Category: Feasible inventions

Having had way too much coffee during what I laughingly described as my working day, I found it hard to sleep last night. The upside of this insomnia though is that the following idea took hold.

Today’s invention is a coffee machine which contains a clock. Anyone ordering a double espresso after 3pm would be given a warning message: “Are you sure?”

This machine could also come supplied with a proper, ie plain ceramic, mug for every one of its users. They would be encouraged to draw a mark on the base -which would allow them to be identified by a small camera in the machine’s dispense chute. The system could then issue healthy guidance like “Hello John, how about some green tea, since you’ve had five coffees today?”

I find myself frequently having to bash through multiple sets of firedoors en route down various corridors. These are deliberately made of massive material in order to impede the progress of a fire from either direction.

Today’s invention is a modification to firedoors so that they incorporate their own extinguishant.

The top, wall-side corner of each side of each door would have a reservoir full of water attached. This would increase the moment of inertia of the doors only slightly. From this, a pipe would run along the top edge of each door face. The pipe would contain perforations, plugged by wax pellets.

In the even of a sharp rise in corridor temperature, the pellets would melt, allowing water rapidly to permeate the doors’ interior spaces and adding significantly to the escape period which they provide. This might even allow lighter materials to be used in the doors’ construction.

Fed up with standing in a windswept queue waiting to extract your own cash from a hole-in-the-wall machine (which then promptly runs out of money or just malfunctions)?

Today’s invention is a mobile ATM. First, select a time window and a delivery address via your bank’s secure website (assuming that they bothered to test it using Firefox, Safari, Opera etc and not just tatty old, last-century IE).

An armoured van will then appear with an ATM in the side to allow you to extract your cash without having to trek around town. The usual precaution would apply about not allowing the crew to access the safe and also the van would be equipped with a prominent, armoured camera to reduce the incidence of post-use mugging. It would also have a booth-like structure around the machine to prevent shoulder surfing and getting rained-on whilst withdrawing.

Vans would be re-routed in realtime so as to attempt to minimise some product of the average wait time and the total distance travelled. This would also make criminal attacks less easy to plan.

Properties which face onto the street are often troubled by having bicycles, motorcycles, dogs and even protesters chained to their railings. This makes the place untidy, especially as some of these cables and chains are ultra-resistant to cutting and removal.

Today’s invention offers a new railing design which consists of a set of tapering metal ‘blades’ with rounded tops (these would actually be each shaped like half a French stick, split longitudinally and then hollowed out). They would protect people from falling into the basement below, or banging into the windows behind, but would also allow anything chained around them to be lifted clear and removed.

The tapering profile used makes leaving anything attached to these rails obviously insecure and liable to be ‘liberated’ by the building’s owner or any passing thief.

If you are inclined, you can now visit a disco in which the dancers all wear headphones tuned to receive the same music. This cuts the noise which might annoy the neighbours and enables uninhibited dancing into the small hours (this says nothing of course about the damage to hearing which may still be caused).

Today’s invention applies this approach to the cinema. Instead of having to use a great auditorium, projection equipment and a shared screen, an audience could each be equipped, on entry, with a set of electronic glasses -all of which would display the same movie within a normal-sized room.

The glasses might incorporate headphones too, but these would allow through some awareness of the audible reactions of the other viewers, so that the cinema experience could still be a shared, community event. People might be encouraged to sit facing the same direction, in order to accentuate this effect (even though it would be strictly unnecessary).

Today’s invention is a simple reshaping of the thumbdrive or memory stick.

Rather than have these damn things poke out and constantly being in danger of snapping off when in contact with passing people, pets etc, the stick shown would simply be made to merge in gracefully with the body of one’s laptop.

This would allow eg backing up to occur automatically without necessarily ever having to remove the drive. It might even be possibly to house two drives in one such unit (both plugged in at the same time and possibly both writing to the same memory space).

In the process of trying to run a course recently for some very bright University graduates and postdocs, it occurred to me that I needed to keep close track of the time.

Ever since school exams, I have set my wristwatch on the table in front of me, but when standing to talk to an audience, it always lies flat (and hard to see) or rolls over unexpectedly when I make it stand up on its strap.

Today’s invention is therefore a watchstrap with an asymmetrically-placed clasp. The clasp has a flat outer surface which can be used to act as a stand when the timepiece is tracking one of my interminable PowerPoint fests (but without snagging the wearer’s cuffs).

My mobile phone always seems to need to be juiced up just when I’m getting ready to leave.

There is a tension between refueling a battery every time it gets connected to its charger (tends to be bad for the battery, which usually needs to discharge first) and the requirement to have devices ready when you are. This is particularly true for electronic kit which doesn’t allow its power source to be replaced … “Battery malfunction? Chuck the whole thing out”.

Today’s invention is a charging device which works out the health of any battery connected to it (by measuring the rate at which it will store charge) and which also allows the user to specify the time when it will be required.

The system will issue alerts about potential damage caused by having to charge at an unhealthy rate, together with the option to go ahead anyway. For low urgency systems, the system will actually try to discharge the battery before recharging at the best possible rate to preserve its health and still meet the deadline for use.

Olympic swimming events are timed by an electronic system capable of measurements accurate to within 1/1000 sec. Since the pools themselves are hard to construct with corresponding precision, medals are allocated based on differences of only 1/100 sec.

It seems to me that the lane in which one swims at this level of competition must have a broadly similarly-sized effect on a competitor’s race time. Those at the edges will be contacted by strongly asymmetric wave action and a non-uniform turbulence field.

Today’s invention is a way to limit these non-uniformities. It consists of a set of transparent barriers from the pool floor to above the current level of the lane floats, which they replace. These would be set on the pool bottom and flooded with pool water before an internal, end to end cable is tensioned, exactly equally for each barrier.

These would conveniently stop the fluid dynamics interactions between lanes, whilst still allowing swimmers to see each other.