Category: Possible inventions

The whole patent process is adminstratively a mess -I understand, for example, that in some fields it’s taking longer and longer to be granted a patent because all of the good Officers have now been poached by big companies to help them draft more watertight applications.

Worse than that though is that the system acts as a brake on invention, rather than a stimulant.  Even governments are now starting to recognise that patenting protects corporations against citizens (See eg this story).

Today’s invention is a contingent payment scheme in which patent attorneys can draft and submit claims in return for a share of the IP. Patent agents are quite used to litigating cases on a no-win-no fee basis in certain jurisdictions but I’m proposing that they sign up for a share of the real action. They get to take some risk, on projects they select, in return for potentially huge rewards. No more handouts of Monopoly money for just shuffling papers.

This would certainly separate sheep from goats in terms of the patent agents who understand technology: -they would be the ones to whom inventors would naturally gravitate. There would also be fewer micro-incremental or ‘spoiling’ applications and many more patents at least partly in the hands of genuinely innovative, Fred-in-a-shed inventors.

I’ve been talking lately to a science fiction writer about how more of the ‘interior life’ of her characters can be expressed when her latest story inevitably gets made into a ‘Major Motion Picture.’ The old voice over/narrator thing is so 23rd Century.

So I suggested thought bubbles…they are a mainstay of comics, of course but I’ve never seen them used in a film -even films of comic books seem to fight shy. Today’s invention is therefore to embed thought bubbles when editing/postprocessing a movie.

These would need to be multilingual of course but with digital filming taking off, that becomes fairly straightforward -speech to text conversion could even be used to fill the bubbles (as long as it wasn’t a George Lucas script played by a Marlon Brando avatar).

Come to think of it, why isn’t this done already for subtitled films? The thought bubbles themselves could be automatically located in patches of the screen where the texture was uniform, so as not to be too intrusive visually.

Having a big kitchen sink (albeit in a small kitchen) is great. You can sluice down all sorts of stuff with some chance of washing away the stains and splatters before they provoke a domestic contretemps.

The major difficulty is tap(s): even the ones which rotate around a central point can only direct the water flow onto a very limited arc of ceramic (and those coffee grounds are always lurking in the corners).

Today’s invention is therefore a universal-fit rubber manifold pipe.

The inlet stabs onto the mixer tap and the other three or four outlets are each equipped with a pinch-close valve and a moulded-in iron wire. This allows the user to direct exactly as much water flow to any part of the sink as is required. The soft iron wire ensures that each outlet stays pointing where you aimed it, even when the flowrate is turned up.

You can buy a version of this for garden use, but it’s just a rigid device for joining hoses: useless for directing flow in a consistent way.

There are many industries that require localised erosive or etching processes; such as electronics fabrication, decorative glassware, engraving jewellery or even ‘stonewashing’ your favourite bluejeans.

What many of them need is a way to control exactly where and how much etching takes place. Well, every time I visit the dentist I’m told the salutary tale of how the surfaces of my teeth are being eroded by bugs that create acid from my food (I also get the spiel about the latest recommended new-and-improved brushing/flossing technique, but that’s another story),

Today’s invention therefore is to apply a precise concentration of sugar solution to a well-defined region and then to add some enamel eating bacteria. After a specified time (at a particular temperature), their acidic output will have etched a tightly controlled region of the surface.

It’s not going to be a fast process, but it seems pretty low-cost and there may be scope for recycling the bugs as well as the acids they produce.

Motorcycle sidecars were invented for people who couldn’t afford a car, not because they were dynamically graceful or elegant in design.

Given the amount of tinkering that bike enthusiasts do (trikes, truck engines, trailers, etc ) I’m slightly surprised that I can’t find anyone who has developed today’s invention.

It’s simply to attach two motorcycles together in parallel, linking their steering, gearchange and throttle mechanisms so as to create a dual-control machine. The linkage would be a parallelogram in section, allowing the bikes to lean over to the same extent in bends.

Why? Well, first you get lots of the benefits of a small car (eg stability, especially if there are frost patches) but most importantly it provides a way for one experienced rider to teach a less experienced one how to take corners etc safely at speed (something which most riders either never learn -or crash while attempting to discover).

This would require two identical machines to start and there’s not much point in using ‘boxers’, since the cylinder heads are going to be in perpetual conflict. It would, however, be useful to motorcycle training schools, or even as promotional vehicles -Tom Cruise could appear to do more of his own pointless stunts, without having to stick to a straight line.

I’m no great fan of inflicting suffering on animals of any sort (with the possible exception of some football hooligans). I do however understand that fishing is a massive sport (or perhaps pastime would be a better description, if you break sweat when fishing, it’s time to talk to a cardiologist).

Anyway, today’s invention is a more effective than normal way to catch big fish.

