Now To Get The Anvils To Fall When I Want Them To

Everything I learned about engineering I learned from cartoons. Well maybe I can't say that, but Danish engineer Karl Kroyer can. In 1949 Carl Barks wrote the Donald Duck comic strip The Sunken Yacht where Donald and his nephews raise a sunken yacht by filling it with ping pong balls. Like painting usable tunnels on solid brick walls, running straight for at least 10 feet off a sheer drop-off cliff, making a method of reaching space by running a large rubber band between 2 trees, and having the perfect disguise by only putting on a hat or a fake mustache, I believed all cartoon things possible when I was 4. Fortunately for Kroyer, he believed in these things for much longer.
In 1964 a freighter carrying 5,000 sheep sunk in a harbor near Kuwait. The sheep died and the people were in danger of wide-spread disease from contaminated water unless the ship could be raised to remove the corpses, and soon. There wasn't much time to spare; even bringing in cranes to lift the ship would have taken too long and been too risky. Fortunately Kroyer was an inspired man. He quickly devised a method to make a tube leading to the ship and they ran many polystyrene balls (approximately twenty-seven million of them) down the tube filling the sunken freighter which soon began to rise allowing the workers to remove the sheep carcasses.
Kroyer, patting himself on the back, applied for a patent for this ingenious method of raising a sunken ship but was turned down when the patent office came across the Donald Duck version in which the idea was proven to have already been thought of 15 years prior.