Japan’s Wackiest Inventor

io9.com:

Yoshihiro NakaMats, 79, is Japan’s most prolific - and bizarre - inventor. He claims to have 3,350 patents (Thomas Edison only had 1,093), and that several of them are for the floppy disk. “Everyone knows about the floppy disk,” he says. “But I also invented the fax machine, automatic pachinko, and the taxi meter.”

While running for mayor of Tokyo last spring, he announced that he possessed three secret tools that would save the world from mass destruction: a device capable of turning North Korean missiles around in mid-air, a love potion more effective than Viagra that would reverse the declining birth rate, and a new water-to-fuel technology that fights global warming. The weird thing is that he could be telling the truth.

NakaMats’ repertoire of inventions spans from the useful to the ridiculous. Thousands of pages of neatly hand-written notes and diagrams document the man’s mental journey, and prototypes of the gadgets he invented–the magnetic strip, a computer-calculated putter, the aerial duster, jumping shoes, an anti-gravity float-vibrate 3D sonic system–are stacked against the walls of his Invention Library, which he sometimes opens to the public.

Every month, he invites 50 students into his Innovation House, where he teaches classes like Exercising the Imagination and The Logic of Invention. He also recently made his male model debut at a Tokyo runway show.

Read more.

Photo by Roger Hutchings.

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