Category: Whimsical inventions

It may be that fancy restaurants, interview lunches and dinner parties will soon benefit from serving dinner on a sensitive computing table device.

Today’s invention is a program for such a system which would be able to monitor and control a formal meal. It could display menus, ensure the place settings were correctly arrayed and alert diners to the appropriate knife to be using…if they were to pick up eating irons or glassware in the wrong order (horrors!), a small light would flash on the surface. If the wine bottle wasn’t cold enough, a message would be sent to that effect to the earpiece of the relevant waiter.

It could even determine the rate at which food was being eaten from a plate and assess, over repeated visits, the likelihood of eating disorders. If, heaven forfend, one were talking whilst food had just been lifted or had one’s elbows on the table, such faux pas could be sent in an advisory report to diners after the event.

Messy eater? The table program would even be able to calculate the area of food debris around one’s place setting and might even lower your priority on future guestlists.

Today’s invention is another attempt to stop thieves ripping off one’s fancy new in-car entertainment system.

When leaving the vehicle, a coverplate is often attached to hide the player in the fascia. My suggestion is to avoid those enticing matt black plates and use instead one which takes the shape of a convincing cassette tape player, complete with protruding cassette.

No thief in their right mind will be interested in stealing such an outdated, unsaleable unit and one’s car will therefore remain unmolested.

Many thermometers operate on the basis that some internal fluid expands when heated.

Today’s invention turns that on its head by making a thermometer consisting of a fluid with a very low coefficient of thermal expansion (eg coloured water) in a glass enclosure which expands greatly on heating (eg soda glass).

When this device comes into thermal equilibrium with something hot, the glass will expand, whilst the liquid stays at almost constant volume. The temperature will thus be measured by the fall in the liquid level.

Similarly, a temperature fall will be registered as a rise on the coolness scale.

The only embarrassing problem, to which I can confess here anyway, is dandruff. Bathing my head frequently in benzenoic shampoo does actually limit the difficulty but it can’t be good for one, longterm.

What to do? None of this matters if you insist on wearing sand coloured clothing of course -in that case, dandruff may the least of your problems.

Today’s invention is a small fan which is located inside the collar of one’s jacket. This drives air into an envelope-shaped manifold on each shoulder which is perforated on the upper surface. The jacket itself would be unlined in the shoulder region, to allow a freer passage of air through the material.

The fan would be activated when the jacket is first put on and run (quietly) until it is removed. The airflow upwards through the material would be just enough to deflect any errant flakes of epidermis away from the shoulders before landing and forming a drift.

Chewing gum is pretty disgusting stuff. When the taste has disappeared, usually after about 30 seconds’ rumination, you can swallow it (yuck), wrap it and bin it, or spit it out (gack).

It seems the last strategy is widely favoured among those who are devotees of the cud. It’s pretty difficult to come up with a way to encourage people to wrap their chewings…if I could do that, I’d invent a way to recycle the damn stuff as road paint (it usually sticks to roads and pavements so hard it costs huge amounts to freeze off).

No, today’s invention is a stopgap. Realising that people will still spit gum out, I suggest supplying them with liquorice-coloured gum. When that hits the deck, it becomes largely invisible, saving councils all those cleaning up bills.

Today’s invention is simply a range of small, pre-formed origami-esque ships which are made of lavatory paper.

These can be dropped into a toilet and used for recreational ‘target practice’ by urinating males of all ages.

Designed to be just buoyant, these might also release some vegetable dye and extra disinfectant when a direct hit was scored and a sinking achieved.

Despite the increasing restrictions placed on where people are allowed to smoke, I still frequently find myself surrounded by toxin-laden exhalations (eg when walking past the entrance of any office building).

Today’s invention is a way to limit the extent to which passive smoking is still inflicted on people.

The guts of several domestic smoke detectors would be extracted and attached to eg a waist belt. These would be capable of detecting even small quantities of smoke and their differential concentration readings used by a belt-borne pda to control a number of small fans, also carried on the belt. The nearer the smoke source, the harder would the fans be driven; resulting in active stench suppression.

It might also convey the message that standing ouside smoking is still not a healthy thing to do.

Ships, like any object moving in fluid, experience drag forces. ‘Skin friction’, the effect of viscosity, is one component, which can become as high as 70% of the total. The implication of this is that a large proportion of the power output from the ship’s propulsion system is wasted in overcoming this form of resistance. Traditional solutions involve painting on sharkskin-like coatings or injecting bubbles into the surrounding water.

Today’s invention attempts to significantly lessen the extent to which water rubbing on a ship’s hull holds it back.

The hulls of vessels (eg supertankers) would be fitted with a number of lightweight external, dish-shaped ’shields’ (the two outer ellipses in the diagram). These would be mounted, half in the water and half out, on very well lubricated central axles down which air would be blown so that the gap between the hull and the inner side of each shield would remain filled with a film of air.

The normal propulsion of the craft (shown moving rightwards) would cause these shields, with lower halves adhering to the surrounding water, to be rotated as shown.

This would also have the effect of lessening the expense of cleaning off the various forms of fouling caused by marine crustations etc on rigid hulls.

Half the fun of opening a present is the surprise obtained from removing the wrapping (The web is increasingly populated by videos of people unboxing their brand new x20j-cyberdyne, or whatever, so this must be an important phenomenon).

Today’s invention is intended to heighten that surprise: it is decoy wrapping.

Wrap would be bought two sheets at a time. An outer, translucent one, with reduced transparency and an inner one with a choice of decoy markings. These markings might be eg a well-known chocolate box design, to be used for wrapping anything other than chocolates or a famous book jacket to be used for parcelling-up something other than that particular book.

If you fancied a double bluff, of course, that would be an even bigger surprise for the lucky recipient. For those who like to undertake pre-opening investigations by shaking, this might all be extended by the addition of extra weights within the package and even eg some matchboxes filled with curiously rattling contents.

There’s a lot of well-intentioned baloney going around about how wind energy is going to help save the planet. Well, my money is on nuclear but I’m still keen on using any comparatively cheap sources which may be available.

The trouble is, wind turbines are costly -so much so that to build one big enough to be efficient, it may never be able to pay for itself within its service life. So, today’s invention is to harvest wind energy by a simpler means. Trees.

Trees thrash around if the wind gets up. There are even patents (oh dear) for systems of artificial piezoelectric leaves attached to synthetic trees -a bit like those phone masts which visually shout ‘Look, not a real tree.’

I suggest attaching to the top of each living arbor a thin wire (It might even make sense to stick on a large, leaflike vane to amplify the natural motion). The wire would run down the trunk and be wrapped around a crude ratchet, nailed to it. This would gradually tension a clockspring which would periodically drive a small dynamo.

Wires from all these devices within a forest would converge on eg a local bank of fuel cells or a branch of the main electrical grid.