- Would you allow your doctor to carry out surgery with a chainsaw?
Most common tools out there are fantastic for their purpose. It’s just kind of funny that some of them weren’t designed for what they’re used for today.
Occasionally, the original iteration of a product completely misses the mark on what it’s best at. Fortunately, you can always count on creative people to put them to good use, sometimes in weird and wacky ways.
Here are 10 tools and items that were created for an utterly different purpose than what they’re commonly used for.
1. Pipe Cleaners
Pipe cleaners are an essential component of every elementary school craft project. They certainly weren’t made for children to play with, though.
As it reads right on the label, pipe cleaners were meant for cleaning smoking pipes. Running them through a pipe’s stem removes moisture and caked-on tobacco residue, helping to preserve the smoking implement.
Pipe cleaners didn’t turn into craft items until pipe smoking began to decline in the 1920s and 1930s. However, pipe smokers still use them for their intended purposes.
2. Chainsaw
Today, chainsaws are strictly used either for cutting wood or for gory violence in horror movies. Believe it or not, the latter use is closer to their original purpose.
The first chainsaws were surgical tools. Some of them were used for cutting through bone during limb amputations, while others were used during childbirth.
If a woman’s pelvis was too narrow to allow the baby to pass through, the attending doctor would whip out a chainsaw and hack through part of the cartilage in the woman’s pelvic bones to widen the passage.
Ouch.
3. Corkscrew
Instead of a tool to open a bottle of fine vintage, corkscrews were originally military tools. They were used to extract bullets from misfired smoothbore muskets.
If the ball or bullet got stuck in the musket’s barrel, the soldier would grab a long cleaning rod with a corkscrew-like end. Screwing the tool into the barrel allowed him to thread it around the bullet and pull it out.
Sometimes, though, field surgeons would also use them similarly to extract bullets from wounds that they couldn’t otherwise reach.
Ouch.
4. Slinky
Everyone’s favorite coil of wire wasn’t a toy to start with. Like the corkscrew, it originated in military applications.
Invented by Navy engineer Richard James, the Slinky was supposed to be a part of a stabilization system for sensitive instruments on warships. However, in 1943, he accidentally knocked one of the wire coils off a table and watched it bounce down a set of stairs.
Together with his wife, James figured the thing would make a fun toy for kids. They were right.
5. Paintball Guns
In a bit of a reversal, paintball guns are used these days to simulate firefights in a fun shooting sport. They were originally designed for forestry workers, though.
When planning which trees to cut, lumberjacks often mark them with a bit of paint. But it can get really tiring if you have to walk through miles and miles of forest to painstakingly spray paint on each tree to be cut.
That’s where the paintball gun came in. Invented in the 1960s, it was designed to allow forestry workers to mark trees from a distance.
6. Bubble Wrap
History is full of questionable interior decoration trends. One of them was tactile wallpaper, which is what bubble wrap was supposed to be.
It was invented in the 1950s as a 3D wallpaper, but (unsurprisingly) nobody wanted to buy it. It was then marketed as insulation for greenhouses, again with no luck.
Fortunately for bubble wrap’s inventors, they figured out that their abominable wallpaper made for excellent wrapping material.
For more horrible decor ideas, check out our list of 10 strange interior decoration trends from the past.
7. Claw Tool
The claw tool is an implement with a hook on one end and a forked claw on the other that firefighters use to break through locked doors. Now, this is the purpose it was created for — but not by rescue workers.
According to a persistent legend, burglars trying to break into a New York bank accidentally caused a fire. When firefighters arrived, they found the strange break-in tool the escaping criminals had left behind.
They were so impressed by its ingenious design that they decided to adopt the claw tool for their own use.
8. Tea Bags
Tea bags are a convenient way to brew a hot beverage on a cold night. Originally, however, they weren’t meant to go in the water.
Tea bags started as small bags of tea leaves that merchants would send to prospective customers. The breathable bag preserved the tea leaves while keeping them from going all over the place.
We don’t know if the first person to brew tea with the leaves in the bag did so out of laziness or a misunderstanding. Either way, they were clearly onto something.
9. Frisbee
In the late 19th century, William Russell Frisbie founded a company. It didn’t produce novelty throwing discs, though, and was instead a bakery.
The Frisbee got its origins as a pie plate. It was a sheer coincidence that the pie holder also had great aerodynamics.
Well, the Frisbie company wasn’t about to leave money on the table.
10. Hitachi Magic Wand
The Hitachi Magic Wand was launched in 1968 in Japan. It was marketed as a massage tool for sore and tight muscles.
Now, it works perfectly well for this purpose. However, people quickly started massaging… Other places with it.
And that’s why the Magic Wand is known best these days as a sex toy.