Take a live, brightly coloured bait fish and place it inside a small transparent box full of water. Attach the box to the end of a fishing line and immerse in your body of water. The box would be hydrodynamically shaped (like a teardrop) so as to align itself fairly stably in the water current.

The movement of the bait fish would attract predators stupid enough to bite at the box and in so doing snag themselves on the nearby hook.

Naturally, I’d expect any fish not caught for food by hungry people to be thrown back (together with the somewhat perturbed, but otherwise unscathed, bait). A refinement of this system might be to have some holes in the top of the box to allow the smell of the bait to escape (as well as any vibrations given off).

If this is all thought too cruel, I’d suggest wrapping an old mobile phone in two condoms (navy seal style), whilst playing a bait fish movie in brilliant colour on the screen (most mobiles already have a piscine form factor).

I’ve been taken aback by my own ability to ignore people who are suffering. When I was a child, tv pictures started appearing in our living room of other small children dying for lack of food (always helped on their way by ‘governments’ from all over the world).

It’s been established by experimental psychologists that it’s much easier to be cruel or neglectful to someone who is anonymous.

Today’s invention is a new use for multicoloured plastic letters, suitable for stringing together to form a simple necklace.

These would be supplied to famine-threatened villages in a big tub. Children would be encouraged to grab these and make necklaces spelling out their names (and even maybe simple messages/greetings).

When the cameras arrive to document their ‘hopeless plight’, these people would be identifiable as individuals, rather than a mass of foreigners who are impossible to help. This might provoke all sorts of people to do a Geldof.

Maybe the necklaces will soon carry personal web addresses, in a further attempt to overcome the danger of anonymity.

I’m slightly surprised by how old fashioned some firefighting techniques are. I suppose it’s not really that surprising that people whose lives depend on well-established systems and procedures are a bit reluctant to experiment.

Take the standard firehose, for example. Given the momentum of the water flow, it can take two or three highly trained firefighters to direct it onto the target area -personnel who are therefore unavailable for other, more important tasks get used essentially as ballast.

Today’s invention is therefore a trolley which accommodates the business end of a ground based firehose. It would incorporate wheels to help the hose get unwound and located manually. Thereafter, water from the hose would be used to fill a large tank in the base of the trolley, ensuring that it remains in place without being held by firefighters.

The top section of the trolley, holding the hose nozzle, would be free to rotate and driven by a hydraulic system powered by the supply water pressure itself. Valves in the system would be radio controlled so that a single operative, standing at a safe distance, could, by opening and closing these, reposition the hose on different targets, as necessary.

Several hoses could be directed by one firefighter in this way (In fact, in areas of high water pressure, a larger number of hoses could be operated, perhaps even being directed automatically to the hottest regions as indicated by thermal imaging cameras).

I’m not, in general, a big fan of noise but here’s a possible exception.

Lots of cyclists are involved in accidents and often it’s because neither car drivers nor pedestrians can hear them coming.

Today’s invention is simply to attach a light plastic tube to some of the spokes of a bicycle’s front wheel. Each tube would be mounted parallel to its spoke with the end closer to the axle closed off. As the bike moves down the street, air rushing over the open end of a pipe causes it to hum, just like blowing over the lip of a beer bottle.

Rotation of the wheel would cause an increase and decrease in volume from any one tube, corresponding to the 12 or 3 o’clock positions, for example.

The tubes could be of different lengths and even tuned in order to generate interesting, even personalised chords. This effect could be enhanced by locating the tubes in a range of circumferential positions.

As the bike’s speed increases, so the frequency of the ‘siren’ would increase. This provides other road users with an extra indication that a bicycyle is closer than they thought and also gives an indication of the speed at which it’s travelling.

In the late 80’s, psychologist Francine Shapiro observed that particular eye movements reduced the intensity of disturbing thoughts in some patients (eg victims of combat stress, rape etc). The truth is no-one really knows why this works, but EMDR does seem effective.

I noticed recently that certain Apple screen savers (eg ‘Beach’ under OS X) were having a similar, low-intensity hypnotic effect. These are essentially still images of a tranquil scene, each of which is very slowly panned and zoomed; imitating the way that one’s eyes tend to move around a scene.

My suspicion is that these screensavers are so popular because they detune the critical, conscious part of the mind and allow access to underlying emotions. A similar thing happens when I read a large body of printed material: my eyes quickly begin to drift around the page, I lose ‘concentration’, and my mind wanders off into emotional states which are unrelated to the text.

Today’s invention is a program capable of making such a moving screensaver from any large JPEG image. The resulting image would be designed to move in those patterns which are known to provide most effective emotional release. This would almost certainly help some people subliminally, without any awareness of being ‘in therapy.’

Occasional tears in the keyboard would be a small price to pay.