Year: 2008

Having just watched the classic film LeMans again I was reminded of the dangers of carrying petrol around in a vehicle.

Today’s invention is an alternative way to transport petroleum spirit at high speed. Instead of sloshing around in a fuel tank, which, even with foam inserts, is bad for weight distribution/handling, the fuel would be loaded into cylindrical ‘bullets’. Refuelling a car would be a question of dropping a bandolier of such containers into a hatchway.

The bandolier would be engaged with a feed mechanism not unlike that on a machine gun. Pellets of fuel would be sequentially pierced (by a firing pin device) and drained into a small feeder tank. In the event of an accident, these discrete pellets would be very much harder to break open, making an explosive ignition much less likely.

If the vehicle were subject to a serious shunt, accelerometers might be used to detect this and to automatically jettison the remaining bandolier over the crash barrier.

Submarines captured my imagination first when watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Stingray in the 60s. Today’s subs can circumnavigate the globe, without having to surface, because they have nuclear power plants on board.

Even these high-powered monsters would benefit, however, from not having a giant conning tower sticking out of the deck. This allows the crew to see further when travelling on the surface but adds greatly to the drag when moving underwater and makes the boat highly visible when surfaced.

Today’s invention is a virtual conning tower. The submarine’s hull would be a single, streamlined torpedo shape with minimal protrusions. Instead of a tower, a small flock of UAVs would be released from the casing of the submerged vessel, break the surface and then fly at variable altitude and perhaps at a small distance from the mother ship.

These would be steerable from below, enabling advanced reconnaissance via onboard cameras (submarines can communicate subsea using radio transmissions at around 80Hz). The UAVs could be made effectively undetectable by radar and provide all the benefits, in terms of damage tolerance, of a swarm of aerial robots (at most, these might be seen as a flock of seabirds).

It might even be possible to have a tubular hull shift ballast so as to stand nearly on end in the water -acting as a temporarily high conning tower. This would also allow the diameter of the hull to reduced, cutting drag significantly.

How to get one’s message across to people who have a rapidly filling email inbox and a reluctance to open messages?

Today’s invention makes a new attempt to introduce some novelty to this endeavour.

Send the person an email entitled ‘Please turn on threading in your email program.’ Then send them a series of sequentially numbered messages, the titles of which form the message you want them to get, -but without their having to open any emails. Irrespective of the receipt order, the email program will place these in the sequence intended by the sender.

Although threading often imposes some kind of indentation on one’s message titles, it might also be possible to ‘draw’ an ASCII-art-like image by creating a roughly-aligned sequence of symbols in titles.

For somebody who tries never to make hardcopies of anything, I seem to spend a lot of time thinking up ways to improve computer printer performance.

In order to save on the amount of paper that’s wasted, today’s invention is white ink. One’s printer will create a set of human-undetectable marks on every printed page. When that page is returned to the feed tray, it will be identified and the white ink applied, like Tippex, to the pre-existing letterforms (whose precise locations etc will have been stored in printer memory).

This whiting-out could occur in realtime ie with one old letter being ‘snowpaked’ over just before the new one is printed. Thus a single sheet of paper could be reused multiple times -as in a medieval palimpsest.

Springing a leak in the hull of a ship is generally a very bad situation; doubly so for a submarine.

Rather than just manning the pumps and stuffing wadding into a breach, today’s invention offers a new approach to the imperative of not sinking.

When some hull perforation is detected or reported, a small submersible is rapidly released from the body of the vessel and automatically driven across the hull to the approximate location of the hole (it could be clamped magnetically to the surface and positioned more accurately using standard subsea lights and cameras).

A powerful refrigeration unit on board this drone sucks in a stream of seawater and blasts out a jet of frozen particles which are directed to the holed area. These build up and form a coarse plug, durable enough to allow more effective repair (and, in the case of a sub, surfacing). Such a system could also operate inside a vessel, given enough space for the required plumbing.