Category: Possible inventions

I’m sick to death of buying vacuum cleaners that don’t. Whether it’s a Dyson (greedy price, tacky mechanicals) or a Hoover (zero capacity, instant clog) they simply fail to pick up enough of the crud that inhabitats my floors.

So, inevitably, today’s invention (patent not pending) is a truly revolutionary machine that could take the exciting international marketplace for skin cell collection and dust management by storm (or so it will boast on the packaging -these cleaner guys do get carried away sometimes).

This consists of the usual box with an inlet and an outlet pipe. Inside the box, at the outlet, a glorified roll of toilet paper would be inserted, so that the paper covers the outlet (lying on some kind of open grid, for support). As the household games progress, the paper begins quickly to clog with small particles but -here’s the fun bit- the paper is continuously advanced across the outlet so that suction is uninterrupted by clogging. Something like a 35mm film advance mechanism, from the days before digital eveything.

The paper could be made slightly adhesive so that much of the dirt would remain attached to it for easier cleaning out later. The larger detritis would fall in the box in the usual way.

It would even be possible to have the paper move faster when the power drawn by the motor increased (ie when clogging was taking place). Somebody really smart will come up with a way to advance the paper using the motion of the air itself.

The manufacturers thus get to sell something ‘New and Improved’ together with superannuated bog roll.

When he wasn’t engaged in squeezing the back of his eyeball with various metal implements, Isaac Newton spent a lot of time scribing lines across a spectrum which he had arranged to fall onto his wall at Trinity College. One interesting thing he discovered was that the presence of these lines somehow allowed more colours to be seen than when they weren’t there.

If you count the distinct colours visible along the top edge of the image, it comes to perhaps five. Repeating this at the bottom edge of the image results in a count of almost twice that number. (This phenomenon may account for why stained glass windows are so vivid and why shops display different coloured garments piled under lights casting sharp shadows).

Today’s invention makes use of this 17th Century discovery (Why did anyone invent anything, before they invented ‘Intellectual Property’? -discuss ; )

During the manufacture of products, the precise amounts of any dye or surface colorant used can be controlled -if that’s important to marketability. Post production, when all you have is a swatch of material or a splash of paint, it’s much harder to find a perfect match from within a spectrum of available shades.

The delineation described above enables enhanced colour discrimination and so viewing colour samples side by side through two adjacent ‘windows,’ formed from a handheld, sharp-edged black frame, would enable significantly better matches to be achieved).

Lots of people find that, when learning to paint, it’s perfectly possible to follow a technique for sketching the underlying shapes correctly. What is much more difficult is matching the colours in a real scene with mixtures of the paints available in a given palette.

When you play with any image processing tool such as The Gimp (or Photoshop if you have that kind of cash), the ‘eyedropper’ tool can be used to demonstrate that the actual colour extracted from a region of a digital scene is very different from how it looks when located beside its neighbouring regions.

Painting therefore requires a) determination of what the local hue in a part of a scene should be, when extracted from the perceptual influence of the surrounding colours, and b) mixing the correct proportions of basic palette colours to achieve this.

Today’s invention attempts to overcome both these difficulties. First, a digital camera captures an image of the scene which is to form the subject of a painting. The image is blurred slightly and colour quantised and each region, larger than a few pixels, is digitally labeled with its average RGB coding.

These figures are then translated into the nearest equivalent CMYK values at each position in the image. A mechanical dispense device contains replaceable paint tubes in each of these four colours (cyan, magenta yellow and black). When operated, (by eg clicking on the screen of the laptop on which the software is running) the device squeezes out paint in the required proportions. These can then be mixed and applied to the corresponding location in the painting.

After using this system for while, it should be possible to start to mentally link the local colour in the scene more directly with the paint mix required (I’ve just discovered another possible application).

It’s hard to sit still for any length of time in comfort. Even the most ergonomically adjustable seating arrangement will start to cause some pain if you don’t get up and walk about every so often.

A research supervisor of mine once drew my attention to some data that encouraged me to make use of all the adjustable features of the ‘task chair’ I was then using. Changing one of the parameters each day, even if only by a small amount, he claimed was a guaranteed way to decrease muscle strain and improve concentration.

Today’s invention is therefore a chair capable of cycling through all the small-scale variants on your preferred sitting position -changing one per day at random, for example. If the chair offers four degrees of freedom and each is altered by no more than say 10%, in 2% jumps, then there are 625 possible combinations of seating position. It doesn’t matter that these aren’t noticeably different, your muscloskeletal system is apparently challenged and reinforced by having to adapt just a little each day.

It would be possible to run the program on one’s desktop computer and have the seat itself incorporate only some low power motors, able to reposition the seat elements (using eg worm and wheel gearing) when under no-load.

This approach might most easily be applied to those car seats which already have personalised programmable configurations. Instead of a static shape for each driver, they could be equipped with software to provide a very slowly changing seating position -thus limiting expensive and distracting back problems for road warriors.

It seems that if you study in a scent-filled room, and then get exposed to that particular scent during the subsequent night’s session of slow-wave sleep, your recall of the material is significantly better next day (See this article).

Today’s invention is a system to promote learning via this mechanism. Users, when asleep, would have their entry to slow-wave sleep detected by a cap wired with an array of electrodes attached to a millivoltmeter. This would in turn be connected an electrical socket scent dispenser (the same one as activated during the previous day’s study period.

Slow-wave sleep would switch the scent on again and reinforce the lesson from the previous day.

