Cracked.com posted an interesting article that detailed some of the most unbelievable Macguyver like solutions imaginable. They include a WWII soldier that copied a map with Jello, Astronauts building a airscrubber with space junk, a scientist who made a breakthrough with Shrinky dinks, and two stories of prison escape; one by way of dental floss, the other via raincoats.
The spacecraft crew worked 1.5 days without sleep in order to construct a air-scrubber which was held together with random junk and duct-tape in order to survive when Nasa miscalculated oxygen needs for two members instead of three. (Rocket scientists eh)
The Scientist had been studying microfluidics (fluids on the microscopic scale) and was strapped for materials so she used the SlinkyDinks and based the design off of the pattern of the platic.
Three inmates escaped the world famous Alcatraz prison relying only on a lifeboat made out of raincoats. They made a drill out of a vacuum cleaner motor to drill through the prison walls, and made dummy heads out of toilet paper and soap so that they would appear to be in their respective beds. Supposedly one of the inmates had spent his entire life in and out of prison and possessed an extremely high IQ. The inmates constructed a raft out of 50 raincoats either stolen or borrowed from their time spent in prison. The three were never found.
In the second prison escape story Vincenzo Curcio used dental floss to saw through the metal bars in his prison cell. In the same year Antonio Lara also escaped by using the same method, although he only made it out of his cell to kill another inmate, not escape from prison.
Finally, the WWII pilot copied a map using jello which they pressed onto the map, and then pressed the jello onto a sheet of clear greaseproof paper. They used to Jello to copy over thirty maps without raising the suspicion of the enemy because the maps remained intact.
