The Drawing Nobody Could Explain
Picture a comment section going quiet, then exploding with guesses, because nobody had the faintest idea what they were looking at. That was the scene on Neatorama.com on December 20, 2010, when the site posted a sketch by inventor and cartoonist Steven M. Johnson: a tangle of parts that looked purposeful, yet refused to say what it was for.
This wasn’t a riddle with a clever solution buried in the lines. It was a drawing built, on purpose, to resist explanation. Johnson, born in 1938 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, spent decades turning “what if” into pictures, first as a city planner in the 1960s and 1970s, then as an editorial cartoonist for the Sierra Club Bulletin starting in 1973. Assigned to sketch 16 future recreational vehicles the following year, he produced 109 instead, because holding back was never really his style. What happens when an invention’s purpose is never meant to be found in the first place?
A Museum Built on Not Knowing
The sketch came from Johnson’s ongoing “Museum of Possibilities,” a weekly feature packed with imaginative, often gloriously impractical invention concepts. None come with instructions, and none get explained, ever.
That’s worth separating from real historical mystery objects, the kind museums display with a card reading “purpose unknown.” Those are genuine unsolved puzzles someone might still crack. Johnson’s inventions work differently: the ambiguity is the design itself, not a gap waiting to be filled. The series isn’t announcing “we don’t know what this does.” It’s telling you, gently, that you’re not supposed to know, which makes it feel less like an engineering exercise and more like a running joke.
Neatorama Turns the Confusion Into a Contest
Neatorama took that built-in ambiguity and turned it into a game. This was the 13th installment of a recurring bit called “Name That Weird Invention!,” and the premise was simple: readers looked at Johnson’s unidentifiable machine and proposed a name for it in the comments.
The rules kept things fair without getting complicated. One entry was allowed per comment, though nothing stopped a determined commenter from posting several separate ones. Each entrant also had to pick a T-shirt they wanted from the NeatoShop, choosing from categories like Science, Funny, or Artist-designed, or forfeit the win. The prize was a free shirt for whoever came up with the funniest or wittiest name.
Here’s the interesting part: there was no correct answer to find, because nobody was being tested on knowledge they might or might not have. The entire product of the contest was the joke itself, not a clue toward some hidden truth.
The Long Arm of the Law Wins
The winning entry came from a commenter using the handle qwhacker, who named the contraption “The Long Arm of the Law,” short and punchy, and it worked precisely because it committed to a bit without over-explaining it.
The runner-up took the opposite approach. Commenter cs proposed “The Self-Service Ticketing Lane Response Vehicle and Revenue Generator,” imagining a police officer issuing traffic tickets remotely over video chat from a coffee shop, sparing them bad weather and roadside danger. It didn’t win a shirt, since cs never picked one from the NeatoShop, but it’s arguably the more elaborate performance: a whole bureaucratic universe invented around a drawing that offered zero evidence for any of it.
Why the Answer Was Never the Point
The December 20, 2010 article never reveals what Johnson’s invention actually does, and it was never going to. That’s the quiet trick behind “Museum of Possibilities”: some things are more fun left unresolved, because the not-knowing gives people room to invent something better than the truth could have been anyway.
Most people scroll past a puzzle that admits it has no answer. Noticing it’s still worth engaging with, that the fun was never in solving it but in playing along, is its own small kind of sharp thinking. It’s the difference between shrugging at a strange drawing and immediately wanting to know what your friends would call it.