Category: Feasible inventions

It’s not as if there are many community bike-share schemes left (didn’t all the bikes get thrown on a late-night lorry to Amsterdam and resprayed en-route?).

Anyway, today’s invention is a way to make such bikes somewhat more available and secure, without having to leave permanent bike racks for everyone to trip over.

A single hemispherical weight is bolted to the pavement. The top of this has a bicycle pedal rigidly attached.

The scheme’s bikes all have their left pedal modified to incorporate a small padlock. The two bars of this padlock can penetrate through the right pedal of any adjacent bike, ensuring that all bikes stay upright. All of the padlocks use the same key which is supplied only to members of a community of limited size (eg a College).

This allows people to walk up, detach a bike, ride around and then leave the bike anywhere with a pavement hemisphere (no need to carry bikelocks).

Bikes would be branded according to the group they served.

We seem to search for items in random assortments most successfully by colour (rather than eg by shape alone). Try looking for a big brass screw in a box of small grey ones). Today’s invention is a way to ensure than new screws are findable, even when tipped into a box of various random fixtures.

A small ring of paint, of a colour unique to a given design of screw, would be sprayed onto the threads (not heads) of all of the new screws of that type during production in the factory.

They could all later be tipped into one’s screws/nails/sundry small parts bin.

Looking for eg three purple screws would then be made very much easier when staring into the box.

Ordinary heavy punchbags have a tendency to get compressed with use by boxers so that hitting one is like punching a bag full of bricks.

Today’s invention is a punchbag which has symmetrical ends. Each end has a zippered closure containing a set of suspension chains.

After each week’s use in a gym, the chains can be zippered into their envelope and the opposite end opened up to hang the bag.

Inverting the bag periodically should greatly lessen the hardening effect -allowing longer workouts and helping avoid injuries to hands and wrists.

Today’s invention is a bottlecap with an integral bottle opener.

This would be supplied on two bottles in eg a six pack and can be used to open the other bottles more conveniently than banging the caps on a table edge.

Felt markers are generally very useful, until you need to create a mix of thick and thin lines (try switching from flip chart to writing on a postit note using a standard Sharpie).

Today’s invention is a felt marker with a ‘nib’ on either end and sharing the same ink reservoir.

Each nib would have its own sealable cap as usual, but one would be much finer than the other.

When I’m making tea, I can often find myself boiling the water, searching for teabags etc and then absent-mindedly flicking the kettle switch back to ‘on’ without really needing to reboil.

Today’s invention is therefore a kettle whose bimetallic switch will only allow the water to be heated if it is, say, >5 degrees below 100C.

At higher temperatures, the tea won’t actually suffer noticeably taste-wise at all.

Thus, if the water temperature is 98C and you flick the kettle on, instead of wasting a huge amount of energy, the kettle will emit satisfying recorded noises of water boiling.

It’s easy to scan a product in a shop with eg a smartphone and get a tonne of information about the damage it caused by being flown around the planet, how many calories it will attach to your waistline etc., etc.

Today’s invention extends that idea into a new dimension: profit.

Each product would be assessed by an online crowd of experts with inside knowledge of processing and manufacture in a number of industries. They would come up with an estimate of its cost to make and appear on the shelf.

This would then allow one’s phone to indicate the markup being asked by the store and provide consumers with visibility of a seller’s true pricing policy.

Have you ever noticed the big difference between even The best keyboard keys and the way your mouse button works?

The keys are designed to move vertically through a relatively large distance, so that your fingers can change their mind in the course of a mistaken selection and also, I guess, so that touch typists can rest their hands on the keyboard without accidentally typing. Most people, though, aren’t touch typists.

Today’s invention is a keyboard for the rest of us -ie with keys made in the manner of mouse buttons. These would have a very small travel, require little force but also give crisp auditory and tactile feedback -something that conventional keys rarely manage.

The keys would probably be best hinged from the edge nearest the screen and could still be separated from each other by a gap, to help with locating them. This would lessen the severity of finger impacts which occur thousands of times per day and perhaps reduce rsi-type injuries.

Someone recently said “You’re an Inventor? What can we buy that you’ve invented?” Good question.

The expert staff at Maplins (“sorry we don’t have that in stock”) tell me that I’m not supposed to use crimp connectors on solid wire. Bull.

Today’s invention is a way to build 3-D models and sculptures using these connectors and solid, garden-quality iron wire. Once each section of wire has a connector crimped (hard) on the end, they can be joined, several at a time, using a nut and bolt. This can be used to make robust, 3-D forms of everything from DNA to Buckyballs to birds. I tend to favour uniformly triangular connectivity.

If you fancy your own sculpture, I’m now selling plans at £5 and kits at £50. I also do commissions -just email me.

Today’s invention is a way to add value to those paperbacks which people buy to read when traveling.

Each such tome would have several additional blank pages at the end, made from absorptive, soft paper.

When overcome by the sudden urge to sneeze, a reader would quickly turn to the back of the book and press their face into one of the tissues there. Each of these could then be torn out and discarded.

This could help lessen the productivity losses of national economies -a significant saving, given the cross infections that occur in planes, trains and buses.