#1437: FallPhone

Cats can adjust their moments of inertia as they fall from a height so that they tend to land feet first.

Today’s invention exploits this thinking by equipping eg cellphones with mutipart batteries (or other masses) which can be driven rapidly from place to place within the casing.

If a phone (or other fragile, portable electronic device) is dropped, for example, the accelerometers on board, which would normally just switch it off before impact, detect the axes of spin and move the battery masses so as to orientate the device (since rotational momentum is conserved).

This ensures the phone will always land on a small, impact-absorbing pad at one end and thus avoid being damaged.