Category: Possible inventions

It seems crazy still to be outputting print onto paper. It’s heavy, flammable and pretty much unsearchable in large quantities. Many people seem to be unable to read volumes of material on a screen, however, and so today’s invention is yet another way to restrict the waste that this involves.

Inspired by the continuous rolls of paper used to print receipts, today’s invention is intended to free us from the tyranny of the A4 sheet. When printing something to read, or pin to one’s noticeboard, a large proportion of the printable surface at the end of any document is blank (not to mention the page breaks themselves). Using a continuous roll of paper (rather than a trayful of discrete pages) would allow the end of the written content to be detected and the paper automatically severed at that point.

Any resulting documents would thus have a random physical page length -which would have the added advantage of discouraging filing the damned stuff (if you were absolutely compelled on occasion to work in A4, a simple full stop at the end of each ‘page’ would still allow that of course).

Today’s invention is a simple way to improve the security of a lock-and-key mechanism.

The door, or lid, containing the lock would be equipped with an array of identical keyhole plates, only one of which would have an actual lock behind it. All others would be decoys. The plates are cheap to apply and delay the actions of anyone speculatively trying to pick the lock, or of someone who has somehow obtained the correct key.

In addition, a special lock mechanism might be used (eg in a Yale-type lock) in which any attempt to turn or vibrate the internal cylinder, without first having fully displaced all the pins (in the right order), would cause an internal mousetrap-like device to snap shut on the lockpick or skeleton key, making its withdrawal impossible. This might also be used to activate an alarm.

I happened to have been looking at some Facebook entries when it dawned on me that all of those party/ concert photos of Miss X and her three best friends have a common appearance.

Today’s invention is a Facebook application which finds faces in the photos placed on pages. It then compares these faces with those posted by individuals on their pages. Names can thus be automatically be applied to the numerous group shots, without anyone having to type in all those identifiers as tags.

This would only be around 90% accurate, I reckon, but it would be a cool feature (knowing the name of someone you find attractive would allow them to be contacted, greatly adding to the social networking functionality). There might also be some some intriguing, or at least amusing, misidentifications.

An array of celebrity faces provided on the site could be used to answer such questions as, “which Hollywood star does my boyfriend most resemble?”

Having just watched the classic film LeMans again I was reminded of the dangers of carrying petrol around in a vehicle.

Today’s invention is an alternative way to transport petroleum spirit at high speed. Instead of sloshing around in a fuel tank, which, even with foam inserts, is bad for weight distribution/handling, the fuel would be loaded into cylindrical ‘bullets’. Refuelling a car would be a question of dropping a bandolier of such containers into a hatchway.

The bandolier would be engaged with a feed mechanism not unlike that on a machine gun. Pellets of fuel would be sequentially pierced (by a firing pin device) and drained into a small feeder tank. In the event of an accident, these discrete pellets would be very much harder to break open, making an explosive ignition much less likely.

If the vehicle were subject to a serious shunt, accelerometers might be used to detect this and to automatically jettison the remaining bandolier over the crash barrier.

Submarines captured my imagination first when watching Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Stingray in the 60s. Today’s subs can circumnavigate the globe, without having to surface, because they have nuclear power plants on board.

Even these high-powered monsters would benefit, however, from not having a giant conning tower sticking out of the deck. This allows the crew to see further when travelling on the surface but adds greatly to the drag when moving underwater and makes the boat highly visible when surfaced.

Today’s invention is a virtual conning tower. The submarine’s hull would be a single, streamlined torpedo shape with minimal protrusions. Instead of a tower, a small flock of UAVs would be released from the casing of the submerged vessel, break the surface and then fly at variable altitude and perhaps at a small distance from the mother ship.

These would be steerable from below, enabling advanced reconnaissance via onboard cameras (submarines can communicate subsea using radio transmissions at around 80Hz). The UAVs could be made effectively undetectable by radar and provide all the benefits, in terms of damage tolerance, of a swarm of aerial robots (at most, these might be seen as a flock of seabirds).

It might even be possible to have a tubular hull shift ballast so as to stand nearly on end in the water -acting as a temporarily high conning tower. This would also allow the diameter of the hull to reduced, cutting drag significantly.

