The Birth Spinner

Those of us with kids know that there is no end of baby-related inventions. I got an auto-shusher as a gift, which just played a SHHHHHHH sound periodically. It was supposed to help a baby sleep or something. Then there are the pregnancy inventions that are supposed to help a pregnant mother endure those prenatal months. Either way you come at it, babies are a big business.

But most of those inventions are focused on the process of making a baby and then what to do with a baby after you have one. Today’s patent deals with that precarious instant in between, the moment of birth. I present to you the apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force:

The imminent mother lies down on a table, is strapped in, and then is whipped back and forth until the baby falls out. In case you can’t make it out in the above picture, there’s a net strapped to the mother’s legs to catch any babies that get shaken loose. Here’s a side view:

In addition to the net, the thoughtful inventors included an automatic off switch.

When the fetus leaves the mothers vagina and lands on the cotton bed 97 in the net 83, its Weight, as a result of the rotation of the machine, exerts a radial centrifugal force on the bottom of the elastic net 88. This force on the net 88 presses on the upright switch-out plate 93 causing the depression of the horizontal switch-out plate 94 and the switch-out button 95, which through a known conventional circuit arrangement (not shown) causes an electric switch in the control box 16 to stop the drive motor 15 and the rotation of the whole machine.

USP 3,216,423, col. 4, lns 9-19

Then here’s an end-on view, because I know you want to see more of these figures:

Notably absent is any mechanism by which the mother can control the device. There is an operator who can turn it off, and then the baby can turn it off, but I guess the mother is in it for the long haul. Oh, and don’t worry, “[T]he head is held firm by a chin or neck strap 82 detachably connected at its ends to the stretcher deck 32.” Here’s a closeup of what that looks like:

And there’s even a pillow! As you can see, every consideration was given to the mother’s safety and comfort in this infernal baby machine.

To the best of my knowledge, we do not spin babies out of wombs these days. Cesarean sections are super common, and I suspect possibly less terrifying than getting strapped into one of these monsters. But then, I have never given birth, and I will defer to the womb-enabled for their opinions on that matter.