Bully wrote:
> [..]
>

They look like a good idea, and I would like to try them when they are
mass marketed. Of course I would need at least two pairs, one for day,
and one for night.

Martin.

Martin wrote:
> Bully wrote:
>> [..]
>>
>
> They look like a good idea, and I would like to try them when they are
> mass marketed. Of course I would need at least two pairs, one for day,
> and one for night.
>
> Martin.

Rear vision?

Sounds good - but the mekers were beaten to it by the manufacturers of the
famous "Seebackroscope", available by mail order nd advertised in the rear
pages of certain upmarket comics... er... fifty-plus years ago.

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n03/letters.html>
<http://bradfordmagiccircle.co.uk/bmc-magazine-186.html>

And even previously discussed on ukrc:

<http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk.rec.cycling/browse_thread/thread/d5af6bf915575943>

The relevant quots from the first URL above (saves you digging for it):

Can you pee in your car?

From Simon Barley

It was around 1950 when my brother and I – amateur sleuths beside whom we
considered Sexton Blake a mere beginner – saw an advertisement in the Hotspur
for the Seebackroscope. Like Alan Bennett (LRB, 25 January) and his brother,
we experienced a mixture of puzzled disappointment and rage at being cheated
of our pocket money by such a spectacularly useless object. I prefer now to
see the Seebackroscope not so much as a con, but rather as the fruit of some
helpfully ingenious mind – of the same inventiveness that litters the pages
of Exchange and Mart with suggestions for things that enable you to have a
pee in your car or make tea in a foreign hotel (two devices, these, not one).

Simon Barley
Sheffield

From John Cunliffe

I had a Seebackroscope probably at about the same time Alan Bennett did, and
found it equally useless. I wonder if Bennett also came across some of the
catchpennies that could be bought at the stalls along the sea-front in
Blackpool and Morecambe. One was a small box with a label on it printed so
that the box looked like a tiny radio. This would be described as 'The
Smallest Receiver in the World – 2/6'. A tiny radio would have been a
technical impossibility in those pre-transistor days and when you opened the
box, you'd find a tiny plastic or wooden chamberpot inside. Many adults must
have had to explain this joke to their bewildered children. Another object
was advertised as a patent bug-killer. It consisted of two blocks of wood,
linked by a piece of string, and marked A and B. There were printed
instructions: 'Hold block A in the right hand. Place the insect on block A.
Hold block B in the left hand, and bring it smartly down upon block A.' The
lesson pointed out at the time was never to trust advertising, and never to
'buy a pig in a poke'.

John Cunliffe
Ilkley, West Yorkshire

JNugent wrote:

> Rear vision?
>
> Sounds good - but the mekers were beaten to it by the manufacturers of
> the famous "Seebackroscope", available by mail order nd advertised in
> the rear pages of certain upmarket comics... er... fifty-plus years ago.

I think I've still got mine somewhere.

Dave Kahn wrote:

> JNugent wrote:

>> Rear vision?

>> Sounds good - but the mekers were beaten to it by the manufacturers of
>> the famous "Seebackroscope", available by mail order nd advertised in
>> the rear pages of certain upmarket comics... er... fifty-plus years ago.

> I think I've still got mine somewhere.

:-)

I never got my hands on one. But I understand they didn't work very well.

JNugent wrote:
> Dave Kahn wrote:
>>
>
> :-)
>
> I never got my hands on one. But I understand they didn't work very well.

Correct. They were utter shit. :-)