xplanes:

Constantinos Vlachos in his “Tri-phibian” – a craft which, the inventor claimed, could navigate through air, water, and on land. It caught fire during a public demonstration outside the Library of Congress in 1935 – Vlachos was dragged from the craft by a policeman and spent nine months recovering in hospital.

Jeffrey High, a photographer, came across Vlachos in Washington in 1985:

“He would sit outside in this chair and honk an old bicycle horn every time a car passed, hoping to generate traffic into his…musuem I guess. Mr. Vlachos was an inventor who invented a flying car, and an engineless car, among other things. His inventions never came to fruition, as far as I know… but I spent well over 2 hours with him that day and the passion still burned within him. I can still feel his grip on my arm as he told me of his life.”

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In theory, many Japanese could easily make the leap into a cashless world. The country has six main competing cashless payment systems, many of them embedded into mobile phones. Including Oyster-type cards issued by public transport companies, industry sources estimate that there are about 120 million cashless payment chips sitting in Japan’s wallets and handbags, waiting to be swiped.

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