Twenty-Seven Of History's Strangest Inventions

'If at first an idea is not absurd,' Albert Einstein famously said, 'then there is no hope for it.' Sometimes, however, absurd is just absurd - yet, even so, it's a fascinating slice of history's collective direction of curiosity and experimental innovation.

After those vintage versions of modern social media and yesteryear's visions for the future of technology, here come some of history's most weird and wonderful inventions, from wooden swimwear to spectacles for reading in bed, captured in archival public domain images by the Netherland's National Archive.