Nantes' Grand Éléphant is a multi-story wood-and-steel walking machine that carries passengers through the former shipyards, with riders viewing the city from the height of a moving…

In the early 1930s, Austrian engineer Friedrich Schmiedl launched rockets carrying hundreds of letters between mountain communities, using parachutes to return the mail to earth.

Before radar, Britain built enormous concave concrete sound mirrors along the coast so listeners could hear distant aircraft engines and estimate their direction.

Jacques de Vaucanson's eighteenth-century automaton duck flapped, drank, ate grain, and appeared to excrete it, astonishing audiences even though the digestive trick was an illusion.

Italy's Villa Girasole was built on a circular rail system so the entire two-wing house could slowly turn around a central tower and face the sun.

New York's pneumatic mail network shot canisters beneath city streets, and postal lore records a cat being sent through a tube during an early demonstration before emerging alive.