Today’s invention is a cure for the main problem with wellington boots (aside from the look).
When it rains, water floods down one’s legs and fills the boots.
Instead, imagine that one’s outdoor trousers have some extra length, doubled over and held in place by a number of circumferentially-placed poppers (orange).
When you put your boots on, undo these poppers and attach the outer ones to corresponding ones on the boots’ outside (blue).
Apparently lots of eye injuries occur when people remove corks from champagne.
Today’s invention aims to limit this threat to festivities.
Each cork would have a small number of vent holes drilled through it prior to insertion in a bottle.
As the cork is extracted, these holes would gradually release the internal pressure, greatly reducing that available to cause injury.
I was shopping recently in a supermarket when I kept spotting isolated products seemingly left in the wrong places.
It looked as if people had found product B afer having placed product A in their trolley and then dumped A in the wrong location.
Today’s invention is a simple way for supermarkets, which are always intensely data-hungry, to make use of this extra stream of information.
All the shelves in a supermarket would have a small trough running along the bottom.
If customers did an ad-hoc swap, they would be asked to put the reject item in the trough when they picked up item B.
This would allow staff to easily locate any produce requiring rehoming but it would also make them aware of when a strong preference has been expressed…vital for future marketing.
Here’s a merry festive scenario. Drive into windswept petrol station. Queue for ten minutes to get a space at a pump. Discover that that particular one is out of the type of fuel you need.
Today’s invention attempts to overcome some of the frustration associated with having to wait and then queue again.
Vehicles would each be fitted with a small radio transponder. This would announce your arrival to the garage, together with information about which side of your car your filler cap is on.
It would also relay data about the type of fuel required (stopping you filling with the wrong stuff). In addition, it could alert the garage to any oversize vehicles.
A light-up arrow would be attached above each side of each pump unit.
One of these would flash at each incoming vehicle indicating where best to fill up in order to minimise queue time and ensure that you draw up alongside only a working, appropriate pump.
Many people who use supermarket trolleys suffer from poor eyesight.
At the same time, packaging is increasingly covered with information at high density…some of it small-print essential to the purchase decision.
Today’s invention is a magnifying glass in the handle of a supermarket trolley (shown in pink). In fact the whole of the handle could be a cylindrical, perspex lens.
This would allow any package (orange) to be passed behind the handle so that minute text could be scrutinised effectively (via the red virtual image indicated).
I’ve written in the IOTD ebook about imagining myself small enough to fit inside a model aircraft or a Lego house.
I used to find this much easier to do as a small child than I do now.
Taking up a different point of view, by projecting your mind inside small structures, is a way to spur creativity, but it’s also great fun.
Today’s invention is a theme park in which many childhood toys are scaled up to full-size, whilst still retaining all the characteristics of the toys themselves.
This might mean squeezing through the window of a matchbox car with solid doors and a one-piece, low-resolution, red plastic interior, or having tea with a lifesized Barbie in a scaled up dolls-house.
Personally, I’d be keen on Scalextric at 1:1 (would the speed scale linearly?)
Even though automated telemedicine is all set to take over healthcare, people will still need to see a medical practitioner in the flesh on occasion.
Their fee rates require that there will always be too few of them to go around -which necessitates, in turn, the survival of the waiting room.
The ancient, germ-promoting magazines will eventually be replaced by tablets or interactive surfaces.
Today’s invention is an application running on all such networked machines. Since the ability to control one’s surroundings affects people’s health this would allow the current constituency of waiting folk to vote for which selection of music or TV channel should currently prevail.
This system would allow a truly democratic choice to be made, rather than the default ‘middle of the road easy listenin’ of eg Radio 2.
A rolling average choice could be calculated every 10 minutes or so.
Such a system could easily be provided in hairdressers, airports and bars as well and should also offer the option of silence.
(If you really must have a recorded soundtrack, you can bring your own speakers and plug them in -before visiting the audiologist).
Many armoured vehicles carry extra plating in order to pre-detonate incoming armour-piercing shells.
Today’s invention is to extend this idea to the provision of a double layer of plates to each side of such a vehicle.
This hinged plate unit could be moved to an angled orientation in order to provide improved deflection capabilities for incoming rockets etc.
The movement would be electrically driven and controlled from inside.
In defence against small arms fire, this unit might even be swung outwards under electronic control to ‘bat’ missiles back at those who launched them.
The double wall would also allow infantrymen to perch and shelter within this gap during movements towards a battle area.
I’m a great admirer of this technique for creating images in grass by controlling local photosynthesis.
Today’s invention is related but perhaps more prosaic.
It’s a robot lawnmover the depth of cut of which can be varied in the course of its transit across a lawn.
It would therefore leave behind patterns corresponding to the greyscales in an image.
Pictures could be programmed into one’s grass including those which are distorted so as to appear standing up from the ground (when viewed, eg, from one’s house).
People with gardens alongside motorways, trainlines or runways might be paid to have their robot mowers advertise certain brands.
I have been hearing some dreadful stories about people marooned in lifts.
In movies, such unfortunates always find a trapdoor to allow them to climb up or down the liftshaft. This would be highly dangerous and today’s invention offers an alternative.
A lift is shown stuck between floors 3 and 4. Conventional lift doors would be impossible to open.
Instead, why not have doors which are made in horizontal strips?
These would normally be locked together but when the lift emergency button was pressed, the strips (yellow in cross-section) would be individually rendered free to swing outwards (blue). This would limit any sudden vertical movements of the lift whilst occupants exited to either floor n or n+1.
The potential mind-numbing effects of a long weekend in limbo would thus be avoided.
