Category: Possible inventions

Bubble gum currently takes way too much time and effort.

Today’s invention is a small machine which ‘chews’ some gum repeatedly -undertaking a viscous stirring process in a hygienic chamber, but without adding water and thus maintaining the flavour components in the material. After this, the gum would be forced into a mould, forming it into a disc with a concavity on either side.

This central, thinned region would allow the gum to be placed in the mouth and, without any normal chewing, instantly blown into a successful bubble.

The thin region might even have some coloured food particles added to it, within the machine, so that when the bubble is created, a message (or logo) magically expands on its surface.

This could be a new form of user-selectable love-heart message, perhaps or a new form of advert.

I’ll admit to being mildly obsessed by the issue of optimising the performance of lifts in skyscrapers.

There are obvious analogies with scheduling a railway. In order to have the freedom to run express, long-distance lifts, today’s invention is to incorporate some ‘sidings’ in which slower lifts can pause and park, temporarily out of the way.

This would work best in systems where the lifts are attached to the outside of a building. The length of the sidings need be only a very small fraction of the overall height. Rather than use cables, I envisage some kind of geared, funicular arrangement, capable of diverting the cars laterally in safety.

There could then be a processor devoted to scheduling the car movements in near-realtime so that express transits would be given priority for the shortest possible periods.

One of the things which makes blowing up balloons difficult for youngsters is that they have to tie a knot when finished, without letting the air escape.

Today’s invention is a simple duck-bill valve which is formed, in stiff rubber, like the tail of a balloon but which fits inside and stops deflation: no knots required.

We’ve heard a lot about the issue of bird strikes on aircraft lately.

Today’s invention is to equip all airliners each with a small rocket (attached to the tailfin, perhaps) and enough propellant to enable them to make a powered descent in the event that all of their jets are disabled by ingestion of flocks of birds.

The rocket would fire only when sensors indicated this condition and it could be designed for single-use, thus decreasing cost and weight of this bolt-on system. To decrease weight still further, the rocket might make use of atmospheric oxygen, rather than on-board oxidants…inefficient ignition might actually be an advantage here, allowing for a more controllable burn.

There are very, very few occasions when the use of a firearm is going to create a solution. If however obviously bad people are attacking definitely good people, then I want the innocent parties defended as accurately as possible by eg a police marksman.

Today’s invention is a small metal brace which allows two semi-automatics to be fired simultaneously. This assumes their (substantial) combined weight is supported by both hands of the weapon-wielder.

The brace attaches the frames of the two guns together in such a way that pulling one trigger also pulls the other (and allows the two slide mechanisms still to operate).

This doubles the firepower (and recoil), but the idea is that by mounting one weapon in the opposite orientation to the other (ie with the additional weapon’s barrel below the marksman’s hand and its grip pointing skywards), their tendency to wander off-target during recoil (uplift) will be cancelled out. This will improve accuracy and limit ‘collateral damage’ (The barrels’ axes would need to be set to intersect at a fixed target distance).

I’m scandalised by having just read about a Swiss Army knife with no blade. What are the folks at Victorinox thinking about? Maybe the Swiss Army will be relying on dazzling their enemies with the dinky laser pointer which is included?

Today’s invention reuses product components they already have available to ensure that your knife can only be used by you.

Use the existing fingerprint-reading technology to control, via a simple electromechanical lock, the opening of the pocket knife blade -thus avoiding unfortunate accidents/ violence/ lawsuits as a result of unauthorised usage.

Legitimate protest is one thing: rioting is quite another. I’m no supporter of the companies who happily sell stun guns and cattle probes etc to repressive regimes, but today’s invention is certainly non-lethal and might help disperse people in a street riot before anyone gets hurt (they can mock their government online…often more effective and usually less dangerous).

Take a standard polycarbonate riot shield and embed twenty or thirty loudspeaker cones in its surface, facing forwards. Each shield bearer, and that probably means policeman, would be equipped with a belt mounted battery which would drive all of the loudspeaker cones on a shield.

This would generate enough noise to make standing in front of a wall of such shields uncomfortable (even with ears plugged). The shields themselves might be slightly concave so as to help focus the sound energy emerging from them. A large number of such shields could be coordinated by aiming them at e.g. anyone foolish enough to be carrying a weapon. This cacophony could be further intensified by driving the speakers in phase and thus setting up a ‘wall’ of antinodes between crowd and police.