Today’s invention is a powerful fan which switches on whenever the door of a washing machine, spin-dryer or dishwasher is being opened.
This briefly negatively pressurises the machine interior, passing the incoming airstream over a condensing coil in order not to allow the room to fill with clouds of escaping water vapour.
For people staying in shared, accommodation, door security can be difficult. Often individual internal doorlocks are not fitted in a rented flat.
Today’s invention provides a solution, which locks the door without having to attach any screws to anything (and thus lose one’s damage deposit).
The door handle spindle is replaced with one which is prevented from being removed by a circular plate on the inside and a padlock on the outside (yellow).
The padlocked side has a bar (grey) which can’t rotate on the spindle and which acts as a steering wheel lock, in that the bar runs into the corner of the doorframe, stopping the spindle rotating and the door from opening (inwards).
Today’s invention is a new form of ringtone for domestic phones.
When a call is incoming, one handset begins to play one part in a round or an attractive harmony.
Until the phone is answered, other handsets chime in in order, increasing the volume of the resulting complex music which can be heard all over the house.
Much classier than the standard, uniform tinkling.
Augmented reality is beginning to take hold.
Today’s invention is to use an application like this, running on eg an iPhone, to recognise eg a number of simple shapes in the real world which the user has specified (eg ‘+’ or ‘#’ etc, etc).
Each shape, once recognised, would trigger the software to paste in to the moving view of the current scene some graphic element.
A user could thus point the device at a list of names and have their faces displayed nearby.
This has already been done for words in complex scenes. Each word can now be replaced by a corresponding image pulled from eg Google image search.
As a student, I would sometimes start a stampede in the underground simply by gradually starting to run. All it takes is a couple of other people to follow suit and some crowd instinct kicks in so that almost everyone suddenly feels late and left behind.
Moving walkways, of the type used in airports, apparently cause people to take fewer paces per second than when walking normally -they get a rest but the flowrate of people is only very slightly increased over the case in which there is no walkway at all.
Today’s invention is therefore a way to get crowd volumes moving faster. Travelators would have walls fitted on either side onto which images of people walking in the same direction would be projected. The speed of the projected walking would be fast but not so fast as to look incredible.
This would encourage passengers to up their pace, so as not to be left behind.
Today’s invention is a new form of icecube, designed to float in one’s drink whilst containing a shot of some other drink (possibly based on alcohol and in a contrasting colour to that of the main drink).
The thickness of the ‘cube’ could be varied by making a small change to the geometry of the mould, providing some extra anticipation of the moment when the second liquid starts to mix with the first.
Sometimes swimming against the tide can actually be a valuable metaphor to adopt.
Enormous resources have been expended on special surface coatings which are intended to discourage fouling of seagoing vessels by barnacles.
Today’s invention reverses this logic. For large bodies which are broadly circular in cross section, adding barnacles can have a drag reducing effect (just as with the dimples on a golf ball, barnacles can ‘trip’ the flow boundary layer into turbulence).
Such an approach can be applied to eg oil and gas risers, which are often damaged by tidal and wave forces. These could be significantly lessened if the circular pipes were each equipped with a smallbore tube delivering barnacle larval food material from an onboard tank.
This would allow a natural and automated form of drag reduction.
Although even the most intense camera flash is very unlikely to do permanent damage to anyone’s eyes, the effect can be pretty unpleasant at close range.
Parents especially get annoyed at photographers who fire off flash, even inadvertently, in the face of their baby.
Now that cameras are starting to routinely incorporate some level of face detection, today’s invention is to use that, together with the inbuilt autofocus capability, to sense when a face is closer than the minimum comfort radius and to prevent any flash under those circumstances.
Browsers provide data entry windows with strict word limits. Try to squeeze in some extra ones and you are informed that you have minus x characters left.
Today’s invention is to apply this to PowerPoint presentations.
Too often have I received (and given) talks in which there were way too many words on a slide. This embedded tool would constantly check the word count and object if it was about to be exceeded.
It might also provide guidance as to the minimum feasible fontsize for legibility (perhaps you could supply the size of the auditorium and this font limit would be automatically adjusted).
Maybe it’s a symptom of growing up in Belfast but I’m particularly interested in bomb disposal (I only discovered recently that Conscientious Objectors often worked in this area during WWII, for example).
Today’s invention is a solid blast shield to the back face of which a disposal expert is strapped. The shield would be made of heavy-grade armour plating and fitted with all-terrain wheels -allowing the wearer to move in very close to an IED or UXB.
The shield would be fitted with robotic arms and a set of cameras, all of which would be used from behind the shield, so that in the event of detonation, protection would be maximised.
