Of the many inventions Gyro Gearloose produced over the years, his creation "Helper" played the biggest role. Gyro originally created Helper to help Scrooge McDuck and Donald Duck find money missing from Scrooge's money bin. Essentially a table lamp, Helper consists of a small robot-like body with arms and legs and a lightbulb head. The little character appeared as early as 1952, and re-emerged in the DuckTales series and in Disney comics as recently as 2002.
Gyro's inventions frequently caused more harm than good, but usually due to comical misunderstandings. In a comic published in 1957, Gyro invented a red dye so powerful that it turned the entire water supply of Duckburg red. Originally created for a local cloth maker named Donald Dock, Helper accidentally spilled some of the dye on the address and the dye was mistakenly sent to Donald Duck. Expecting the delivery of a water-purifying chemical from Gyro, Donald poured the red dye powder in the river as directed. Gyro, Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie left for a brief exile to Timbuktu and waited for the dye to wear off and the water to return to normal.
The comic book incarnation of Gyro Gearloose often returned time and again to the same invention themes. For example, a few of his inventions turned mundane items into food. The Dirt-to-Milk machine lived up to its name by converting ordinary dirt into food of all kinds. The Dirt-to-Produce or Dirt-to-Food machine did the same, but produced large quantities of fruits and vegetables. These machines exemplify the sort of fanciful and improbable inventions for which Gyro became known.
While Gyro often had trouble creating functional inventions, he sometimes invented tremendously complicated and successful things such as a time machine. This invention featured prominently in the "DuckTales" series, as Gyro, Donald, Huey, Dewey and Louie used the device to travel back in time. The time machine operated primarily as a plot device to allow the writers of the series a broader range of scenarios and locations for the episodes. For example, a visit to ancient Egypt resulted in Donald's kidnapping due to his resemblance to a revered pharaoh.