Category: Feasible inventions

The urban landscape is almost as dotted by security cameras as it is by satellite tv dishes.

Today’s invention is a behavioural upgrade to motor-driven security camera systems.

Each such camera would have a reflective grid painted on the ground in front of it. Anything moving across the grid would obscure some part of it and cause the camera(s) to be automatically pointed at that spot.

This would be disconcerting for anyone about to commit a crime. Groups of two or more potential criminals attempting distraction of a single camera would find themselves being stared at for a few moments each (and thus recorded).

Cameras which detected people loitering could perform a slight ‘shaking of the head’ motion of admonition, followed by a sideways flicking movement saying ‘keep moving over there.’

Cameras of this kind would thus provide a greater sense of surveillance and discourage crime, but with minimal modifications to existing systems.

I remember reading about how the Shuttle astronauts had serious trouble with the gloves of their spacesuits whilst in orbit.

In order to get any feel via the rubberised tips of the pressurised gloves, these had to be pulled tightly onto the ends of the fingertips -after a day’s hard graft in space, lots of fingernails had been lost (some astronauts, it seems, even remove their fingernails pre-flight).

A particularly significant problem is delamination in which the nails develop protuberant flakes which snag painfully on the glove interior.

Today’s invention is to help prevent this problem during long EVAs. It consists of a patch of finely abrasive material inside the back face of each of the glove’s fingertips and which maintains smooth ends on the already short nails.

Everyone is very concerned about pedestrians getting run over by silent, electric cars.

Today’s invention addresses another such problem of the future.

Drivers in general are increasingly insulated from their environment. Hearing other traffic noises and the sounds made by one’s own vehicle is essential to safe driving, and yet we can’t even open a window because of the volume of sound and the unpleasantness of the pollution.

I propose therefore to fit cars (including the quieter electric cars to come) with a set of microphones.

Some would be directed to listen to the sounds of nearby vehicles (especially over the driver’s shoulder). Others would provide realtime information about the sounds being made by the engine, gearbox, tyres and suspension.

All of these noises could be moderated electronically so that the cacophony was limited in the otherwise quiet interior.

These sounds would be played into the interior via directionally situated speakers -So that the sound of a car driving too close in a blindspot could be located and boosted in order to make the driver more aware of the potential danger.

A friend mentioned to me yesterday that the passage of people through the railway station ticket barriers reminded him of Young’s slits experiment.

People do seem to collide a lot on the downstream side of the ticket barriers -even if they don’t actually reinforce or annihilate, the effect is to slow the movement through the gates.

Today’s invention is to extend the barriers into a ray pattern as shown.

This allows people to work out which direction they want to move, post-barrier, and visually select the stream in advance which will lead them there.

This means that to head left on exit, route a would be selected, not route b (which would cause the kinds of collisions which currently occur between people who emerge from the normal adjacent barrier channels, turn towards each other and then collide).

It makes me laugh when military vehicles get some super new high tech camouflage such as this, which leaves the wheels easily visible.

In fact, the circularity of armoured car wheels makes them easily detectable even by robotic sentries with image processing capability.

Today’s invention is therefore a set of irregularly shaped plates, each of which hangs from a pivot attached to the vehicle’s skirt, as shown.

This effectively hides the circular wheel shape, whilst not obstructing the suspension system.

Kitchen knives are essential but they also may be employed as weapons by criminals.

Today’s invention is a mould in the form of a two-sided box, each side of which has an internal recess.

This makes it possible to place any knife in one side of the box, so that a short section of its blade lies above the recess. This depression is then filled with a cold-setting material (like the famous Sugru).

When the material has set hard, the resulting knife has a shorter exposed cutting edge, a large, rounded tip and a handle which is too large to grip comfortably enough to stage a stabbing attack.

There is also moulded-in a small secondary handle, with a deliberate stress-concentrating notch. This means that anyone exerting more than carrot-chopping force would find the handle breaking off in their hand.

(Repairing this would again just require more Sugru).

Today’s invention is a simple add-on to online shopping kart systems, based on the recent finding that we seem to have an irresistible urge to mimic what other people are doing.

When someone is looking at their own kart, they can ask to see a page showing what everyone else on the site has currently got in theirs.

Not only does this satisfy some kind of voyeuristic tendency, but shoppers can then simply click on these items to add them to their own kart.

When I get some kind of receipt, I often want to dispose of it in a way which would make it hard to extract information about my transactions.

I tend to tear up any such paper and put some of the pieces in a variety of different bins within walking (or throwing) distance of my desk.

It would still be pretty easy to complete the data just by finding a single shred of paper (we can easily read a sentence when we have only the top half).

Today’s invention is therefore to have receipts printed using Captcha text (ie crowded and bendy).

An approach like this would allow people to check their transaction, tear and disperse the shreds -and thus decrease greatly the available information from any small collection of such shreds.

(For the above reasons, I’d also actually also like a shredder which would tear paper into vertical strips, rather than beautiful, razor-cut horizontal pieces).

When it’s raining and blowing a gale, the streets are quickly littered with the fragmentary skeletons of inverted umbrellas.

Today’s invention is an umbrella which, when it is about to blow inside-out and wreck the frame, has panels which simply separate, as shown.

Since these would be held together like the lips of a resealable plastic bag, all the user would then have to do would be to retire to a less gusty doorway and reseal the edges.

When you carry a suitcase, off-centre loads create moments at the handle which can wrench one’s arm/wrist and squeeze the fingers.

This could be helped by attaching a circular handle, but a rectangular case would then potentially drag one corner on the ground -which defeats the purpose.

Today’s invention is a handle system for suitcases which consists of a comfortable grip which can slide along as shown in a channel on the top of the case.

This allows a user to place the handle, by trial and error, directly over the bag’s centre of gravity -making it much less uncomfortable to lug around.