Year: 2007

It’s ridiculous to expect people to choose between extinguishers when they have just discovered a fire. Interpreting iconic or written instructions, when you can feel the flames, is really not a viable solution…especially since using the wrong extinguishant (eg water on a hot oil fire) can have catastrophic consequences.

Today’s invention is a way to deal with this issue.

Each bank of three or four different extinguishers would be equipped with an “electronic nose” capable of determining the nature of the fire by analysing the airborne combustion products. This would be helped by locating the nose sensor at the inlet to the extinguisher hose (or horn), being held towards the fire.

If the sensor detects e.g. the products of burning electrical insulation, it will decide to allow use of dry powder and to restrict any attempt to use a water-filled unit. This choice could be indicated by having a green led light up on any available extinguishers which are appropriate to the current fire.

This might be further automated by equipping smoke detectors each with one of these ‘sniffers’ and a low cost infra-red camera to locate the seat of the fire. This could then allow the right extinguisher to be automatically pointed and activated.

Although it’s inexplicable, there are still some people and institutions who prefer to send hardcopy documents rather than electronic ones (Only a couple of years ago, the Law Society of England and Wales, for example, declared itself to be ‘against email’).

This means searching for a post box and ensuring that the right stamps have been applied. After that, you just wait for some response (assuming no postal workers’ strike that week).

Today’s invention is an alternative way for the Great Unwired to send hardcopies to each other.

Banks are still reasonably trusted institutions (if you ignore all those missold pensions, Nick Leeson, sub prime mortgages…). They have ubiquitous ATMs which are capable of handling deposit envelopes and a secure way to gain access to and, if necessary pay for, their services.

People wanting to post a letter could write it as normal, print an address on a deposit envelope and enter that into their local ATM. The content could be automatically extracted, scanned, identified from bank address records and sent electronically to whichever ATM the intended recipient used next. On logging in with their pin, the ATM would print a copy of the document, insert it in an envelope and drop it into their hands.

I’m not one of those people with a phobic reaction to having a cannula inserted into my arm (especially if it’s done by a professional, practised nurse, rather than some bleary, junior medic).

I’ve noticed that a lot of thinking has gone into the design of these things to make them easy to insert and keep them sealed against infective agents. The English NHS buys about 20M of these a year, so the cost implications of any change are significant.

One problem is that this design of cannula creates a finger-sized protruberance from the the surface of one’s skin…just asking to get snagged on a hospital gown, bedclothes, stethoscopes etc. After a few hours, any movement of the needle, driven by the external plastic collar, is painful and messy (forcing the needle into the vein wall).

Today’s invention is a fine nylon tube which is driven down the inside of the needle, after it has penetrated a blood vessel, by the attachment of a syringe or a tube leading to a ‘drip’. This proboscis greatly decreases the damage which the needle can do to the inside of a vein and the discomfort of wearing a cannula for a few days is therefore lessened.

In addition, when the needle is withdrawn, the nylon tube still protrudes from it, making it very unlikely that medical staff will prick themselves on a ‘sharp’ covered in someone’s blood.

It had to happen, I finally got around to reinventing the wheel.

Rather than persisting with that simple old round geometry, today’s invention is a way to have wheels (top of the image) transform themselves into tracks (bottom of the image) by varying their internal geometry. The suggestion is to do this by using an outer track with driver wheels raised off the ground in both cases. Idler wheels would be moved radially inwards or outwards within slots to create a circular arc or flat profie (or intermediates between these).

In the wheel case, the idlers might even be locked in position around the circumference of a circular hub, so that the whole thing could roll, effectively using the track only as a wheelrim.

This would provide, when a wheel’s low-rolling and turning resistance weren’t required, a better response in terms of grip and load distribution.

Someone has now built a version of this (although they seem to be using extensible tracks and only two idlers, in a rather complicated mechanical system -but it certainly works).

When planning permission is sought for some new building, it can send small ripples of uncertainty around a neighbourhood. Amongst the local residents, there will usually be some knee-jerk noes and some don’t knows and some don’t cares.

In order to help people form a more informed opinion, today’s invention is simply to create a VR simulation of the proposed building, based on any CAD drawing that has already been prepared.

This would need to be rendered in sufficient detail that issues like the before-and-after light levels could be investigated, together with questions regarding access, services, etc. I’d like to see an acoustic model incorporated which could help assess how noise levels might be affected for example, and for industrial buildings, how waste might be managed.

Only then could all parties really begin to understand the implications of a planned development -and have their concerns validated or negated.

The effort required to build such a model would be substantial (although more useful than a cardboard version) but it would provide a valuable extra hurdle in helping to prevent unwanted development or unfounded objections.

Academics are restricted sometimes from making full use of their mental powers because the nature of their profession is that reputation counts for a lot. This can be easily misinterpreted to mean that making any unsubstantiable suggestion, or even slightly crazy proposition, is forbidden to them.

They therefore need a way to bounce early-stage ideas around with more than their trusted collegiate peer-group -but without exposing themselves to embarrassment.

Today’s invention is a bulletin board for academics on which their postings appear anonymously. This allows them to contribute ideas without jeopardising their reputations or being intimidated by the “standing” of others. It would also mean, of course, that they would miss out on the credit for any of these ideas. (This could actually be good, in screening out those people for whom the business of intellectual creativity is just an ego trip).

At any time, anyone posting to a given thread could propose a group meeting to advance their thinking face-to-face (with a view to building some kind of research programme, perhaps). There could even be a mechanism by which those who were against a meeting might find themselves simply not invited to it.

It’s been assumed, since trains were invented, that they would be giant, friction-driven monsters made of cast iron and brass.

Today’s invention revises that idea…by suggesting (again) that the existing tracks be used to carry micro-carriages.

These would flexibly transport small freight packages (maybe as small as a suitcase) and would run on only one track at a time. This would avoid all the nightmarish scheduling issues to do with having thousands of two-directional trains vying for the same track space.

Each small carriage would be made of lightweight materials and be individually driven by a small gas turbine -or even a modern steam engine with a low pressure jet exhaust (anything other than rail friction -maybe even mag-lev?).

What happens when vast numbers of these are heading for multiple collisions across the network? Well, each would also carry a lightweight sigmoid-shaped bridge rail. When a collision is predicted, the carriage would lower its bridge rail section to one side of the track and either park itself momentarily, in its own mini siding, or place it between the tracks in order to swap rails.

This approach would also allow all conventional rail traffic to continue on its merry way as normal.