Category: Possible inventions

Muggers and hoodlums seem to sense when someone is vulnerable to attack on the street.

Taking a leaf out of nature’s book, today’s invention is a coat which senses fear on the part of the wearer (perhaps by detecting hairs suddenly standing on the back of one’s neck at the same time as palm sweating). It then gradually releases the contents of a small cannister of compressed air into specially placed bladders inside the coat.

This causes the coat to swell strategically, making the wearer look bigger, brawnier and much less like a potential target for attack…something like a cat arching its back to deter rivals.

Today’s invention is a simple device which enables someone to create for themselves a snug-fitting, low cost storage or carrying case for objects which need a higher level of protection than a simple box provides.

The object to be stored is placed on eg a redundant telephone directory, a block of waste wood or a pile of used printer paper clamped to a desktop. It is manually drawn around using a suitably fat felt tip pen, leaving a closely fitting outline.

An electric drill, fitted with a hole-saw attachment (of an appropriate radius) is attached to a small ‘turtle’ like cart with crude contour-following capability. This moves around, drilling to a fixed depth inside the contour, until it has been hollowed out.

A smarter version would be capable of also drilling some isolated holes outside the contour, in order to reduce weight eg for shipping/carrying purposes.

Queuing: not only is it hard to spell, the very concept is a pain in the ear.

Today’s invention is a small, roomba-like robot, whose only function is to wait in line on your behalf.

These would be cheap enough so that you could drop one on the end of several queues. Each would have a hook which would engage with the device in front’s rear loop. This connection would only be released when the bot ahead had finished queuing so as to maintain the correct order, despite attempts by people to interpose their machine and thus jump the queue.

Each bot would also have your mobile number displayed and a push-to-lock cabinet on top, so that whatever was being waited for could be confirmed, placed inside, locked and only opened by the owner when his/her bot(s) returned to them (directed e.g. by on-board gps).

In the fancy restaurants I occasionally used to visit before I had children, sorbet would sometimes be served between courses in order to ‘clear the palate.’

I have a personal theory that If you really taste an individual food e.g. sugar, without it being masked by other tastes, your body can more easily deal with metabolising it and also decide more accurately when it’s had enough.

Today’s invention is a device for improving the taste of food, by cleaning one’s palette in between forkfuls, as well as possibly reducing the tendency to gorge (in search of a sufficiency which is disguised by a mixture of tastes).

This takes the form of a fork with an insulated handle which is loaded with a tube of sorbet before eating starts. A diner can turn a screw in the end of the fork and squeeze a small amount of sorbet onto the eating end -which can then be consumed in the usual way in between bites of the main meal.

Today’s invention is a new way to use an existing product.

I usually make coffee using one of those insulated Smartcafe mugs with a filter element intended to squish the grounds down into the bottom of the cup.

The main problem with this design is that I end up with a sedimentary layer of coffee remnants which are really hard to extract from the base of the cup, once the beverage has been consumed. It also means that I have to cart about an inch of coffee grounds, right next to the liquid I’m drinking. So, why not use this device in a more effective way?

Place the filter element in the empty cup, so that it rests on the bottom. Now add the powdered coffee beans on top. After brewing, slowly withdraw the filter element, so that the grounds are carried upwards on top of it.

Extract the filter element (which might need a slightly increased tray depth) and simply tap it into the recycling bin, leaving a cupful of liquid coffee behind, ready to drink. No more scraping at the residue in the cup to make it fit for reuse.

I know next to nothing about guitars. Double neck guitars are similarly mystifying.

Nonetheless, today’s invention is a double neck guitar -with only one neck.

Actually, this would effectively be two guitars, with the required different properties, placed back to back and melded together.

The combined neck would need some extra reinforcement and, in order to allow the fast change between instruments which is the main reason for double necks, the strap would have a bearing at each end allowing the instrument to be rapidly spun about its longitudinal axis.

I’m always deeply skeptical about any suggested link between colourscheme and human performance.

It turns out, however, that some of this stuff is not nonsense and has actually been measured.

Proofreading will benefit from being surrounded by the colour red whilst thinking up ideas works better if one’s ambient colour is blue.

Today’s invention is therefore a plug-in for the various Office-type software suites which can detect whether one is proofreading a novel (word processor background set to red), typing in ideas (mindmapping software background set to blue), checking numerical data (spreadsheet set to red) or drawing diagrams (blue).

This, it seems, would actually improve the efficiency with which tasks like these are undertaken.

Sometimes a thread of comments posted on some website or blog can actually be much more useful and informative than the original article to which they refer.

Text, however, is sooo Web 1.0.

Today’s invention is to allow registered users of a site to post their comments in the form of a link to a video they have uploaded to eg YouTube. The link would only work if the video file to which it connected was less than a fixed number of MB.

This would enable something more like a conversation or debate to be attached permanently and it might even limit the number of trolls who feel the need to insult everyone they disagree with.

Inevitably, it would also point the way to sock-puppet-as-pundits.

I was always impressed by the ability of Star Trek characters to set their phasers to ‘stun’ and thus provide bellicose aliens with a proportionate response, rather than uniform, maximal force.

Today’s invention is a related adaptation to existing handguns (rather than to specialised riot control devices).

This would take the form of a rotary valve which would allow the weapon user to preselect the area of a set of circumferentially-arrayed vent holes through which some of the propellant gas from a cartridge could be discharged.

No venting would propel the bullet at normal speed; the fully open setting would allow almost all the gas to escape and thus reduce the muzzle velocity of the projectile to a very small, and certainly non-fatal, level.