Category: Feasible inventions

It seems that if you want to swirl your wine in the glass before sniffing it, there is an optimal combination of depth, glass diameter and rotation rate.

Depending on these factors, you can generate dynamic wave patterns with either single or multiple crests so that the amount of mixing between air and wine can be controlled.

Today’s invention is therefore a wineglass turntable for viniculturists.

Pour the wine in to the marked level and then run the turntable at the correct speed. After the appropriate interval, smell the wine.

Oh, and if it smells ok, drink it.

If I had only a year to break the man-powered land speed record I wouldn’t develop a whole new machine.

I’d take the best cyclist I could get and seat him on the fastest racing cycle I could find, as comfortably as possible.

Then I’d assemble a shell around him using oasis plant watering bricks. This would be very crude to start with but it’s sufficiently soft stuff to allow a really streamlined shape to be sculpted that weighs almost nothing. The critical element in reaching top speeds is the form drag -given a tight timescale I’d minimise wind resistance and forget the other details.

I’d also supply a leaning pad for the rider’s chest so that he could relax as much as possible (no need to steer in this record attempt).

The other critical aspect is to allow the ‘engine’ to breathe effectively. I’d run the record attempt somewhere at low altitude with lots of trees around for oxygenation.

I’d also cut a few discreet slots in top side of the oasis shell to ensure no buildup of carbon dioxide.

In former times, troops rode horses -making it possible for them to get from A to B as a dispersed group. Attacking them therefore had to be done largely one at a time.

Now that warfare (or ‘peacekeeping’) is mechanised, soldiers get into increasingly large vehicles which need massive amounts of armour to resist eg landmines and rockets.

Today’s invention is a way to protect soldiers from roadside bombs and other weapons directed at large vehicles.

It is the armoured ATV (or four-wheeled motorcycle).

Militaries around the world already use these vehicles and the cost of buying one per soldier on patrol is certainly less than buying the equivalent capacity in armoured Humvees.

By adding a steel shell around the driver of each ATV, it becomes much harder to kill numbers of soldiers, since they are dispersed, still quite fast moving and with some significant individual protection.

Everyone knows about the invention of Velcro being based on observation of the burrs on Burdock seeds by Georges de Mestral.

Today’s invention is to take a step back from that and apply such burrs in a viral marketing campaign.

Natural burrs would be attached to a number of fabric patches applied in critical locations within eg an airport.

People passing would brush by these and attract some onto their clothing. In the train or elsewhere, later, these would transfer from person to person.

Each burr would have a small label attched, bearing a web address for the product or service being advertised.

The burrs themselves would be biodegradable and cause no damage to anyone’s outfit.

Today’s invention is a way to better represent the relative merits of athletes or other sportspeople.

Instead of the usual podium, there would be long ramp. At the top of this, the gold medal winner would stand to receive his/her medal.

A display on the side of the ramp would indicate the relative positions of all competitors in the final -or even the whole event. This would allow athletes to take their places on the ramp, even if they weren’t medal winners.

The audience could thus get a better overall view of the competition result, as well as being more inclusive of everyone who took part.

Amazon have got around to allowing people to trade-in their books etc online.

Today’s invention is to add the next obvious step to this process by equipping users with a list of the books they have bought from the site itself.

These would be selected by clicking images of the covers and thus avoiding the onerous task of manually typing in eg ISBN details.

Today’s invention is simply to reuse contact lens containers as 2-dimensional spirit levels.

These are often hemisperical and with a central mould flashing so that the position of the water level inside relative to this can be judged by the human eye very accurately.

Such a system would make it possible for all sorts of products to incorporate a number of integrated levels…at very little cost.

Once the device or system (think picture frame or washing machine) had been correctly orientated, the cases could be removed and thrown away.

I really like the Petzl headlamps, which now have a natty push button switch on the top.

They used to have a tiny, stiff sliding switch which made it really difficult to turn one on in the dark. You could spend quite a while forcing the slider in the wrong direction (because it was stiff even in the right direction).

Today’s invention is a simple way for lamps like this to preserve the old switch design but to ensure no more delays when the light needs to be lit.

It consists of a foolproof way to orientate the lamp, even in the dark and when working with one hand. A pair of closed-ended tubes would be moulded into the body of the lamp (or retrofitted in the form of a collar). These would be simple to locate by touch alone and correctly orientate the device for either left or right handers.

The user would know that these should accommodate index and second fingers, allowing the thumb infallibly to push the switch on, opposed by the fingers gripping the tubes’ interiors.

I was surprised not to be able to find this already patented.

Today’s invention is dental tape which comes in short lengths, each of which has tapering dental brush bristles woven into it.

In this way the tape, once inserted between teeth in the usual way, allows the brush to be pulled between the teeth, until the correct size for brushing is found.

No more poking the wires of oversized brushes into one’s gums or having to guess which combination of floss brushes to buy.