Category: Possible inventions

Your cellphone design provides an important way to say who they are -apparently. A recent New York Times article talked about how manufacturers are managing to charge huge prices for devices which look cool and make their owners appear smart and/or exclusive -“like a movie star.”

“…the sleek Motorola Razr V3 cellphone first hit the stores just over two years ago, it carried the price tag of a must-have status symbol: $500. Now? About $30 with a two-year service contract.”

Today’s invention is one more attempt to endow such products with this ‘wow’ factor, but without having to pay for fancy (costly) technical innovations they don’t actually need.

This simple mechanism (which is actually part of a booklight) has a couple more links than the standard clamshell design and these seem to imbue it with a significantly more complex, lifelike movement.

Imagine the social effect of being the first with a fold-out cellphone mouthpiece (suitable sound effects during unfolding would enhance this impact further). Devices like this, with more degrees of freedom, also allow for many more interesting unfolding processes than do simpler ones.

Of course, once you start to get into the realm of powered, multilink mechanisms, the possibility of a cellphone-as-robot emerges.  Just think how cool it would be for your cellphone to ‘walk’ to you from the next room when there was an incoming call.

They have tried to fit airbags to motorcycles and even motorcyclists, I understand, but the triggering conditions are extremely hard to get right (so that they don’t fire when travelling over rough ground or when braking hard).

In addition, bikes have the disadvantages that the driver is only centimeters away from any impact and tends to be ejected from the machine, often sideways, during a crash. Airbags might save life if they can be interposed between rider and stationary object, but one of the main causes of injury is abrasion. Airbags will not deal well with high speed tarmac, since it’s difficult to coat them in a thick layer of handstitched goatskin.

Today’s invention attempts to deal with some of these problems. The Hoberman sphere is a brilliant invention with multiple applications. It’s basically a large collection of scissors, joined together so that when they are closed they transform from a small clump to an almost spherical buckminster-like geometry.

I’d suggest that motorcycles could be fitted with several of these, each of which would be made of spring steel and compressed into a small ‘bubble’ enclosure. On impact, with either the road surface or a telegraph pole, the enclosure would shatter, releasing what would almost instantly become a spherical spring, capable of absorbing an enormous amount of energy: a mobile crash barrier.

These devices might even be used on the flanks of a machine in order to stop the bike falling on its side -thus avoiding the usual leg injuries and keeping the rider in the driving seat.

Mathematics textbooks are full of references to fair dice. Fairness they define as yielding equal numbers of each of the 6 possible outcomes, when a die is tossed a very large number of times. A die that came up ‘5’ for the first 30,000 or so tossings, might. however, make one suspicious about exactly how fair it was, even if ‘5’ didn’t reoccur in the next 5,000…it all just shows that humans aren’t naturally attuned to the meaning of probability (anyone’s first 5 minutes in Las Vegas illustrate that).

Today’s invention is a truly fair die.

It consists of a cube with some electronics on board. Each side of the die has a seven-seg display. Whichever of the six sides lands uppermost is the one which displays the result in the usual way (whilst the other five sides show the other five numbers, if necessary).

At each toss, the number to appear on the uppermost face is read from a pregenerated list containing exactly equal numbers of each of the 6 possible outcomes (and distributed along the list using a simple numerical shuffling technique).

If you were concerned that the (predestined) list could be ‘hacked,’ security features, such as holograms, could be embedded in each of the faces. The batteries would require charging occasionally and after say six million throws (that’s 1M 1’s, 1M 2’s, 1M 3’s, etc), the system would shut down permanently.

The good news is that I seem to have overcome my obsession with catflap design. The bad news is that vacuum cleaners have taken their place in my daily ruminations.

In the ideological war between the bagged and the bagless, I’m a conscientious objector. The main reason for not having a bag has to be that it is replaced by a cyclone extractor which maintains suction (or double cyclone, if you want to be patent-picky). The downside here is that a big transparent box is required, in which the stray toenail clippings can gather.

Today’s invention is to make the dual cyclone a bagged vacuum cleaner. Instead of that big, heavy, transparent housing, simply use a circumferential clip which allows a small, clear plastic bag to be attached to hold the crud. This also serves to reuse all those ridiculous supermarket food bags that clog the kitchen, reduces the weight of the machine and still allows observation of the collected dirt (If you insist. Perhaps it’s an alternative entertainment for those people who continue to think TV is a good idea and whose spin dryers are on the blink).

Most importantly, this approach makes getting rid of domestic detritis much easier than fiddling with button-released containers that are always hard to re-seal -by allowing the bag to be slipped off the machine, nipped closed and dumped every time it’s used.

Locusts swarm, apparently, when they become so crowded together that the rate at which they brush each other’s back legs gets beyond a joke. When they then descend on some unsuspecting field in vast numbers, you can say goodbye to whatever crop was trying to grow there.

So the world now has locust control programmes which consist of spraying insecticides or fungal particles on them. This is probably not that good for the environment, even if the volumes of chemicals involved are small.

Today’s invention is to use vacuum cleaners to suck up the offending critters. No point using a bag cleaner of course, so I propose that a large cyclone device be designed, using eg oildrums and fitted at the bottom with a fan powered by a small diesel engine. This would have a large inlet and be cheap enough for every farm to have one fitted to a trailer so as to be manoeuvrable into position beneath a swarm.

