Archive for: November 2009

We hear a lot these days about cars which can automatically apply the brakes and swerve to avoid collisions.

Today’s invention is a variant on that theme. The vehicle would be designed with special structural impact points built in around its bodywork. These would be capable of absorbing an enormous amount of energy, but be sparsely enough distributed so as to avoid a large weight increase.

When the usual onboard system sensed an unavoidable collision, the steering would be taken over, at the last few milliseconds, so as to actively drive the vehicle to impact on one of these strongpoints.

Just when you thought that Polaroids were finished with…
today’s invention is a low-cost sunburn avoidance tool.

A Polaroid sheet is tightly clamped within a container using a grid of bars which separate the sheet into separate windows. Each window has a light-impermeable hatch.

When sitting on the beach, one window containing a reference colour would be opened. The adjacent window would then be opened, exposing a calibrated square of film to the sun’s rays.

When the film square and the calibrated colour become visually indistinguishable, it’s time to head inside.

Today’s invention is a new way to cool one’s computer, without just bolting on a series of ever noisier fans.

The normal fan outlet in a laptop or desktop machine would be connected to a flexible hose with internal diameter of the order of 1cm and, say, 10m in length.

The other end of this hose would connected to a large, remotely-located fan (which might also be joined to many other computers in a room, for example).

This fan would be powerful enough to enhance the cooling airflow across the internals of many machines, and to overcome the pipe friction in their hoses, but also be locatable sufficiently far away (in a cupboard) that there would be an insignificant extra noise contribution from it to the users of the computers.

The air passing through this hose might even be cooled by a refrigeration unit near the fan and passed back, via a further length of hose, to each of the original computers. Computers might be sold with a powerful remote fan, and only a small internal one in order to minimise their weight.

Much as I love the idea of the paperless office, I know better than to think it’s happening anytime soon.

Today’s invention is a laptop the (strongly built) hinge action of which can be used to

I’ve spent an hour fruitlessly searching various patent databases for this one. It’s quite long enough to justify me posting this…

Think of the common door closure spring mechanism. It’s great. Now imagine it fitted with a small motor so that the door can be made to oscillate backwards and forwards.

Today’s invention is just such a device which can be use to help improve ventilation and maintain thermal equilibrium in a house or office building by wafting air backwards and forwards between rooms.

The doors would have to be driven quite slowly, through a limited arc, and have a switch to disable the motor if any resistance was sensed.

Such a system might be equipped with electronic thermometers so that it started up automatically when the ambient temperature difference between rooms exceeded some preset threshold.

People who have to work with great sheafs of paper know that sorting and shuffling this material can be hard and frustrating work. Two sheets of paper, when pressed together, resist separation because viscous air finds it difficult to flow into the widening gap between them.

Today’s invention is therefore a printer which is capable of embossing a handful of pinhead sized marks into each sheet, forming an almost invisible sparsely-dotted line from one side to the other. The line for each sheet would lie at some random angle to the edge.

These dots serve to hold each sheet very slightly away from its neighbour and make the task of separating or shuffling adjacent ones very much easier (because the air gap thickness starts from a value greater than zero).

Some of the hard plastic boxes which house products on sale are great for protecting the contents in transit and making them visible on the shelves.

The trouble is that you need a hammer and chisel to get them open, which can sometimes result in damaging the delicate product within. So people inevitably use their teeth…generally a bad choice and ironic if the the product is a toothbrush.

Today’s invention is a device a little like a staple remover. This is effectively a pair of substitute metal teeth and cheap enough to be supplied as part of the plastic packaging.

A user repeatedly bites down on the integral pads (using muscle-powered molars rather than canines), piercing the packaging and driving the ‘teeth’ gradually around the outer seam of the pack.

Apparently there is a new danger in the business of flying. People are increasingly reporting that their laptop screens are being cracked by the decision of the person sitting ahead of them suddenly to dump the seat back into the lazyboy position.

This used to be infuriating enough, but imagine having a seventeen hour flight with some snoring stranger in your lap -and a smashed laptop aaarrgghh!

Today’s invention is a cardboard tube which fits over the end of all armrests and obscures the ‘reverse’ button. To release it, you have to slide the tube off. This action takes a couple of extra seconds and exposes a sign on the other end of the armrest, which attracts the attention of the person behind.

The sign would say “look out, seat back about to descend!”

There’s not much that can be done to improve on the basic bicycle design.

Today’s invention, though, is an attempt to provide all-wheel drive to this venerable contraption.

It only takes a few degrees of handlebar rotation to steer a bike: any more and you simply fall off. This allows both wheels to be driven by a flexible, toothed rubber belt which passes over a drive wheel in the middle and coordinated derailleurs on each wheel hub.

It opens up the possibility of optimising the angular velocity of each wheel independently, improving traction on a variety of surfaces.

In silicon valley, where they aren’t shy about making money, it’s actually seen as much riskier to work for a major corporation than a startup. If the startup goes down, you have some valuable, transferable experience which will get you hired by some other garage company in the raft of such organisations. If a big company fails, it sinks like a stone, flooding the market with competitors for jobs on the next bandwagon.

Elsewhere, we desperately need to develop some healthier attitudes to risk. Leaders (remember them?) have to be prepared to defend investing even public money in experimental ways. Cherry picking, ie looking for a lottery win-sized certainty, via endless ‘due diligence,’ is flawed and sends the wrong message: “Don’t do anything until you get the guarantee of a big slice of shiny investment.”

Making money isn’t necessarily synonymous with greed. Graft need not be unglamorous. Ideas aren’t cheap.