Today’s invention is a pair of mittens which are set into the outside of a warm jacket -exactly aligned with where the wearer’s hands lie when his or her arms are folded.
#1054: Armitts
Month: October 2009
#1053: SodaSign
Today’s invention is a way to create a personal message inside a bottle of fizzy drink (or ‘soda’).
A labelmaker device is used to print a short message, such as a name, as a negative image on a transparent tape. This is then attached to the outside of any plastic bottle filled with gassy drink.
A small heat lamp (perhaps built into the labelling device) is briefly shone on the tape template, This activates nucleation sites on the inside of the bottle wall, so that whenever the cap is removed, the message is spelt out in bubbles on the surface.
#1052: Heelshield
Blisters are one way in which the body reacts to damaging friction.
Rather than wait to develop an unpleasant, painful blister, today’s invention is a stick-on synthetic blister, designed to provide the same level of skin protection but without the searing pain and infection risk.
This would consist of a thin, durable, flexible envelope containing a bio-compatible lubricant.
One side of this blister would have an adhesive patch which would allow it to be applied before wearing new boots on a long walk, for example.
#1051: Anatarmour
Everyone who has to wear a bulletproof vest complains about the bulk and weight -people have been killed because they chose to remove uncomfortable kit.
Today’s invention is a vest which concentrates the most protective elements (eg ceramic shields and kevlar patches) primarily in front of the body’s most vital organs.
This anatomical emphasis increases flexibility, reduces weight and has the effect of achieving a more workable compromise between survivability and wearability.
#1050: ChargeChair
Wheelchairs tend to be heavy and pretty bulky, but why not take advantage of this shape factor that’s designed primarily for stability?
Here’s one idea I thought up earlier.
In an electrically driven chair, there’s room on board for all manner of useful stuff. Today’s invention is to equip wheelchairs with battery-charging facilities for mobile phones and wireless hubs providing extra bandwidth that can be rented out to other members of the public.
This would make those disabled people who chose to carry a suitable sign, a source of some very valuable (but hard to steal) resources. It might also encourage communication with people who sometimes find themselves overlooked.
#1049: Timeline
Yet another one-handed alternative watch, I’m afraid.
Today’s invention is a watch with an hour hand only.
As the (longer than average) hour hand rotates, so a slider (driven by a counter-rotating cam with a return spring) moves outwards along it from the centre (indicating ‘0 minutes past’) to the end (indicating ’60 minutes past’).
This gives more than sufficient precision for most events and is especially good at allowing the half-past position to be read (due to our sensitivity to symmetry).
#1048: Shaveshaker
Still irritated by the mess which my multiblade razor picks up, I tried oscillating it underwater. Good news, it gets pretty clean; extending its life and saving some of the fortune required to stay shaven.
Today’s invention is a multiblade razor with a handle which fits my electric toothbrush drive unit (in place of the brush head).
Attach razor to brush and hold under warm water. The resulting buzzing seems to work quite well as a way to dislodge the stubble.
Repeating this in the air afterwards holds corrosion at bay and maintains the blades for even longer.
#1047: Cowlloud
Wearing a goose down insulated coat recently, I found myself in a rainstorm with the hood up, just before crossing the road. Bad move. It turns out that this material, which is great at heat insulation, also forms a really good sound barrier.
Today’s invention is a way to help hood wearers avoid getting run over.
It consists of a pair of inbuilt earbuds which are wired to a pair of small microphones on the outside of the hood. This would be good for getting to sleep in noisy, outside environments…to silence the background din, just switch off one’s mics.
I’d also like these to be steerable by the wearer, so that one could listen more clearly to certain noise sources rather than others by pointing the mics in that direction.
#1046: WarWords
I read yesterday about the tragic case of a girl who was killed when hit by a box of leaflets airdropped over Afghanistan.
The boxes containing leaflets are supposed to break open in midair, when dumped from the back of a plane and shower the paperwork across the countryside. The messages are intended to demoralise attackers or warn civilians of forthcoming bombardments, etc.
Well, personally I think this kind of practice is ok if it helps stop fighting, but there has to be a better way.
Today’s invention is a glorified printer which is installed in an aircraft and ‘clocked’ to pump out paper sheets at a faster-than-normal rate. This might even be placed in a UAV, with paper in the form of a roll filling the fuselage.
As each printed page emerges, it is pressed lightly by a small piston into a cylindrical mould, several times -crumpling the sheet into a 3-D object without tearing it. The resulting pellets can then be jettisoned, falling separately from a safer, increased height in a predictable way onto a targeted area -without posing any danger to those below.
