Synopsis:
Scrooge hid all his money in an eerie old castle, but has now forgotten where he put it. But the Beagle Boys know!

Comments:
The science on how the human brain works is still in its absolute infancy, but Barks gave us a few handfuls of stories in which he offered us his semi-scientific solutions to some of the mysticism. In this story a Beagle Boy is tapping Scrooge gently in a particular place on his head thus making him remember certain things. Nowadays this has become a method that is being seriously investigated.
Barks also wrote several stories in which the characters changed personality in different ways not unlike what medicine can do today. The stories in U$057 The Swamp of No Return, WDCS141 'Think Boxes', WDCS145 'Hypnotizer Gun', and WDCS278 Have Gun, Will Dance are examples.
Today personality tests are relatively common occurrences. In FC0318 No Such Varmint and WDCS275 Zero Hero Barks carried the phenomenon a little further by inventing special gear to perform the tests.

Synopsis:
Scrooge, Donald and the nephews are blown through the air to a nearby small planet. It seems to be Valhalla, the home of the ancient gods!

Comments:
The scientific part of the story is very strange indeed, and the astronomer really had to come up with some convincing explanations in order to get us to accept the whole concept. See how I explain away such anomalies with scientifically provable hogwash, as Barks uttered in a later interview.
Later in the story he also lets Louie, one of the nephews, remove some of the 'scientific' gravity(!) by expressing the reader's feelings: Another of childhood's cherished illusions reduced to so many nuts and bolts.

Synopsis:
Donald invents a special radar apparatus with a screen, through which he can follow the nephews anywhere. But the radar has its flaws...

Comments:
Was Barks the first comic book artist to describe the modern video gear that surrounds us today? At least he lets Donald follow the nephews by electronic means wherever they go just as it can be experienced in today's supermarkets, banks and public places.

Synopsis:
Scrooge's treasure is in peril at the old family castle in Scotland. He takes Donald and the nephews along only to discover that the castle may be haunted...

Comments:
Scrooge uses a special apparatus to 'see' through the walls in the castle - an X-ray machine. The basic concept was real enough; the German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen used the rays to take photographs of the bones in our bodies. Today humanity would have had grave difficulties without Röntgen's ingenious invention.
But Barks took the concept a little further as his machine's rays could penetrate thick walls. This has since become reality in real life - today the Egyptian pyramids are being scanned to give up some of their secrets.

Synopsis:
Scrooge discovers that The Beagle Boys suddenly have money to burn. In fact, so much money that it must come from his Money Bin. But how?

Comments:
The normally dumb Beagle Boys have invented a brilliant device to smuggle out Scrooge's money from the Money Bin; they use a long hose with traction belts and suction feet! It can move over the ground, climb walls, and suck up money!
Years later the invention became known as an apparatus that could travel into tight places such as sewer systems. For that purpose it is mounted with a video camera that can scan the whole system.

Synopsis:
Donald takes the nephews on a holiday trip to the formerly oh-so Wild West where he volunteers to catch some cattle rustlers. He claims to be an expert...

Comments:
Barks introduced nothing less than a laser cannon years before it became common knowledge (that probably happened to many of us in 1964 when secret agent James Bond was almost split in half by a laser beam in the film Goldfinger)!
Also, in WDCS278 Have Gun, Will Dance Barks introduced a rifle that operated with special laser beams invented by military scientists.

Synopsis:
Gyro invents an unbreakable money bin for Scrooge but when Scrooge loses the combination they have to travel to the asteroids in order to obtain a metal strong enough to open the bin...

Comments:
Again, Barks was years ahead when dreaming up this story. He was fairly accurate in his descriptions of the rocket launch, the weightlessness and many other scientific facts that were not common knowledge at the time. See more of Barks' impressive space facts HERE (middle section).

Synopsis:
Donald is vacationing in the deep woods and he uses a scintillator to find the whereabouts of the nephews. But it only functions if it is turned on...

Comments:
The scintillator is an invention of Barks' and it spots uranium from a distance. In the story small balls of uranium are attached to the nephews' caps which should make it easy for Donald to locate them. Apparently Barks was not fully aware of the dangers of pure uranium to the human body; if he had been he most probably would not have had the nephews carry it around the way they did!
Two years before Barks had written another story, WDCS160 'Christmas Camel', about uranium. He was living in a desert area in California at the time and the desert was full of people looking for the very valuable uranium with Geiger counters.

Synopsis:
Donald tries to protect Scrooge's money by confining the Money Bin in a sealing wax which makes it totally impenetrable. Now, how will Scrooge get access to the money?

Comments:
Wax has been old news for centuries, but impregnable wax was unheard of in 1954. Soon it emerged in a variety of special products of which super-sealing car wax probably is the best known.
It is interesting to witness how new products are sometimes perceived by a Disney artist (see also about Uranium above). Earlier Barks was storyman on the 1944 cartoon short Plastics Inventor in which Donald bakes a plastic airplane that dissolves in a rainstorm. The plastics industry was in its infancy then, producing a weak and brittle plastic, but the material was never so poor that it would melt in water. Obviously Barks did not know that at the time.

Synopsis:
Gyro invents a special cat translator which can understand cat language. But there is a severe drawback - because now the cats can also understand Gyro!

Comments:
Barks was really ahead of his time here! Nowadays electronic translators (for example for use in our computers) are being launched. You can speak into them and get sentences translated into other languages.
You might have noticed that Gyro Gearloose has not been included in this page beside this example. The reason being that his scientific inventions would easily fill numerous pages. So if you are interested in learning more about his (and Barks'!) brainchildren you should go HERE for graphic examples and HERE for a full text listing.

FC1095 'The Bear Tamer' - 1960

In this story Little Helper invents a powerful fluid that repels bears. The formula that Barks used has been discussed among both Barksists and scientists ever since. Apparently Barks used part of a chemical formula that was a classified military secret in the USA.
When interviewed about it Barks replied: Well, I'll tell you - I just stole that out of the Encyclopedia Britannica. It was a big article on chemistry with all different chemical formulas, and it was written in this gibberish - CO H and so on - and I just looked at a whole string of those things and looked at about the middle of that. And I thought, Well, may be it's harmless enough if I just take these bunch of chemicals and sort of jumble them up and stick them on a piece of paper. Well, that is what I did, and it turned out that it was a powerful chemical formula.
Just this once Barks seems to have surpassed the skills of none less than Gyro Gearloose...