The Failed Life Science Innovation That Birthed An Opera

Given the fast-paced world of medical innovation, it can take a lot for a drug or device to get noticed and that can lead to wildly different outcomes for potentially life-altering technology.

Some innovations, with the help of life science marketing and extensive research, can change the world as we know it, whilst many others end up as scientific dead-ends that languish in obscurity until the concept is rediscovered once the technology has caught up to the concept.

In some cases, however, an idea can prove to be so baffling that some refuse to believe it was ever invented, and others write entire operas about how it was devised.

Such is the story of the Blonsky Device, a concept for a machine that would help assist with births via the use of high-speed centrifugal forces.

The idea, in theory, was that the mother in labour would be strapped to a circular table that would be rotated extremely quickly, theoretically making giving birth quicker and easier by creating enough force to assist the mother, although it is unclear exactly how it would have worked in practice.

George And Charlotte Blonsky, the childless married couple who invented the machine in 1965, loved children and wanted to help women who could not give birth normally but did not necessarily want a caesarean section.

During a visit to a zoo in the Bronx, they were told by a zookeeper that elephants spin around before they give birth, sparking their idea to use spinning forces to help mothers.

The problem was that the zookeeper was wrong, and whilst the surprisingly elaborate Gigeresque sketches of the machine emphasised the safety of the mother and child, complete with a tiny net to catch the child being born, there is no proof that it would have worked.

The expensive, terrifying-looking machine was never made, but the invention would receive an Ig Nobel prize in 1999 and be the subject of an opera, The Blonsky Device, in 2013.