The bugs would be sucked into it in large numbers, probably coating the inside gradually with a layer of their carcasses. The majority would be deposited in a hopper (sorry) enabling it to be converted conveniently to animal food or fertiliser. (I had an uncle who ate fried locust paste from a bucket whilst serving in the 8th Army and he said they tasted good -manna from heaven).

Does Dyson have a patent that covers pest control -and cookware, I wonder? ; )

It’s a major challenge sometimes for me not to utter the most extreme expletives. When I’ve tripped over the cat or received yet another insulting TV licence demand, or dropped paint on the carpet, or some IDIOT with a luckybag licence has just cut me up in traffic…etc, etc.

I’m not that keen on my children learning such terms (partly since there is always a danger of getting enigmatic enjoinders from the school banning the words ****, ****, **** and especially **** ).

Today’s invention is therefore a modern version of the old-fashioned swear box.

A microphone feeds into my ever-present laptop, which is running speech-to-text software. Every time it detects a banned word (I have a mercifully limited repertoire of these), it emits a very annoying noise (think Windows at startup) and automatically debits my PayPal account by £1, as a donation to UNICEF.

You could, of course, strip out the motherboard, soundcard, network card and microphone from a pc , stick them in a small box and sell it as a blasphemy sentry.

One of the major problems with non-vertical windows of every sort is that any dirt which accumulates blocks the normal drainage channels which they incorporate. This frequently leads to a dam effect whereby rainwater is trapped and overflows the lip of the window -into the building itself.

These windows are usually on rooves or out of sight and the problem is not dealt with until water ingress has caused expensive damage.

Today’s invention is a simple device which will sweep dirt from an unattended window before this situation arises. I noticed, when driving my car in winter, that a substantial block of snow was spinning on the rear window: in the grip of a stable vortex (the real streamlines don’t resemble those in the brochure, it seems).

I propose to equip all skylight-type windows with a thin disc of translucent plastic (PTFE, with a small boss on the rear face perhaps would minimise friction).

Powered only by the wind, this would carry some small vanes on the outer surface and be constrained to spin across the face of the window, spitting dirty water off before any residual clag could be deposited.

Helicopters are designed so that if they sustain a loss of engine power, their main rotor will continue to rotate, allowing the pilot to ‘autogyro’ safely to earth.

Ignoring the brochure-speak, there are numerous reasons why a rotary wing aircraft might find itself needing to make a controlled, unpowered touchdown (without the vertebrae-fusing impact). Some light aircarft carry parachutes which support the entire fuselage in such an emergency descent. Try launching a chute above a spinning rotor, though, and the result is obvious.

Today’s invention consists of a number of airbags slung in a pod beneath a helicopter. On sensing a catastrophic loss of engine power, these would be deployed in quick sequence, forming an inflated aerofoil shape (unlike automotive bags, they would be unperforated and remain inflated for several minutes).

This improvised wing would enable a pilot to enter a controlled glide and also cushion the inevitable return to terra-all-too-firma.

Chipboard, especially that stuff that’s dressed up in plastic laminate, really is a dreadful material. Used to create cheap and cheerful furniture. especially (loosely) fitted kitchens, it’s sensitive to water, frays when a screw comes anywhere near and worst of all it warps under almost any load.

I’m thinking here particularly about the idea of using such stuff in the guise of bookshelves. Unless you are prepared to employ a support every 20 cm, chipboard shelves start to sag visibly the moment they are asked to hold more than a few copies of the lightest of lowbrow literature.

Today’s invention is for those people who have shelving requirements beyond their budget. When using those vertical metal ‘spines’ that bolt to the wall and into which slot triangular supports, buy one extra vertical per intended shelf (these are normally very cheap) and screw it to the (horizontal) rear edge of each one, using the holes povided.

Presto: you can accommodate even Encyclopaedia Britannica, without any unsightly shelf deflection.

Western countries are struggling under a mountain of supersized personal blubber with people increasingly unwilling to suffer the discomfort that aerobic exercise entails.

Just breathing becomes seriously traumatic when you first start to exercise (many people never experience any other from of difficulty when exerting themselves, eg muscle pain, because their breathing difficulties keep their activity in check -and then they stop).

Today’s invention is a system which can reduce breathing distress and thus prolong exercise.

Running carrying an oxygen cylinder is an unattractive option. So imagine a light facemask with simple flapvalves at both inlet and outlet. A battery-powered fan, like that in a hairdryer, blasts air continuously onto the outside of the mask (when activated). The airflow from the fan impinges on the inlet valve which opens when the wearer breathes in -providng him/her with an extra jet of oxygen in the same way as an automtive supercharger works.

When the wearer breathes out, the inlet valve is shut and the outlet valve forced open. With the inlet closed, its air flow is directed, via a kind of U-bend, across the outlet valve -forming a region of sharply decreased pressure and thus sucking more of the wearer’s exhalation from the lungs.

This might be valuable for either the very unfit or eg soldiers on a battlefield working at the limit of their physical abilities.