Some people take enormous exception to finding bits of cork in their wineglass.
One way to avoid this is to use today’s invention: a vacuum corkscrew.
A rigid cylindrical tube is placed on the neck of a wine bottle. A rubber seal on the flat face of one end of the tube is pressed into contact with the bottleneck (whilst avoiding touching the cork). The tube is then evacuated, using a handpump, which causes the cork to be sucked from the bottle…without generating any fragments.
Opticians generally do a good job of correcting one’s eyesight using lenses.
Today’s invention is a new system in which the correction is only partial.
The lenses that one ends up wearing would be only 90% corrective. This leaves the wearer constantly having to exercise their eye muscles a little in order to make up the shortfall and achieve focus. This exercise alone would be enough to reduce one’s reliance on glasses and perhaps even reduce the deterioration in one’s vision over time.
No matter what you might think about some of Edison’s attitudes, you have to admit that he was highly creative.
The incandescent bulb, which he helped to develop commercially, is way out of favour these days. This is for a variety of different reasons including energy efficiency (only ~10% conversion to light), cost of manufacture and reliability.
Today’s invention takes a second look at this old technology and addresses the latter aspects of its design. Imagine a cylindrical glass ‘envelope’ with the usual, low pressure inert gas inside. On the inside surface of the cylinder is loosely bonded a helix of filament wire. One end of the cylinder admits a sealed rotor which allows the two contact wires it carries to drive current through a fixed length of filament. As one section burns out over time, so the rotor, when turned a little (via a screw thread), allows the contacts to connect across the next section of filament. A smarter version might aim to vary over time the length of filament between contacts to as to make use of the remaining, unburnt sections -although this would cause a variation in light output each time.
Much greater mechanical strength, miniaturisation potential and the ability to bypass burned-out filament sections would result in greatly enhanced longevity -with only a marginal increase in manufacturing costs.
I thought yesterday that I’d invented a whole new use for cellular automata in cryptography…but of course there is already an entire discipline devoted to this idea.
My non-invention was that you start with a pixel pattern (binary works best because without colours, neighbours aren’t correlated). Use this as the start field for a CA (like Conway’s Game of Life, except that the rules can be run backwards as well as forwards. In Life, you can end up with only a few blinking pixels which can’t ever be used to regenerate the original field, so it’s not reversible. A reversible one is something like a model of an ideal gas in which a sequence of collisions can be traced backwards and forwards forever with perfect precision). Run the reversible CA for 100,000 cycles or so. Send the scrambled image to someone who knows the reversible rules (which can be ultra hard to guess). Tell them how many cycles to run it backwards for and they can regenerate the original image/text.
Sadly, today’s invention is just a small-scale application of this approach. I imagine ‘a spot the ball’ competition, run as an online, viral campaign. You send your friend a link to an applet. This contains a scrambled image -with one pixel inverted from black to white. The applet will allow the friend to darken one pixel of their choice and run backwards by a large number of steps automatically. Only if they choose the correct pixel to turn on will the original screen, “You have won $1M,” appear.
Inspired by origami, today’s invention is a parachute which is folded into the shape of an overall.
This could then be integrated into the rear surface of a one-piece flight suit, wearable by everyone travelling by air. Rather than have to carry a bulky parachute, or to grab and don one in an emergency, people would be always ready to make an escape from their aircraft by wearing a folded chute, distributed around their body.
The folding could be done in such a way as to minimise the thickness around areas of flexure such as elbows and knees -and thus maintain maximal flexibility in use.
Anyone who has ever tried to hang wallpaper or to cut fabric knows that it can be hard to achieve any kind of long, straight edge. If you are working with expensive materials, the cost of having snipped a section which is slightly too short, because of irregularity in the cut edge, can be very high. So you might try using a long ruler and marking the line to follow…but that requires potentially defacing the very item which is soon to be on show.
Today’s invention is a pair of scissors equipped with a small laser beam projector (adapted from those which are commonly used in eg portable CD players).
The laser beam is mounted on the outer face of one of the halves of the shears and, driven by a small pendulum, this ocillates so as to describe a fine, coloured straight line along the surface of the material being sectioned, directly in front of and in line with the scissors.
A more advanced version might take the form of a stationary projector which would form an entire cutting pattern image, showing eg a tailor or a vehicle upholster where the blade should go.
This being summer, it’s the season for being rained on at barbecues. Since I like my meat actually cooked, rather than ‘rare’, I have to spend a lot of time watching whatever is being made on my behalf. Food in preparation always gets shuffled about on a grill a fair bit, making tracking one’s forthcoming steak much more difficult.
Today’s invention is a dogtag for barbecue items which helps ensure they are cooked to your taste.
On arrival at the cookfest, you would be handed several tags made of a heavier than usual aluminium foil. Each tag has an alphabet pressed into it which allows you to punch holes where your initial letters appear (using eg a wooden skewer, or at a pinch, a pencil).
Having done this, the selected pieces can have a normal bulldog clip attached to their edges and a tag twisted around the ring on each bulldog clip, gripping it securely and allowing it to be identified irrespective of orientation.
Similar punched holes in the tags can be made to express your sauce preferences and to allow the chef to easily determine whether bleu or bien cuit (cindered) is required. The clips can be dishwashed clean afterwards and the tags discarded.
Military helicopters sometimes have to make a forced landing: an event which often results in a sickening impact with the ground and multiple casualties.
Today’s invention is an adaptation of the Russian approach to space vehicle landings, using retro rockets, which attempts to lessen the injuries caused in such helicopters.
In the event of an imminent crash landing, the underwing munitions on board a military helicopter could be swivelled to point vertically upwards (but with the release catches still locked). All such rockets still on board would be automatically and symmetrically fired, when the vehicle was within a few feet of the ground, significantly cushioning its impact.
Ever since carbonated drinks were invented, people have had to accept whatever level of fizziness was supplied by the factory. Today’s invention attempts to allow consumers to control this according to their personal taste.
Each bottle would be full to the top -with no air gap. The contents of each bottle would be injected with the same quantity of carbon dioxide. A consumer could reduce the amount of fizz in the bottle, from the maximum, factory-gate level, by unscrewing the cap a small amount -as indicated by the relative movement of marks on the cap edge and the bottle neck.
This would be arranged to occur without breaking the seal, so that a fraction of the gas would come out of solution, in response to the low pressure region and in proportion to the amount of initial unscrewing. A region of carbon dioxide would quickly form above the liquid surface and in equilibrium with it.
Opening the bottle would then allow the excess gas to escape at once and enable drinking the custom-fizzy liquid in the usual way.
Leafcutter ants (Atta) are adept at managing the division of labour between the 8M or so individuals undertaking different functions within a nest.
Garbage collection is done by several specialist types who identify anything foreign within a nest and transport it to an external garbage heap. No-one coordinates this work but the ants behave according to simple rules which govern their interactions with each other and their environment.
Today’s invention is to exploit this behaviour by applying it to the separation of mixtures of leaf-like cellulose and inorganic particles (eg glass fibres). This would allow vehicles, and other engineered systems, to be largely constructed from fibre-reinforced cellulose. Parking a scrap vehicle on a nest would result in it being gradually broken into two separate sets of material particles, allowing a new car to be formed from these recycled elements.
