When a back-seat passenger gets out of a car, they usually find it impossible to make use of any rear view mirrors -or they may just forget to.
The door can easily be jabbed out into the traffic stream with obvious dangerous consequences.
Today’s invention is therefore a mirror fitted to the inside of the rear door of a car. As the door catch is released, this mirror pops up, drawing attention to itself and anything approaching from behind the vehicle.
It seems that crowds behave in ways that can sometimes be predicted by physics.
Today’s invention is an overhead panel for walkways which consists of a diffusing screen behind which an array of green and red leds is located.
Each led unit is connected to a motion sensor which can detect coarsely the direction of movement of someone walking (or running) beneath.
In order to smooth the passage of a crowd moving both ways in the walkway, each person looks at the colour over their own head and then walks towards a patch of that colour on the ceiling.
This tends to coalesce individuals into a small number of streams (eg 2) which pass each other with less interruption.
Today’s invention is a transparent plastic umbrella with double-thickness panels. Each of these acts as an envelope into which can be slotted, from the perimeter with the eye-snagging pointy bits, a flexible, triangular insert; visible both from inside and outside.
These inserts can be pre-coloured, to allow the user to coordinate their outfit with their brolly, branded exclusively or contain hand-drawn images to provide an extra dimension of rainy-day personality.
Today’s invention is an anti burglary device which consists of an insert to one’s chimney.
An electrically activated, slow release smoke cannister is inserted high inside the chimney breast.
On leaving home, this is operated by setting the domestic alarm so that potential thieves are deterred by the sight of an apparently active fireplace.
Today’s invention is a printer which prints in a rhythmic way, so as to emulate the musical sound of drums in a band.
Users could choose the style of drumming, from pipeband to samba, even specifying this in the page setup instructions.
This would inevitably slow printing down a little but it would turn an unpleasant background drone into an engaging, user-defined ‘tune’.
Laptops habitually overheat.
Today’s invention is an attempt to lessen that problem by embedding the processor in the lid, behind the screen.
The lid would have holes in the front and back surface, enabling natural convention cooling of the interior (rather than relying on noisy fans in a horizontal box, as is the usual approach).
Obviously there would be some need to ensure that the machine remained balanced with a lighter than usual keyboard and a heavier upright screen.
When a floor is being mopped, signs appear saying, effectively, ‘if you slip, don’t sue us.’
These actually introduce a trip hazard, especially when placed at the top of stairs, for example.
Today’s invention warns people of wet floors, but creates no such trip problem.
A lightweight sign with a clamp type suction device is attached to the ceiling, instead (this could be done using eg a balloon, but would probably be too fussy and shortlived). The sign might be mostly transparent, so that collisions between passing pedestrians could be minimised.
Also, an extendable neck version might be made to help with varying ceiling heights.
People trip over cables all the time.
People also have peripheral vision which is very sensitive to movement (something to do with spotting dangerous beasties lurking in the long grass).
Today’s invention is a device which plugs eg into a USB port on a laptop and which flicks the power cord every few seconds.
This allows passers by to become more aware of the moving cable and step over it safely.
(A better version would be incorporated into plugtops in general, but that would require somewhat more complex design).
When using a networked printer, that ‘page preview’ thing never works well enough to be relied upon. Inevitably the printer is located half a day’s walk away from your desk, so you will make a print, trek, gasp in surprise at the ugly errors it contains, bin it and repeat a few times.
This wastes time and paper.
Today’s invention is a network printer which scans what it has just printed and sends you a copy electronically. You will almost certainly want to improve on the first version, so it will then offer you the option of feeding the paper back through the machine for another print on the other side.
Today’s invention is a way to deal with domestic broken glass.
Rather than fill the kitchen with a pile of fragments waiting to be wrapped in cardboard and dumped in the regular bin, there is a better way.
A glass jar is made just small enough to fit through the hole in a bottle bank. This jar has a glass, screw-on lid…no other materials are involved.
When anything glass is broken, the bits are gathered and placed in this jar. When the jar is full, it is transported to the bottle bank and the whole thing dumped in to be recycled.
