Martha’s Vineyard Museum is launching an exhibit that celebrates the Island’s inventors throughout the years. Inventive Islanders opens Friday, Feb. 12 and will be on display through Memorial Day.

The idea for the exhibit came from regional high school teacher Chris Baer, the museum said in a press release, who discovered a database of U.S. patent office records on Google. Mr. Baer wrote an article in the museum’s scholarly journal, The Dukes County Intelligencer, which inspired the exhibit.

Island inventions include a cigar-smoking automaton dating to 1904, an artificial ear dating to 1902, a one-seated “aeroplane” dating to 1910, and a flying car called an “airphibian” invented in 1950.

“What we’re fascinated with is putting these people into the context of what the Vineyard was like at the time they were inventing these cool things,” museum assistant curator Anna Carringer said in statement. “We’ll be seeing an entirely new aspect to the lives of some Vineyarders that we thought we knew.”

The exhibition will open Feb. 12 with an event from 4 to 6 p.m. Admission to the show is free for members, $8 for non-members.