Category: Feasible inventions

Misfuelling is the dreadful name given to putting the wrong fuel in your vehicle. Diesel in a petrol car = bad news. This can be a very costly mistake to make and so there are numerous devices to ensure motorists avoid it. The odd thing is that drivers aren’t all buying these and manufacturers aren’t getting their acts together to factory-fit them. Maybe it’s to do with car companies selling anti-misfuelling insurance?

I was irritated therefore when filling my tank recently (already pretty miffed about the price) to find that the nozzles had been swapped in the pump holsters (the hoses always form a hydra-like rope which doesn’t help distinguish between their origins). Whether caused by some malicious miscreant or just a moron, I nearly ended up with 10 gallons of unwanted Extra-Green-Superoctane-Plus, together with an additional £3k bill.

Today’s invention is a simple, colour-coded plastic location device which is fitted to the ‘heel’ of each nozzle and which allows it only to fit into the correspondingly-shaped locator attached to the correct holster.

A ring or bracelet can be given more lasting value by the memories associated with it. That’s why, I suppose, people care so much about the inheritance of family jewellery and why eg watch manufacturers centre their advertising on the idea of passing their (pricey) products on.

Today’s invention is a ring which can add sentimental value to itself.

The ring would have within it a heart rate monitor. This would record the times when the wearer’s heartbeat exceeded a certain level. The ring could then be wired up to eg a mobile phone (without being removed) and request verbal annotation by the wearer of the exciting events of the last day (or week).

Over time, this would build into a personal history of successive generations of wearers.

I’m told that using a look-down viewfinder is very strongly preferred by many photographers. One of the biggest advantages, apparently is that when taking portrait shots, not being looked at by the snapper directly puts a sitter in a more relaxed frame of mind.

Today’s invention is a simple variant on the standard compact camera LCD display back.

In this case, the display faces the rear of the camera and can be hinged outwards to allow a photographer to look down on it and see the scene in the correct orientation. A wider range of hinge rotation might be provided to allow for conventional positioning of the LCD display on the back face of the camera, facing the user.

You can buy a lot of different necklaces which carry perfume within them. One of their advantages is not having to put perfume onto potentially allergic skin.

Today’s invention is to extend the idea to provide each wearer with a small wallet full of plastic ‘bubbles.’ This would take the form of a matrix of cells, just like many small contact lens cases. Each cell could contain a foam pad each to be extracted and sprayed, by the user, with a small amount of a different perfume and then closed using a press seal.

At each different event in a day, the wearer could open one of the cells and thus tailor their scent for maximum impact (given that the olfactory system rapidly stops being aware of a given smell, very soon after first encountering it). This could be work discreetly in a jacket pocket, without the need to splash organic solvents on one’s skin.

Adventurous types could try creating smell cocktails by opening more than one cell at a time. An electronically controlled version might even allow the wearer to communicate subliminally in real time by opening cells exuding attractive or repulsive scents.

I’m tired of throwing away lots of disposable razors, without even knowing whether the blades are blunt. I use a razor once or twice and the whole ‘system’ clogs with a concretion of stubble, skin cells and old soap -making it effectively unusable, even after running it under water at high pressure.

I’ve talked before about the blade cleaning problem…hard-to-clean blades are actually a feature of their underlying business model.

Today’s invention is a washable mouthpiece which snaps onto the rear face of disposable razors. The user blows hard into one end. Air travels in between the blades and dislodges whatever residue there is into the sink (Probably best to do this before everything has dried to a fibre-matrix composite material).

The short passage between mouthpiece and razor would be filled with small-diameter tubes -so that the pressures at their outlet ends would be uniform (thus avoiding the problem of air simply by passing parts of the gap between razor blades which are blocked by gunge).

Children seem to develop a taste for less than healthy food partly because of the visually exciting packaging in which it is often served them.

Today’s invention is a pre-printed cardboard roll of highly-coloured, comic-like images -containing puzzles, links to interesting websites, competitions, factoids, stories, games etc. This material would be age-indexed so that one could buy a roll designed specifically for 8-10 year-olds for example.

The rolls would embody serrations to allow the pressing out of sections which could then be folded into food containers. In this way, fruit and other healthier edibles might be supplied to youngsters in a wide variety of attractive, exciting wrappers.

This certainly saves on running the dishwasher and, using edibles dyes and cardboard, the containers can themselves be eaten.

The AC adaptor on my laptop is woeful, from many perspectives. Let’s leave aside the fact that it runs hot enough to fry an egg…even the latest generation of transformers are way too heavy for a device that is supposed to be mobile.

Part of the weight is in the adaptor cable. A fat one runs from wall socket to device and a thin one runs from device to laptop. What determines the relative lengths of these sections? Well, it’s important to have enough total length that one can work without being right up against the wall and enough flexibility at the wall end that the plug can actually get in the socket.

Beyond these factors, there is freedom to reduce the weight of the adaptor system by minimising the fat cable length and maximising the thin one. Today’s invention is to create adaptors with a few cm of input cable and around 2m of thin output wire. Much less to cart about, marginally less wasted resource and significantly less annoying to roll up.

Middle class Victorians, schooled in the social graces, would have had the ability to provide, at soirees, some kind of small personal performance or ‘turn’.

Today’s invention is a website which allows people to resurrect this tradition by uploading a small film of themselves doing a single, 30-second turn (direct from eg their mobile phone).

This allows people to show a different side of their personality than might be apparent in the office. Individuals who wanted to could enter their email address and postal region so they could be invited to perform again at forthcoming social gatherings in their area.

On a good day, I can run for an hour or so without needing an ambulance. I’ve noticed that it’s enormously easier to keep running if I don’t do the instinctive thing of lowering my chin to my chest and ‘digging-in.’ My assumption is that lifting my head allows easier breathing, but whatever the reason, this really helps me cover ground with very much less effort.

Today’s invention is a neck brace -just like those used by people with whiplash injuries, except that this is an ultra-lightweight version with multiple air holes in it to avoid temperature build-up during exercise.

This might also be combined with a pair of sunglasses in which the bottom edges of the lenses are completely obscured -forming vertical blinkers which discourage the tendency to stare at the ground a metre ahead.

Drycleaning is costly and not very environmentally friendly. I can only guess how much chloro-fluorocarbon liquid is required to dry clean my double duvet, twice a year. The whole process of using volatile organic solvents in this way seems like a good way to kiss what’s left of the ozone layer goodbye.

Today’s invention provides a way to wash the said item in a domestic machine. Double duvets would be formed by poppering together, lengthways, two slightly wider than normal single duvets so that one overlaps the other down the centre of the bed. This unit would then be placed inside an outer cover and poppered in place around its internal periphery.

This would allow almost all the flexibility and thermal comfort of a traditional duvet, whilst allowing each ‘half’ to be washed separately.