Category: Whimsical inventions

A young man I know has taken the initiative and managed to get his community council to equip the local park with a basketball hoop.

These are expensive and so today’s invention is intended to help people play competitive games with only one.

The hoop and its frame would be mounted on a wheeled base, running in a semicircular track, as shown (A-B).

Immediately one team gets possession, the hoop flashes around to the end they are playing towards.

The movement could be powered by an electric motor, but I fancy the idea of two teams of supporters, vying, under an official’s supervision, to move the hoop to let their side score.

Astronauts on the space station have to live with no real definition of ‘up‘.

Today’s invention is to replace each of the many signs on board by a small, square electronic display. These displays would have a camera on board with face detection capability.

On spotting the face of an astronaut, a sign would be able to orientate its text and graphical message to match the crew member’s current alignment.

I’ve joked before that hunting will only be a sport when the animals are equipped with weapons.

Today’s invention is a truly sporting rifle.

Instead of being camouflaged, this would have a number of small screens attached, each displaying moving, coloured patterns and with the potential to emit sounds.

The telescopic sight would have a camera embedded within it.

These add-ons would handicap the hunter in a quantifiable way. Users of such rifles would find it more challenging to approach a game animal but when sufficiently close, they would have the option to kill it or photograph it.

For people who don’t need to eat game, I’m hoping that creating an image of such a creature, with their sights superimposed and details of their increased visibility at the time embedded, would allow more bragging rights than returning with a corpse.

This would thus help preserve the lives of many wild animals.

It seems that if you have to move from room to room whilst remembering even simple items, the doorways themselves can trigger forgetting of the crucial data.

Today’s invention is therefore a small recorder which can be attached to a door (for use within eg stockrooms or on board ships)

As you approach the door, simply say what your current task is eg “find the yellow-handled screwdriver.”

On emerging through the doorway, a speaker on that side would repeat the message, keeping you on track.

Today’s invention provides a way for carrier based jets to avoid the need for folding wings (which add complexity and weight to already complicated systems).

Instead, jets’ undercarriages would be arranged so that they could all adopt the same angle of tilt and thus crowd closely together on the deck.

These machines could even be equipped with parking sensors that cars commonly have, in order to minimise contact between closely parked planes.

If you’re an impatient type like me, you’ll be frustrated by the slowness of almost all laser printers.

Today’s invention offers a way to speed things up.

Small areas of the image to be printed would each be written onto a flat, charged plate by dedicated, local lasers.

A bank of such plates would allow both sides of many pages to be printed at the same time.

This would parallelise the process so that the overall print time for a multipage document could be reduced to milliseconds (at the expense of hugely duplicated hardware).

I’ve had some thoughts before about ways in which (dangerous) level crossings might be eliminated.

Today’s invention is in the same mould.

It consists of a train the carriages of which are joined by a hinge which can be moved from the base to the roof (pink dots).

The hinges are powered so that carriages can exert torque on each other.

As the train approaches a level crossing where a conventional vehicle is crossing (grey), so the train arches up and over the crossing as a bridge-shaped wave passes backwards through the train.

High heels aren’t really made for walking in. They also have a tendency to cause ankle and leg injuries.

Today’s invention is a high-heel shoe which has a slight platform sole and in which a gyroscope with a vertical axis is located.

Every time the shoe is placed on the ground, the gyroscope fires up in order to maintain the sole parallel to the floor. This stabilises the wearer’s ankle, making it much less likely that she will fall over.

Once the shoe is lifted off the floor, the gyroscope is braked, so that normal leg movements are again possible.

This might also keep the wearer’s feet warm, whilst traversing eg a red carpet.

For geeks who are keen on the physics of wine, today’s invention is a possible gift.

A base unit can accommodate any wine bottle, once opened.

A semicircular cam moves laterally backwards and forwards along the base, changing the angle of the bottle from moment to moment.

This it does in order to maximise the surface area of liquid, so as to let it ‘breathe’ effectively, but without spilling any wine.

This is a complex optimisation problem, given the internal geometry of bottles, which is probably best solved by iteration.

Each time wine is drunk from the bottle and it is replaced on the base, the bottle would find a new angle, but stilll not splash any on the table.

If you want to stop someone copying your electromechanical product -and selling it as their own, you could try obtaining a patent in that someone’s country. If you don’t have the cash, consider today’s invention.

Sensors within the machine’s casing would detect any attempt to open internal enclosures that weren’t required for normal maintenance/access. These could be wired to a hidden mobile phone which would alert you as manufacturer.

Rather than generating a ‘cease and desist’ letter, however, these sensors would automatically release a fast-curing epoxy cement within the enclosures.

One component of the resin would be impregnated with metal fibres, so that the device would short itself out before being encased like a fly in amber.

This tactic is reasonably cheap, poses no danger to anyone, but results in a collection of nonfunctioning bricks which is no longer cost effective to reverse-engineer.

Personally, in advance of any of this, I like the idea of having the phone say “This device will self destruct in five seconds…”