Category: Possible inventions

Yet more tattoos, I’m afraid.

Today’s invention is effectively a networked, handheld device containing a bank of ink-fed needles, driven by a printer-like mechanism.

This gets strapped securely to the individual interested in body adornment -who can then select from a huge number of available patterns online. They would be able to modify wording/colours etc on-screen before committing to being marked (I’d suggest mandatory spell-checking).

This could be adapted to simply draw on the skin, using long-lasting, but removable, inks.

Public transport is great but I’d like to link it somehow with a bicycle at either end of the journey. Fold-up bikes are not great…they are costly, complex and have ridiculously small wheels, making their use just too much of a pain on any gradient worth the name.

There have been many bike sharing and free pooling schemes, most of which have seen the said machines disappear into a container, headed ultimately towards rural China. Today’s invention is an alternative approach.

Make many bicycle wheels of a single, sensible size and at very low cost. Leave large numbers of these in public places and then sell people each a suitably-sized generic frame (fitted with a small, removable plastic roller where the back wheel normally goes, a mechanism to turn the forks and bars in-line for easy stowage in a luggage rack and one fixed gear).

This allows people to take their frame to eg a station, drop the wheels in a suitable rack, board a train or bus (with frame) and then slot in two different wheels at the other end of the journey. The rolling frame would be much easier to manoeuvre/carry and the wheels themselves would be so cheap that their ubiquity would act as a big disincentive to thieves.

Every station master and bus company manager would monitor levels of their local wheels and publish the figures on a website. These would then be easily redistributed by throwing a few onto eg a bus or a train occasionally. The process might even get to be self-organising, so that wheels would be more common where demand was higher. If it took off, it would then be possible to do away with some of the normal seats on trains and allow people to secure their bike frames to the floors of carriages to sit on them instead.

Objects, including aircraft, tanks and buildings are located both by image analysis and human observers in aerial photographs. Even though the objects may be surface-camouflaged, unless they are placed under a lot of scrim netting, they will cast characteristic shadows on the ground and thus be identifiable, relatively easily.

Today’s invention is to equip anything which requires to avoid aerial, visual detection, with a string of bright lights. These would be located on the lower circumference of the object, pointing at the ground.

A number of light detectors on the upper surface would constantly sense the direction of the sun and switch on the lights on the opposite, in-shadow side. These could then be fine-tuned to eliminate any shadows cast and thus minimise the optical detectability.

In fact, it might be a good idea to use the lights to disrupt the shadows rather than eliminate them completely.

It’s a pretty shocking thing, when you see the damage an accident can do to a vehicle…especially when it’s your vehicle.

Today’s invention is a new way to make drivers think about their own mortality and take greater care when on the road. It relies on the facts that:
a) when people can visualise something happening, they start to regard it as much more likely.
b) cars exist in a very limited number of designs and colours.

First, many of a nation’s car breakers would be equipped with a webcam. This they use to film the wrecks which are dragged in after road traffic accidents. This material is placed in a single image database.

As a vehicle speeds past a roadside camera, its numberplate is used to identify the colour and model of the car. Pictures of a crashed vehicle matching this description are then sent to a screen farther down the road. The driver will then see ‘his’ car apparently post-accident and, with any luck, it will have a sobering and slowing influence.

As an added flourish, an image of the numberplate in question could be automatically pasted into the crash scene, to force the message home in a personal way.

Wind turbines look pretty good to me…as long as there aren’t too many of them littering the entire countryside. The most common seem to have a central pole and a three-blade arrangement.

One thing that occurs to me is that these things are made to operate at a fixed height. Today’s invention is to allow the support to be telescopic, thus providing the opportunity to raise the blades to significantly greater heights, where the average wind speed is much higher.

Another factor is that, since the velocity gradient is still quite steep at normal turbine height (it may not flatten out much at less than 1000m), the blade which is at the 12 o’clock position will be much more heavily wind-loaded than those at 4 and 8 o’clock. Another invention is therefore to allow the blades themselves to telescope, so that the 12 o’clock one can be automatically made shorter than the other two, as the rotation progresses.

Today’s invention is a collection of nested enclosures, which slide into and out of one another like drawers in a cabinet. A telescoping action is envisaged which would allow the formation of zigzag or spiral machines which could be squeezed into the volume of the original drawer.

The sliders could be made robust and lockable, in order to make the extended structure rigid or motorised so as to allow the whole system to propel itself across terrain or through water.

The drawers need not be rectilinear of course, resulting in interesting geometrically irregular, compressible machines.

As to applications…well I guess robot limbs or staircases or movable bridges are all possibles.

I’m no great lover of air travel…let’s forget, if we can, about having to publicly undress before boarding and about the distant prospect of retrieving any luggage at the destination…I just don’t much enjoy being spam in a can.

It is apparently established as fact that, in the event of a crash landing, many more people survive if they are facing backwards…but who wants to fly in that vulnerable-feeling orientation? By the way, if you are over six feet tall and with a longish back, have you ever had a quiet practice at adopting the ‘brace position’? On many commercial flights it’s just not possible without having some vertebrae removed first.

Today’s invention is therefore a reversible airline seat. They are just like the old tram seats I remember seeing in an ancient transport museum that could have their backrests flipped at the terminus to let passengers always face forward (because the vehicles themselves couldn’t be turned around).

In the event of some emergency landing procedure, everyone would simply shuffle from their seat to the one ahead of them, turning to face the rear of the plane as they did so and strapping themselves in again.

How great would it be to be able to label things by hand -legibly?

Today’s invention is a stylus at the ‘writing’ end of which is a small dot matrix-type array. The user can specify what font is required and even perhaps the ink colour verbally…a mic in the stylus picks up the instruction and adjusts the internal settings accordingly.

Then the user places the stylus on some paper, a piece of fruit or whatever and says “The quick brown fox…” The stylus then propels itself along the surface (driven by a motorised internal wheel and still loosely held by the user, or not).

Beautifully printed text can thus appear on command.

In olympic sprint events, the long jump and the triple jump a tailwind of greater than 2.1 meters per second (4.7 mph) will overturn an apparently record-breaking performance.

Today’s invention is a large fan which can be used to blast air towards the athletes, creating a synthetic headwind. This could be used to generate a uniform velocity profile across the track, by blasting turbulent air through a horizontal array of ducts.

Measurements, in realtime, of the natural local windspeed would be used to drive the fan speed so as to exactly counterbalance any tailwind at all times and thus render world records possible at every meet, irrespective of the weather conditions.

I was talking to a University Professor recently who was seeking ways to ensure that his super-smart but notoriously uncommunicative students would interact and generate more creative research.

Today’s invention is a way to promote that.

Students (or other creative types) would each have a cubicle as usual but these would actually be mobile boxes, capable of being loosely hitched together for a few days and then decoupled and moved around the office space (perhaps being motorised).

‘Collisions’ between cubes, determined either by management or by semi-random automatic movements, would ensure that much more interaction between workers occurs. When joined, there would be only one entry/exit to each pair. Groupings of greater numbers of people (using hexagonal cubicles eg) would also create a ‘cool’ environment in which people could sense that collaboration was a requirement.

Cubes could also be rotated, to shake up people’s perspectives, whilst preserving their own little territories.

For groups not wanting to invest in all this mechanisiation, it would be possible to have fixed cubes with a maze running in the spaces between them that could be varied, forcing people to take new routes between their colleagues.