Category: Possible inventions

Zip fasteners are such a great invention. How could they ever be improved upon?

Well, if you happen to be standing on a mountain in a rising gale with an urgent need to seal out the weather, suddenly having the zip of your coat jam is a potentially life-threatening situation. This normally happens when some soft material on one side of the zip somehow gets in the way of its motion and brings the process to a sudden halt.

Today’s invention is a ‘snow-plough’ for zippers.

In its simplest form it could be implemented as just a duplicate ‘keeper’ running ahead of the one actually attempting to close the zip. If this clogs on surrounding fabric, it alerts the user to the problem just in time to allow the main keeper not to be fouled.

The snowplough keeper would be made of some form of plastic which could be simply broken off, releasing the jammed material and allowing much closer monitoring of the future progress of the main keeper.

Inevitably with the volume of texting which occurs, people are now starting to complain about repetitive strain injury to their thumbs and fingers.

Conventional keypads have a lot to answer for, as has the tendency among designers to cram in as much functionality as possible on a thumbprint-sized area. What is really needed is a full-sized keyboard which can magically still allow one’s superslick phone or pda to slip into the briefest of pockets.

Today’s invention addresses exactly this problem. An aftermarket accessory would be made available consisting of a bag of stalks, perhaps 30mm in length (although keen people could trim theirs for optimal use). On one end of each stalk would be a small adhesive pad -on the other end, a fingertip-sized, moulded-in button.

When attached (temporarily, for a serious texting session) by adhesive pads to the keys on the keyboard, the stalks would be capable of small, independent, axial movements to drive the keys They would splay outwards from the phone pad forming a new, scaled up version of the original one -but requiring much less dexterity/concentration and finger pressure.

The stalks might be conical in form, allowing them to be neatly nested when not in use, The buttons could be made transparent so the underlying keys could remain visible (or opaque so that letter stickers, supplied as part of the kit, could be applied as needed).

Also good for glove-wearing phone users.

Ever since a hot air balloon nearly crashed into my roof I’ve been intrigued by these vehicles. Their combination of high drag and low manoeuvrability make them pretty unexciting transportation devices though.

Today’s invention aims to change that.

The net upthrust on the balloon envelope is mostly due to the product of its plan area and the difference in atmospheric pressure between top and bottom surfaces. This makes it possible to play with the geometry without sacrificing buoyancy.

Imagine a balloon envelope say, two meters in height, 100m wide and 4m broad. This could be formed with a respectable aerofoil section and thus of generating additional lift. For extra safety, two half-size wings could be joined into a biplane. A 4m wide wing section filled with hot air (from one end) would be capable of some flexure (via cables) and thus much more directional control.

Equip the whole thing with a small fan to provide some motive power and you have a robust, steerable flying machine that can pack into the boot of a biggish car.

Hip replacement operations, although highly successful, are very costly. The reason that so many are required is that when someone has even a minor fall, the ligaments around their hip, the ones that hold the hip joint ‘ball’ in its ‘socket’, become suddenly very taught.

It’s this sudden snapping force which can break the balljoint off the top of the femur, rather than any subsequent impact with the floor.

Today’s invention is a belt containing two syringes of fast-acting muscle relaxant. Each syringe is positioned over the hip region of the wearer. An accelerometer on the belt detects when a fall is in progress (just like the mechanism for locking up the hard disk in a falling laptop).

When this occurs, the syringes automatically inject their content into both hip regions, preventing a serious tightening of the muscles and saving the joints from damage.  Actually, you might well see more dislocations (it’s to avoid these that the muscles tighten up) but that seems like a much less significant problem that femoral-neck fractures.

It’s sometimes difficult to make up squash drinks whilst avoiding over-concentrating them. Even the ones without unpleasant additives (ie 16 spoonfuls of sugar per 500 ml) are probably not good for you, if served in too concentrated a form.

Today’s invention provides a way to ensure that the drink is correctly diluted, irrespective of the geometry of the glass used, or the volume of drink prepared (and without having to use a range of traditional glass hydrometers).

A section of the plastic label on each bottle consists of strips, separable from each other using perforated seams. There are enough strips to allow one to be used per serving from the bottle. Each strip has one half of its length printed white and the other half printed with the colour variation with depth of that particular juice when correctly diluted.

