Elie Aghnides was the inventor of the faucet aerator in the 1930s, which supposedly earned him a fortune. He reportedly came up with the idea for it while looking at a waterfall.
Years later, in the 1940s, Aghnides was watching a tractor laboring through New York City’s Central Park and figured he could design a more efficient connection between the vehicle and the ground. He came up with the concept of enormous, slanted hemispherical wheels, and by the 1950s had developed a prototype called the Rhino that had amphibious capability:
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Here’s what it looks like in motion:
I’ve read at least one account claiming Aghnides “hoped to sell it to the U.S. military as a replacement for the tank,” which I doubt the veracity of as it makes no sense; a vehicle like this would make a poor mobile gun platform, and its enormous, hollow aluminum wheels are antithetical to the concept of armored vehicles.
In any case, it appears the concept never got past the prototype stage, but the vehicle’s unusual-looking enough that we thought you’d like to see it.
Source: core77