Edison's Concrete Houses You Could Pour Like Cake

In 1908, Thomas Edison designed a system to build a whole house in a single day by pouring concrete into one giant mould. He wanted to solve the housing shortage by making homes cheap — around $1,200 instead of the usual $3,000. The mould included everything: walls, bathtubs, even a concrete piano. The iron moulds cost about $175,000 each, a fortune at the time. Only around eleven were ever built in Union, New Jersey. People refused to live in them because the walls were cold, rough, and leaked, and they looked gloomy. Some still stand today as a failed experiment.