To make a drink, pour an amount of concentrate into a glass. Tear off a strip from the label and bend it, at the division between white and coloured regions, to the angle shown on the label. Drop the strip into the liquid so that the coloured section lies on the liquid surface and the white part lies submerged in the drink at the specified angle.

Add water gradually, whilst looking into the glass from above. When the strip appears perfectly symmetrical (ie the variation in drink colour above the white, underwater, angled end matches the colour variation printed on the end held on the surface), then the dilution is correct.

For people who are vulnerable to attacks, but who can’t hide in a bomb-proof shelter all the time, life is complicated. I’m talking about presidents, popes and even the commanders of armoured vehicles.

Today’s invention is for anyone who might find themselves being viewed through the crosshairs of a sniper’s rifle, whilst travelling in a vehicle.

I noticed , whilst moving in a fast train recently that I could see the scene behind a parallel train of steel goods wagons, just by glimpsing it through the occasional gaps between them.

So, imagine a person with their upper body above a circular steel hatchway in a flat deck. A cylindrical cage, consisting of a bulletproof, solid roof and vertical steel bars, surrounds them. The cage is free to rotate about a vertical axis, centred on the hatchway and the person standing in the middle.

The whole thing is driven by a geared motor, so that although the occupant can see out and is visible to outside observers (being brightly lit by an internal lamp), the speed of the passing bars is so high that bullets and other projectiles have almost no chance of penetrating the cage.

For a practical bar/gap ratio of 1, at a radius of 1/2 m, the speed of the bars can be kept well below the speed of sound, even if high velocity rounds were being fired at it. The sensation for the occupant would probably be one of being in the eye of a hurricane…hard to keep one’s hairpiece in place.

Someday, battery endurance for my laptop will be on a par with that of my digital watch. Today however, even the most’ ultra-mobile’ computing requires a wall socket recharge at every available opportunity.

This means the that huge black box that dangles on the power cable has to be carted about with me all over the place. I’m sick of it. Most of all I’m sick of having to buy a new one every time I need a new machine.

Today’s invention is a variable transformer for laptop use. It’s not beyond the wit of electrical engineers to make a black box which can either sense, or have dialled in, data like :- the supply voltage, the computer model, etc and then adjust the output current/voltage/frequency combination to the correct values.

All that is then required is a range of connectors with different geometries. Suddenly one transformer can be kept pretty much forever. Although each would be more expensive to buy, the frequency with which they are discarded would be almost zero…possibly justifying a transformer unit at both ends of one’s routine journey to work.

Did I hear somebody say ‘invalidated warranty’? Come on manufacturers, either get battery technology sorted or give your customers a break and stop selling them a pound of excess copper with every notebook.

Old people are understandably frightened of falling down (over 30% of people over 65 have a fall in any one year and the consequences can be very serious, even fatal).

Today’s invention is a ‘baby walker‘ for older adults. This would allow people to walk within the frame normally (as in a Zimmer frame, with small wheels) but if a fall were to occur, they would find themselves supported by the internal, sprung seat designed to hang only a few cm beneath them. This would allow a certain amount of exercise, whilst avoiding the social difficulties associated with sitting down low in a wheelchair.

This device would be made of light alloy to allow it to be easily lifted and repositioned by the adult occupant in a standing/walking mode. Stair climbing whilst using the walker would be deliberately prevented (the height to which the frame could be lifted would be limited by the distance between occupant and seat ie a few cm) and could only be achieved safely by clipping the frame to a stairlift.

So if there’s really no chance to have umbrellas banned, the next best thing to do is mitigate one of their worst features.

The spokes have always been designed to have quite sharp little endponts, in order to allow them to be captured and retained by an axially-sliding ring near the handle, when the whole thing is folded up.

Today’s invention is to supply push-on, coloured foam hemispheres, one per spike. This would at least prevent umbrellas being the cause of any further ophthalmic injuries.

If the spokes still need to be retained when the brolly is ‘down’ then that might be better achieved by a strong elastic band, slid down outside the skin from the central pommel to nearer the handle.