Category: Possible inventions

When I’m walking around carrying eg my keys, phone, MP3 player, railcard, PDA, glasses etc I’m constantly paranoid about losing some of them or having them stolen from an unflapped pocket. If I have to run to catch a train or avoid some homicidal taxi, there is always the fear that some of these essential items have bounced onto the pavement, never to be seen again.

Today’s invention is intended to make it easier to monitor a collection of portable things without constantly having to pay attention to them, (or carry a handbag or having alarms sounding in your clothing).

Each item would be secured to a short length of wire. At each end of each wire there would be a simple magnetic connector. The wire would carry a soft coating which was oval in section (say, 5mm max diameter). This would make it much less likely to form irritating knots, bulges under clothes or be uncomfortable to sit on. The coating could be in bright colours, a different one for each item, if desired. Lengths might even be stitched to the outside of clothes as a design feature.

All these sections of wire would be joined to an MP3 player, so that removal of any one from the circuit formed would immediately, but discreetly, alert the user, by stopping the music playing in one’s headphones. Of course, if you wanted to hand your phone to a friend, the two ends left by their removal could simply be rejoined to fire up your music once more.

People who live near recycling centres can be driven mad by the noise of glass being flung into the plastic bins with maximal force. There is, I’ll admit, a certain joy in hearing that old pickle jar smash into pieces in a collision with 1000 or so redundant wine bottles.

Some bins have a circular brush surrounding the entry hole, but this seems not to cut the noise emitted significantly (The glass doesn’t actually need to fragment on entry, to reduce the volume of the contents, since the bins get picked up and emptied long before they start getting full anyway).

Today’s invention is a simple silencer for bottle banks, which takes the form of a neoprene hose with diameter equal to that of the bank’s input hole. This hose is slighly longer than the height of the bank itself. As items of glass ware are inserted into the elastic hose, they form a ‘chain’ inside, rather than falling directly onto the glass which has already exited the hose.

Subsequent bottles etc pushed into the hose, force the contents inwards, in a kind of peristalsis, so that ocasionally a glass item will pop out quietly onto the material inside the bank.

I was looking at the tyres on a serious sportscar the other day and could hardly believe how low-profile they were: probably no more in depth than 30mm from road to rim. The reason for such shallow tyres is probably mostly to achieve high lateral stiffness…if you’re cornering hard, you don’t want the hub to move radially outwards, whilst the rubbery bit stays put on the tarmac. The lower the tyres, the lower the body of the vehicle can be and that is usually good from an aerodynamic resistance point of view. Also, I guess that, being stiffer, shallow tyres give a driver more ‘feedback’ about the condition of the road -not something that is appreciated by drivers of family saloons on rutted rural roads.

I know that tyre research is a multimillion dollar business, but that doesn’t stop me leaping in and making naive suggestions, of course. Today’s invention is therefore a new tyre design, based on the oldest tyre design: that of the bicycle.

Another way to get high stiffness, feedback and low form drag would be to create wheels which were essentially several bicycle wheels side by side on the same axis. These would have the added advantage of greater resistance to puncturing…one or two tyres could burst on each wheel without the vehicle having to galumph to an immediate halt. It would be necessary to have the tyres spaced axially a little apart in order to limit wall-to-wall contact with each other.

I reckon it would also be possible to make use of a lot of technology from competitive cycling to design car wheels that would be significantly lighter than even racing alloys. A combination of carbon fibre spokes and solid wheels could be used, perhaps, and it would be interesting to experiment with a range of different inflation pressures across the tyres of one wheel.

In certain places, having the ‘wrong’ accent can be a major handicap. Try being from Belfast during the 1970s.

Today’s invention is a system designed to remove the possible impediment of a regional accent and force people to listen to what you have to say,

The user of the system would speak into a mouthpiece so that their natural accent was inaudible. An internal microphone would then pass the user’s speech to a program trained previously to covert the individual’s voice to text. This text would then be ‘spoken’ by an inverse program in some different accent. Since certain accents are known to carry different connotations, it might even be useful to switch to using an output vocabulary recorded by eg a woman from Edinburgh if one wanted to sound trustworthy (or a Cantabrigian if one wanted to sound arrogant authoritative).

This avoids all the difficulties associated with translating from one language to another: simply a word for word conversion would be required. As long as the word rate was not too fast, this could be accomplished in something very close to realtime and thus allow someone from Glasgow to communicate with someone from Glastonbury without applying any social prejudices.

It would obviously be more useful for application to phone conversations, although certain religious groups who believe that voices are inappropriately sexual might adopt it to allow them to talk freely, face to face, in a machine monotone.

I’m not that fastidious about hygiene, but when someone pours me a drink from a ring-pull can, I can’t help but wonder what the liquid is absorbing en route. Cans often find themselves piled up in some fairly insanitary conditions and given only a quick wipe before being served to the customer.

