Today’s invention is a playpark swing which incorporates a small automotive type airbag on both the left and right edges of the seat.
The swing seat would also incorporate a small camera, so that each bag would only fire if a face was detected within say 20 cm.
The edge-mounted bags would inflate without impacting the swing occupant’s legs.
This would reduce the number of head injuries caused to children when running in front of moving swings.
Now that even middle eastern police forces are using flying bikes, today’s invention makes use of this general concept in connection with ejection from aircraft.
When a pilot decided to eject, his cockpit cabin would be blown clear of the fuselage, as usual.
After a few seconds, instead of a parachute, a small set of rotor blades would deploy.
This would allow the pilot to steer his craft nearer to his own lines, before making a soft(ish) landing.
At no point would he be left conspicuously dangling under a canopy, a target for anyone below.
I’ve been watching racing motorcyclists take on racing car drivers. The major performance advantage which cars have is stable braking. In addition, race cars have enormous downforce.
Bikes could go faster if we attached inverted wings, but that would make overtaking hazardous and probably not work well on street circuits (Like the TT).
So, today’s invention is a downforce generator for racing bikes.
This would consist of a large fan attached to a duct held very close to the track (flexibly fringed, like a hovercraft skirt).
The fan would be driven off the engine to generate a low pressure region beneath the machine. Air would flow upwards through the duct and be exhausted behind the rider, as indicated.
Every petrol station I use has a small beach of sand on the forecourt, following spillages.
I hate walking in greasy sand and then dragging it into my vehicle. Not to mention the danger posed by half a gallon or so of 95 octane slopping about the pumps.
Today’s invention is a retro fit device for each pump.
A low tray with a steel grid on top (red) is driven up onto by pump users, using a shallow ramp at either end. Under the grid would be a steel mesh intended to limit the escape of vapour from beneath.
This tray contains a sloping bottom surface which directs anything liquid into a well, away from the paying public. The contents of this well (green) are pumped into a secure container, for later use as a very low-grade, supplemental fuel (for eg heating boilers).
Today’s invention is my submission to an online contest for ‘designers’. I don’t stand a chance in this, because I’m not spending two days rendering the required images, off fees -but the idea, I think, is sound.
The brief was to design an umbrella for people in crowded spaces.
My approach has the following features.
A funnel-shaped parasol/canopy (in the shape of a water vortex). This is inflatable, using the bicycle pump in the handle. This avoids any sudden expansion of eye-poking spokes. It would be translucent, so that crowd members don’t get submerged in total darkness.
The profile of the funnel presents a low-drag shape to the oncoming wind, so that inversion can’t happen and buffeting about is reduced. This structure is further stabilised by being held up on the bicycle pump, as well as a flexible tube (red).
The tube allows the rainwater to avoid dripping all over your neighbours and instead dribbles out onto the ground (directed to miss everyone’s feet).
Wing mirrors have got so clever ie full of electronics that when they fail or are damaged, the cost can easily run to £200.
Today’s invention is a parking sensor built into a wing mirror housing. So what? you may say…
Instead of just making an annoying beeping sound, this detects a potential collision with the mirror itself (either when parked or in tight traffic).
The system would automatically cause the mirror housing to snap back, under the action of a low-tech spring, flush with the car body.
Today’s invention is a simple visor wiper for motorcycle helmets.
There are some unattractive designs inevitably based on conventional car windscreen wipers. Imagine, however, placing a small bristlebot, of the type in the image, on the inside of your visor. This would have embedded in it a piece of ferromagnetic material
The bot is held in place by a rubber-coated magnetic disc on the outside of the visor.
When the bristlebot motor is activated, it will buzz around the inside visor surface, whilst held to that surface by the external magnet. As the bot hits the side of the visor, it changes direction randomly.
The exterior disc thus is moved all over the visor, removing the film of rain from the surface.
Seat backs on airliners are now stuffed full of electronics. This is increasingly to take the minds of passengers off the fact that they are squashed into tiny seats.
When a seat is also being repeatedly kicked by someone sitting behind, or forced into contact with your kneecaps by someone in front, electronics can come to your rescue.
Rather than having an episode of air rage, if seat backs each had an iPad-like device on board (as they do) then the integral movement sensors could detect repeated impacts and wirelessly communicate this to cabin crew.
This would allow miscreants to be dealt with officially before complaints and acrimony set in. Just the foreknowledge that they might be blacklisted could force people to behave better.
I’m not keen on the idea of patents, let alone our broken system which is only really available to companies, not inventors.
Copyright is another form of intellectual property which works everywhere, lasts a very long time and is free. It is intended to stop somebody making and selling copies of eg somebody else’s poems. As such, copyright is no damn use to inventors…until now.
The image shows part of a poem which I have just written. Imagine a computer generating pages of this stuff using random combinations of characters like A, V, Z, N (although I would take the credit for the writing, of course).
Now imagine that these poems are actually 2-D meshes which, if implemented using steelwork, 3-D print or Meccano would have interesting mechanical properties. These could be automatically analysed using eg FE programs so that useful ‘poems’ could be selected. These might represent eg sections of aircraft fuselage in which some regions were highly rigid (eg XXXX) and others made deliberately elastic (eg NNNNN).
So now I have a way for my structural designs to be protected by copyright. No-one is free to make a copy of my invented frameworks because they are actually poems. There is no chance that anyone can get a patent for this idea, since I just published it.
I still have to pursue people through the courts to prove infringement, but that should be relatively straightforward once the test cases get established (20 years or so).
Poems would also need to be of limited length, so that infringers couldn’t grab huge areas of mesh and then claim ‘fair use’.
Today’s invention is a fire safety device, to be used in confined spaces where smoke inhalation can be very dangerous.
It takes the form of a ‘cooker hood’ (green) attached to a powerful fan (pink). The hood is attached to the (low) ceiling on a rail so that it can be positioned nearer a fire. This draws in a large percentage of any smoke being generated and passes it over a 3-way catalytic converter.
The proximity to the flames activates the catalyst’s chemicals and their effect is to strip out many of the most noxious pollutants.
The hood might also carry a conventional extinguisher. It could, in addition, allow the water produced by the catalysis process to fall onto the fire.
This provides people with more time to escape.
