Category: Feasible inventions

I’ll be a big fan of LinkedIn, whenever I work out how best to make some use of it. One thing that this networking tool currently lacks is the ability effectively to screen out the bad guys. Everybody has a personal list of individuals (thieves, tax inspectors, ex-wives, adulterers, cocaine addicted former bosses…) with whom they would prefer to avoid any kind of contact in future.

Today’s invention is therefore an upgrade to online networking tools which allows specification of these names. When a request is made by anyone to link to you, your list is scanned to see if their existing links include any of your blacklisted miscreants. If it does, then the individual causing the problem is highlighted.

In this way, people can weigh their preferences among connections (without the threat of libel litigation). Maybe this will cause civilised behaviour to start to be selected for?

Folding maps is a skill which I never mastered (like clingfilm)…I can certainly introduce folds, in the sense of cramming the whole thing randomly back in an envelope, but the maps tend not to survive very long and there’s always a nagging doubt that that phantom canal I’m searching for is purely an artifact of the last failed attempt to put the damn thing away in a hurry.

So, today’s invention is to print each map on a large fan. One flick of the wrist and the whole terrain is instantly viewable. Another flick and that downpour need not be a threat to the paper representation.

Today’s invention is an educational toy: an alternative to the turtles sometimes used in schools.

A wireless mouse contains a couple of small motors. A child can use the mouse to draw a simple shape on the screen in the usual way.

The mouse is then driven, by a bluetooth signal, so as to follow, on e.g. a real desktop, the path described on screen. Although intended to provide language-free programming, this could be extended to allow the control of several such mice via simple programs written in some graphical language (like Starlogo or Squeak).

Today’s invention is a way to carpet an irregularly-shaped room, without having to get fitters involved in the work.

A small, Roomba-like robot traverses the floor, recording its position accurately. Eventually, it develops an internal map of the room and can order up carpet tiles which will fit exactly …no cutting required. This device would map tiles to floor so as to ensure that there were no ridiculous 1cm-wide tiles required at the edges, for example.

These tiles need no longer be all of the same size and shape, they could be made to scale in size from some central point like the seeds in a sunflower or the segments of a nautilus shell.

Recarpeting is then just a matter of dialling up new tiles to fit the known geometry.

I used to live in Newmarket and watch the early morning strings of thoroughbreds walking back to the stables after training sessions on the Heath. These journeys took place amidst normal car traffic and on occasion, a horse and vehicle would collide -causing potentially terminal damage to both. The car might have been worth £20k, the horse might easily have been valued at over £5M.

Riders have been able to buy themselves airbag jackets for some time. Today’s invention is an airbag blanket which is worn by a valuable horse when moving anywhere near vehicles. This would be activated by any collision so that, even if the horse were knocked over, its impact with eg the road surface would be effectively cushioned.

The blanket would of course carry inbuilt electric lights and reflectors (and proximity detectors might be even more useful for pre-emptive deployment of the bag(s) in order to save those spindly legs).

Marvin Minsky tells us that people increase their incidence of disease 30% by shaking hands. I’m prepared to believe him (although I’m less impressed by his failure to demo any artificial intelligence yet).

Today’s invention is one that might appeal to politicians in particular. Rather than having to stop periodically on the campaign trail to surreptitiously wash their hands, their suits would have a lining in the right sleeve which was impregnated with disinfectant. After every 100 or so shakes, the right hand could be discreetly drawn up into the sleeve and wiped clean. The right sleeve might be made in a slightly elasticated fabric and the lining could be removed each day and destroyed. Actually, thinking about it, it makes more sense for the disinfectant laden lining to be in the right hand pocket.

This would result in significantly less illness for the wearer and reduced transmission rates to his or her unfortunate electorate.

Given that I particularly dislike using phones, when someone calls my mobile, I always like to know who it is (it’s hard enough to deal with calls from friends and family, but customers always call when I’m crossing the road or eating a sticky toffee).

Screening like this requires me to have keyed in the names of people likely to phone me…which is itself unlikely.

Today’s invention is therefore a mobile phone function which will prompt a receiver, at the end of an incoming call “Who was that?” This then allows the name to be entered verbally (with the option to edit via the keyboard any unusual or misrecorded name).

Many buildings are visually spoiled by having a giant fire escape bolted to their exterior. This is especially true of ‘listed’ buildings, which are supposed to be preserved with minimal changes to their appearance.

Today’s invention is a fire escape ladder which folds out from a drainpipe. It would unfold, rather like a vertical tierack, as shown. The mechanism would be held in place at the top by a catch release, so that thieves couldn’t deploy it from ground level.

This could either be a faux downpipe, placed there purely to camouflage the escape or an adaptation to an existing pipe. In either case, the pipe/ladder could be suitably adorned with ‘in-keeping’ plumbing furniture, paintwork and casting details.

When using a strimmer on the edges of what passes, in my garden, for a lawn, I’ve noticed that fragments of the nylon line tend to break off all over the place.

Nylon is pretty slow to break-down naturally and so, over a growing season, the whole garden acquires a litter of coloured threads. As long as these aren’t green, they are detectable, but I really don’t want a) the dog to ingest these and b) to have to spend time harvesting the debris of earlier mowings.

Today’s invention is a strimmer line made of biodegradeable polymer (coloured green). Amazingly, I seem unable to find anything like this available already. It might take the form of a woven, raffia-like thread: certainly strong enough both to chop down weeds and to support the tension required for centripetal feeding (Ideally, I’d like to spin a cutting line automatically from fragments of loose grass, but doing so reliably isn’t straightforward).

I’d impregnate it with fungal spores which, when exposed to sunlight, begin at once to return the line to the soil.