Some of history's greatest minds brought forth revolutionary technologies and ideas like the light bulb, the telephone and the phonograph, but that same gray matter also created more worthless junk than Radio Shack can sell.

You can't win 'em all, right? Keep reading to see five of the absolute stupidest ideas ever to come from our brightest minds.

Leonardo Da Vinci's Water-Walking Shoes
The wild and zany mind of this designer and painter conceived some of the craziest inventions that never worked, even when technology and innovation finally caught up with them. Sadly, water-walking technology has not yet reached the point of necessity.

The device was basically skis with pontoons in place of feet and two flat-ended poles to keep the walker from eating water. Unfortunately, it had no sense of engineering and Da Vinci's purpose of incorporating the device into military warfare to allow soldiers to reach enemy boats made even less sense. It might have worked if you could actually die from laughing too hard.



Thomas Edison's Helicopter
Edison wasn't the first to devise a flying machine, but if craziness could be measured, Edison's design would certainly win.

Edison patented a device that was simply a series of box kites that rotated on a vertical axis and then built a craft that looked like the mutated offspring of an airplane and an actual helicopter. Neither of them took off.

He never attempted the patented design and the one he actually built wasn't powerful enough to get off the ground. Edison then thought back to the day that the light bulb went off in his brain and decided to make that thing instead.

Alexander Graham Bell's Six-Nipple Sheep
The father of the telephone spent an inordinate amount of time with sheep, and while some who do so find, shall we say, unproductive ways of passing the time with them, Bell attempted something more productive.

He spent his life attempting to breed sheep with six nipples instead of the normal two, but was unable to produce any more beyond the flock he already had. In the end, his work with sheep would have been more productive if he had just had sex with them.
Elihu Thomson's Steam-Powered Car
Thomson's genius provided the world with electric welding, generators and safer use of X-rays. But his attempt at creating a car that didn't produce that stinky exhaust smell was a failure.

As one of the founders of General Electric, he developed a steam-powered vehicle that actually worked, if you didn't mind driving a car that took about a week to run to the store for a loaf of bread and a stop at the speakeasy. While the world mourned the loss of its attempt at efficient engineering, oil companies, Saudi Arabian royalty and inhalant huffers continue to celebrate.

Thomas Edison's Ghost Machine
During a time when the world thought anyone could communicate with the dead by paying some bejeweled gypsy who sounds foreign to fake seizures, Edison said he had found a way to do the same thing with science.

The inventor claimed he had done so in separate magazine interviews through his famed workshop that held over 1,000 patents, but the machine, much like evidence of ghosts or the afterlife, never materialized.