The design of the ring-pull itself is a masterpiece of invention, but its pouring action is pretty turbulent, especially with carbonated fluids which can flow pretty much anywhere.

Today’s invention is a flexible, reusable plug or grommit which wedges into the ring-pull aperture when the can has been opened and forms a seal there. In the middle of the plug is an internally-streamlined, moulded-in pipe which contains both a liquid outflow passage and an air inflow one, in an attempt to achieve a smoother pouring action.

This allows the drink to get to the glass without washing in whatever crud happens to be on the can’s exterior.

It’s often hard to find a refuse bin nowadays in public places, with the result that all sorts of rubbish just gets dumped anywhere.

The shortage of bins is because authorities are rightly concerned that some crazy terrorist type could use one as a place to dump a bomb, allowing him or her a chance to escape whilst the coundown continued. Many bins are also designed to be hard to shift and therefore make quite an effective grenade if blown apart from within.

Today’s invention is a public-space refuse bin consisting of a cannon-like body capable of not being burst apart by even high explosive. Rubbish would be placed in the bin by the public through the blades of a very coarse, turbine-like lid (which could be unlocked and completely removed under normal circumstances for cleaning).

If an explosive device detonates within the bin, the force of the blast is directed upwards, but instead of firing debris aloft only for it to shower down on people with undiminished force, the high friction, heavy turbine in the top would be rotated by the blast, absorbing much of its energy and retaining a large proportion of any shrapnel behind the spinning blades.

We have the technology to digitally watermark postage stamps, in order to limit counterfeiting.

What a pity though, that we can still only buy stamps with eg the Queen’s head on them.

Today’s invention is a conventional stamp, complete with the value displayed and a monarch’s head, if necessary. Instead of adding some standard image, chosen by a government representative, why not let people pay to create their own designs for the remaining space? This could easily be done online (by eg uploading their favourite images). The system would then insert covert anti-copying marks into the new stamp which, although invisible, could later be detected by post office sorting machines (after they had been printed out at a specified number of dots per inch by the customer).

Stamps are so century-before-last, but if we must still use them, maybe we could have some fun by designing our own personalised versions?

There’s a lot of thinking going on late at night in the labs of various search engine companies. How can they tweak their results ranking so that people get more reliable access to the information they were looking for?

The problem is context. If you search using only one word, eg ‘Chameleon’ are you interested in the creature with the independent eyes, the rock band or one of the twenty or so ‘original thinker’ web design companies by that name?

No search engine can read your mind, so you tend to get dross and then have to repeat your search (rather than scroll through ten pages of results).

Today’s invention is a better way to handle this problem. It would be easier if the searcher could be provided with some kind of tick-box interface, to help specify the context, when first they visit their favourite search engine. To provide a meaningful set of boxes in general is intractable, though. Instead, I suggest the following.

A searcher would undertake a first pass search. He or she would immediately be presented with a spread of results (ideally, one relating to each of the possible different Chameleon entities). The results themselves would simply be the first ten nouns from the front page of each website. These would each then be selectable, by clicking, as a way to refine the next level of search; which would then deliver more of the required data in the usual format. So it’s an automatically generated field of context-sensitive tickboxes.

This would at least limit the madness of being presented with tens of useless results pages.

The Rules of Tennis state that you aren’t allowed to change the tension of your racket strings whilst a point is being played. (Lower tensions generally provide more power and less impact to the arm: higher tensions offer more control and better spin).

It seems, at least until some official body rules against it, that it’s perfectly ok to change one’s racket tension before every point.

In a game that’s constantly being accused of being boring because of the dominance of fast serves, it would certainly increase audience interest if players took advantage of this and attempted to anticipate the optimal string tension for a forthcoming point (based on eg how well they are currently returning serve or in attempts to protect a wrist injury).

Today’s invention is a screw-driven wedge device in the handle of a racket that would, without changing the shape of the head, boost or decrease the tension in the strings. This could be made operable without showing an opponent any new setting which had been selected.

The brassiere has been around now for about a century, so I thought it was time to upgrade it to being a higher tech dynamic system. Breast motion is something which occupies the minds of designers of sports bras and plastic surgeons alike.

People, especially males, tend to be tuned to the way women move, not just their shape.

Today’s invention is a brassiere which will move in such a way, under the action of normal walking, as to amplify natural breast oscillation.

The required harmonic dynamics can be achieved by building flat springs into the straps and small masses fitted into the cups which can be adjusted to operate at frequencies characteristic of breasts of a given (usually larger) size. The necessary damping friction could be provided by selecting the (variable) number of velcro tabs over which the straps are constrained to travel.

With any luck, this system might provide some women with sufficiently increased confidence as to avoid breast augmentation surgery.