How to get one’s message across to people who have a rapidly filling email inbox and a reluctance to open messages?

Today’s invention makes a new attempt to introduce some novelty to this endeavour.

Send the person an email entitled ‘Please turn on threading in your email program.’ Then send them a series of sequentially numbered messages, the titles of which form the message you want them to get, -but without their having to open any emails. Irrespective of the receipt order, the email program will place these in the sequence intended by the sender.

Although threading often imposes some kind of indentation on one’s message titles, it might also be possible to ‘draw’ an ASCII-art-like image by creating a roughly-aligned sequence of symbols in titles.

For somebody who tries never to make hardcopies of anything, I seem to spend a lot of time thinking up ways to improve computer printer performance.

In order to save on the amount of paper that’s wasted, today’s invention is white ink. One’s printer will create a set of human-undetectable marks on every printed page. When that page is returned to the feed tray, it will be identified and the white ink applied, like Tippex, to the pre-existing letterforms (whose precise locations etc will have been stored in printer memory).

This whiting-out could occur in realtime ie with one old letter being ‘snowpaked’ over just before the new one is printed. Thus a single sheet of paper could be reused multiple times -as in a medieval palimpsest.

Springing a leak in the hull of a ship is generally a very bad situation; doubly so for a submarine.

Rather than just manning the pumps and stuffing wadding into a breach, today’s invention offers a new approach to the imperative of not sinking.

When some hull perforation is detected or reported, a small submersible is rapidly released from the body of the vessel and automatically driven across the hull to the approximate location of the hole (it could be clamped magnetically to the surface and positioned more accurately using standard subsea lights and cameras).

A powerful refrigeration unit on board this drone sucks in a stream of seawater and blasts out a jet of frozen particles which are directed to the holed area. These build up and form a coarse plug, durable enough to allow more effective repair (and, in the case of a sub, surfacing). Such a system could also operate inside a vessel, given enough space for the required plumbing.

I recently read about De Laude Scriptorum, the book written about the art of medieval manual transcription which, ironically, was one of the first publications produced using the printing press.

Intrigued anew by the concept of printing I’ve been thinking about the many different techniques for saving ink…since it’s ink sales upon which the enormous computer printer business is based.

So, why use ink at all? Today’s invention is to create a monochrome printer which is more like a sewing machine. The print head drives a needle to create holes in the paper, the density of which corresponds to the required grey level. Using a matrix of tapered needles, each could be driven through the paper to a different distance, thus creating holes of varying diameter (corresponding to local greyness).

To view the ‘printing’ slip a black sheet of paper under the one being read. This makes use of only one side of the paper but there is no ink cost and the paper itself could be more effectively recycled without having been inked (one could even print conventionally, with ink, on both sides of paper that had been perforprinted previously).

I once owned an old Mercedes and a corresponding Haynes repair manual that was almost of the same vintage. It caused me great grief that the images in it were of such low quality. Essentially, they seemed to have cut costs by employing the cheapest possible print process, which made it unclear how the smudgy photo I was viewing in any way related to the guts of my ancient auto. Why on earth don’t they just film a DVD as they document each task? That way, you could hear the background grumbling and swearing that always accompanies any kind of maintenance session -a refreshing source of forewarning about the weekend ahead.

Anyway, my theory about DIY car maintenance (who can afford to have a garage do all the work?) is that the main difficulty, apart from recognising the bits, is not knowing how hard to press, pull, squeeze or rotate.

If you haven’t ever seen inside that bolted-in enclosure, then it’s always a concern that you may be about to strip some expensive threads or deface a highly-priced casing or, worse still, render the whole vehicle immobile by the slip of a screwdriver used as a poorly-positioned lever. This situation is made even more difficult by the grime which covers everything and tends to gum up all moving parts.

Today’s invention then is simply an addition to all repair manuals consisting of a force rating scale. Each task would be labeled, by someone who has actually done it, with a coarse measure of how much effort is required to perform it. This scale might be as crude as a series of enjoinders: “lubricate first with DWF then easy”, “often sealed by corrosion, fiercely hard work”, “no more than two blows with a rubber mallet”, “requires extraction of whole unit first” or “best left to an expert.”