Category: Possible inventions

Today’s invention is a system which might best be used on railway engines.

If an individual wheel is sensed to be losing traction (often a problem on icy tracks or when under emergency braking conditions), its contact pressure on the rail can be temporarily increased by pumping a measured amount of heavy fluid (perhaps lubrication oil) from a central reservoir into a circumferential channel within the wheel.

This would also have the effect of suddenly increasing the moment of inertia of the wheel and thus reducing its rotational velocity when starting to spin. The volume of flow to each wheel could be precisely controlled in order to ensure an optimal distribution of grip and rotational inertia.

In addition, the frictional heating of the wheels could be lessened by withdrawing the fluid from them when the train had halted.

The old vacuum cleaner seems to occupying me a lot lately. Why, for example, does that damned spring-loaded reel never actually pull all the power cord back in when the loathsome vacuuming task is done?

Today’s invention is a possible improvement that might make retrieval of the various components of dust collection, slightly more tolerable.

A cleaner consists of three modules: a hose reel (blue), a fan/motor and a dirt hopper. Instead of having to cart about all that hose, the reel is detachable, plugs directly into a wall socket and stays in one place. It contains a decent sized spring, ratchet and gearbox so that the cable can be easily dragged out and then slowly, but relentlessly, hauled back in afterwards.

The other end of the cable (yellow) is plugged into the slimmed down fan/hopper unit.

When cleaning is complete, this cable connector can be easily flicked up out of its bayonet-fitting. The electrical disconnect activates the cord withdrawal mechanism and the yellow connector is dragged back, shielded from causing and sustaining damage (or getting snagged) by a light conical collar (grey).

Almost any finely-divided organic material, eg flour, will produce an explosive mixture in an air suspension. The stuff which a vacuum cleaner picks up is mostly skin cells and other forms of organic dust.

Today’s invention is to make a self-powered vacuum cleaner.

It contains a small combustion chamber which admits some aerated incoming dust and periodically ignites this to explode, driving a piston which in turn powers the cleaner’s fan. Obviously a small, battery-powered starter motor would be required to initiate the airflow.

When a vehicle collides with some high-inertia object, the occupants have a tendency to keep going…until they are stopped by hitting a seatbelt, a windscreen, or each other. For improved safety in a car crash, it’s necessary to decelerate people much more gradually…which is why we have seatbelts with progressive tensioning and airbags.

Today’s invention is a way to augment these systems or to replace them in situations where airbags aren’t appropriate…such as racecars. This amounts to a gradualised form of reactive armour for non-military purposes.

Beneath the surfaces of vehicles, a large number of small charges would be fitted. These would each have a force-sensitive actuator, so that they would fire, and slow the vehicle down, only if the intensity of impact was high enough (thus avoiding explosions when contacting pedestrians). If such bomblets are unacceptable, then springs could be used -held in a pre-compressed state by an impact-sensitive clip. The reactive units could be fitted in regions of maximal impact probability…ie around the front and rear surfaces.

These positions might house multiple layers of charges, so that they would experience a braking force proportionate to the degree of local indentation. Such a system could be used to reduce the need for mechanical ‘crumple zones’ and thus make vehicles physically smaller and more manoeuvrable.

The light-sensitive surface inside a camera (whether digital or analogue) is illuminated, gradually, when the shutter release is activated. The incoming light may thus impinge on some regions of the surface for much longer than others, depending on the type of shutter involved.

In an SLR, with a shutter which pivots upwards and then down again, those pixels at the bottom of the image are illuminated for much longer than those at the top. A rotary shutter largely fixes this potential problem (which might otherwise result in some of the sensors in the bottom of the image becoming ‘burnt out’.

A light, angled mirror (blue) is used to allow through the lens composition as usual, but in today’s invention, this mirror rotates about the axis as shown, driven by a high-speed motor.

This provides uniform illumination of the sensing surface whilst still allowing a direct view of the scene via the eyepiece. The mirror shaft would obviously need to be balanced to minimise vibration (perhaps by using several, petal-like mirrors).

Flying a light aircraft, where the pilot sits atop the surface of the wings, can be rendered more difficult because of the limited visibility underneath.

It would be a real advantage to be able to somehow see through the wings and thus detect earlier other planes approaching or objects on the runway. Jet fighter pilots can wear experimental headsets which display such a 360-degree view, but today’s invention is a more practical version of this idea for ordinary small aeroplanes.

A video camera (red) is aligned, beneath each wing, with the pilot’s downward view direction as shown. The image from the video is then projected (yellow) onto the wing surface, providing the sensation of seeing through the metal.

I always have a problem with certain dates. For example, I find it easy to make mistakes when adding meetings, for Tuesday 3rd or Wednesday 2nd, to my diary…somehow the mismatch between the day’s position in the week and its position in the month causes me confusion.

When under pressure, I’ll assume that that meeting scheduled for the 3rd will obviously take place on a Wednesday, and I will miss the vital meeting by a day. This is, I believe a surprisingly common phenomenon -even among people who aren’t synaesthetes.

Today’s invention is a plug-in for electronic calendars which is programmed with all such possible conflicts and which will both ask for confirmation and issue a special reminder whenever they appear in one’s schedule.

People can be pretty remiss when it comes to post-toilet handwashing. Most people also tend to have a strong resistance to leaving a public toilet unflushed.

Today’s invention attempts to use the second tendency to overcome the first.

Imagine a toilet flush button (or handle), located within an adjacent basin, which will only work after a sensor (of the type currently used in hand driers) has detected hand movements and water flow within the basin for several seconds. The natural tendency to flush is thus only enabled after a certain amount of handwashing has occurred.

This would also have the advantage that the flush activation mechanism was itself constantly being washed.

I’m not sure that I see a real need for landline phones, now that a big slice of the world relies on mobiles.

The manufacturers used to make a huge benefit out of the ability to rove around your house and garden using a DECT cordless handset. The trouble with this idea is that people now leave the handsets down wherever they have concluded a call. Just use the ‘handset locate function’? Oh please…when I have to make a call, the last thing I need is to have to listen for a handful of handsets beeping in the domestic distance.

Today’s invention is a landline handset which can tell (using an internal accelerometer) immediately it has been set down on a stable surface and it sets off an alarm until it is replaced in its holster/base unit.

Domestic refuse needs to go somewhere and today’s invention aims to make better use of it than conventional landfill.

Each railway station would have some special railway cars parked in a siding. Refuse vehicles would dump their loads into one of these trucks, which would be designed to ‘telescope’ -one end being free to slide inside the body of the other so that the space between ends is greatly reduced.

When full, each truck is placed on the track ahead of a train which then pushes it along.

When the train reaches a station where large-scale civil engineering is occurring, the brakes are applied to the refuse truck’s front wheels and the train telescopes this wagon, crushing its contents together. The wagon can then be moved to a siding and its compressed block of high-density rubbish used for projects such as building embankments or stabilising earthworks.