ahead of its time that it still looks futuristic now.

So it's no wonder it blew the minds of the people who laid eyes on it in 1954. This armored any-purpose car was the work of Greek American inventor le actinides, who believed it was an all-in-one solution for patrol and defense on the borders of Alaska and Canada.

The terrain in those areas is cold and baggy, and as the borders often cross water ignites believe that vehicles defending them should be able to do the same thing, just an amphibious car though the rhino was capable of 45 miles per hour on the open road despite weighing 5 tonnes and having front wheels that were six feet in diameter.

Because of the unusual design of the wheels, the rhino could survive being tipped up to 75 degrees left or right without falling over, and could also write itself.

Only one prototype was built and was shown to the military, but they passed on buying it out of fear it would sink easily if the wheels were punctured.

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