> The wildest of these ideas was a 1963 patent that, Monmonier writes, “might have made made cartoonist [Rube] Goldberg scratch his head.” The patent, by brothers Thomas and Frank Novak of Brownsville, Pennsylvania, described a stationary globe with a rotating air duct that would use an “upward air blast” to hold a sphere aloft as it orbited the Earth (above). You don’t need to be an engineer to know this would have never worked.
I am not sure how the author came to such a ridiculous conclusion. The machine would work just fine. I guess you don't need to be an engineer to be a journalist either.