Category: Feasible inventions

Young children are, it seems, placing themselves at risk in vehicles by undoing their safety harness buckles.

Numerous patents have been awarded for various fancy devices to screen young fingers from seatbelt release catches.

Today’s invention is simply to reuse the standard ‘childsafe’ medicine container design in this application. Access to the buckle release is limited to adults who can remove the cap, reach a finger inside and press the release button.

Although this would hinder to some extent the already tiresome process of loading children into a car, it’s also a cheap way to prevent serious accidents and thus worth considering.

I’m a bit annoyed by the multi-billion dollar greetings card industry which pumps out expensive pap-verse, based on chopped-down trees.

So anyone can send an e-card and that’s good, if lacking in one essential element of such cards. You can’t easily create a mantelpiece display of them.

Today’s invention is an updated version of the greetings card display. It consists of a number of different-sized electronic picture frames joined together and placed on one’s shelf or mantelpiece at some celebratory time.

As people send you e-cards, for eg your birthday, these appear in the frames…perhaps slowly cycling from frame to frame; perhaps issuing recorded messages from the senders.

The effect is to raise spirits of the recipient more than the individual cards would and also to display their social standing as someone with lots of friends.

When opening those vertical blinds which can admit light by sliding to one side or twisting in place, two problems occur.

The first is that the cords for the two functions tangle. Yuk.
The second is that no-one can tell which to pull on to achieve the option they want.

Today’s invention is therefore a clip-on sheath for the cords, one for each pair. These keep all the cords from getting knotted and still allow free movement by pulling them. Each sheath carries a clear diagram indicating which set does which.

The two sheaths might even clip together to keep the whole package as visually unintrusive as possible.

Customer service. Sometimes this happens as a result of a real desire to please and sometimes just as a result of competitor pressure.

Having just had the old ‘I’m afraid not’ response to a reasonable request to buy something slightly non-standard, today’s invention is a website for crowd-sourcing, for each company, a list of most-direct competitors. These might be ranked by customer ratings, or whatever, with only say the top three competitors appearing.

Consumers would then know who to talk to next and companies would know they knew.

Lots of open-top sportscars used to have a tonneau: a glorified tarpaulin which covered the cockpit except for a gap through which the driver’s head and shoulders would protrude.

Today’s invention is an updated tonneau in which the normal hard roof of a car can be automatically raised or lowered on pillars as shown. The windows raise or lower as normal, except that their upper edges are connected to the roof.

When driving with the roof down, a large axially-split sunroof is opened like a pair of hatches, allowing either the driver or the driver and passenger to have their heads in the airflow.

Today’s invention is an inversion of this one.

A simple pressure switch in one running shoe feeds information about one’s running pace to a portable music device.

If you are running at less than your preset target pace, in terms of footstrikes per minute, the music will be begin being played correspondingly slower than normal and vice versa.

This mechanism provides both feedback to a runner who is off the correct speed and also a strong incentive to adjust.

Particulate stuff that separates into layers in transit is a nuisance. In particular, we buy dog pellets which come in a tub and which are almost completely stratified by size when the food is delivered.

This is a problem because the pellets contain different nutrients and a dog on a protein-only diet seems very much harder to control.

Today’s invention is therefore a plastic spiral which is screwed into a (well mixed) tub of pellets in the factory.

This limits any stratification to the wavelength of the spiral, so that on withdrawal from the tub, much more uniform scoopfuls can be extracted.