It’s not clear if a different smell is required every day in order not to conflate memories. If this turns out to be the case, then it might be enough to create a stably stratified mixture of different oils in the socket reservoir (using scented oils with different smells and densities).

As time passes, and the reservoir level falls, so the relative concentrations of these oils would vary -gradually changing the scent in the room (a duplicate reservoir would be needed to create the right smell during the slow-wave sleep periods).

From 1 January 2005, all electrical work in UK dwellings will need to comply with the new ‘Part P’ requirements and be carried out by persons who are ‘competent to do the work’. Anyone thinking of, for example, adding new circuits to their house will have to get ‘building control’ involved : (

Of course, it’s a well-intentioned scheme -amateurs do kill people unintentionally by crazy high-hubris tinkering. The sad reality is though that the UK is a place where engineering is not recognised as a profession and where tradespeople are free to set up shop without any serious scrutiny.

Sending around some duffer from planning control (who has never changed a plug in his life) and who may be able to devalue your home, by denying you a certificate when you want to sell up, seems a waste of everyone’s time. Actually it seems more like 1984.

Today’s invention is a way for genuinely competent electricians to ‘fingerprint’ their work. This will not only allow house sales to proceed without further external interference, but may also give cowboy tradesmen some serious pause for thought.

Each time an electrician performs a task, he would attach a tag to the work. This would probably best be a laser printed metal one, capable of withstanding a serious domestic fire for many hours. These tags would be printed with a digital signature incorporating the tradesman’s identifier, the date and the postcode of the property (and which would therefore be impossible for a bogus worker to fake or spoof).

Anyone wanting to verify that the work is that of a professional could photograph the tag and send it (by email or MMS) to a government server on which the installation would have been registered. This would enable householders to withold payment, make insurance claims and smooth conveyancing of their property.

Obviously all this would result in increased costs for the homeowner but at least planning people wouldn’t need to get a cut. A small price hike would probably be acceptable, given the real costs of dangerous wiring.

Personally, I’d prefer proper training and professional recognition for everyone who works in an engineering context.

Acoustic levitation is the use of a very intense sound wave to keep a body suspended in mid air. It is fascinating, but not obviously useful for very much outside the space research lab -this despite being allegedly capable of lifting masses of up to a few kilograms.

Today’s invention attempts to apply this effect. Imagine the usual CD system with two speakers. As well as having the loudspeakers play music (or what currently passes for it), they would also emit low-frequency sound waves from a ‘high’ slot in one speaker and a ‘low’ slot in the other.

Although inaudible (to all but a passing, infrasound-tuned elephant) these standing waves would be capable of levitating a single compact disc. It would also be possible to use small pressure fluctuations to spin the disc about a vertical axis, just about as precisiely as is achieved by the motor in a discman-type device (See eg this).

The disc reading optics could be held near the disc surface on a single, elegant arm. This system would not only look stunning but it would do away with the cost, and noise, of a conventional motor.

I don’t have any kind of mud-room in my house, unless you count the dining room. This is a particular problem when there are several pairs of festering, filthy boots mounting up outside the front door -and I’ve been forbidden to experiment with the dishwasher ever again.

“Waiting for the mud to dry so they can be brushed clean” sounds like the kind of thing that manufacturers advise on product literature -marketing types wearing designer loafers that only ever come in contact with polished wood and deep pile carpet.

Today’s invention is simply a carwash for boots. I envisage a box, into which boots get placed, soles facing up. Brushes would scour the boots clean with the aid of some water jets. With brushes made of say 20cm strands, there would be no need to worry about moving them around the boots’ geometry: the brushes would reach everywhere in the box.

Naturally, the water could be recycled, as in a carwash and there might be a fan blowing warm air, if the boots needed urgent reuse.

It should be possible to sense the flowrate of dirt off the boots (by eg optical inspection of the recycling filters). Once the dirt removal rate had fallen below a certain threshold, the boots would be pronounced sufficiently clean and the wash process terminated. (Shining a light through a filter and recording the rate of change of opacity, seems to me to be a generally good way to alert the users of eg washing machines and vacuum cleaners to undertake an urgent clean out -I suspect it’s already done).

The final wash could even contain some waterproofing waxy agent. A number of these bootwash devices could be stacked together for family use, sharing the water and air flows.

This would be a particular boon to people suffering from smelly trainers.

Being introduced to more than three people at a time makes it almost impossible for me to keep track of names and faces. Rather than continue with all of that shuffling-cardboard-across-the-table and mumbling ‘hello’, maybe it’s time for an up to date alternative to the business card.

Today’s invention is a ‘watch’ worn on the right wrist, which can wirelessly transmit, when brought close to another such device eg during a handshake, a small file of information about its wearer.

This would contain, in a standardised format, items such as

-name
-any evidence of past meetings
-mutual friends
-topics to avoid
-a thumbnail photo, for scrutiny later
-most likely icebreaker subject, etc.

The watch would contain enough storage for even a politician’s ‘working’ day (ie several hundred pressings of the flesh). Each file, once received, could be transmitted to a portable device (think Blackberry) which would then run a check quickly for additional up-to-date background information on the individual.

A wireless earpiece would be used to transmit snippets of (prioritised) text-to-speech output. This would need to be on-demand -perhaps when the user performs some unobtrusive gesture, like touching his/her ear.

This system would help avoid faux-pas and, with practice, smooth the meeting process. On shaking hands again, at the end of the meeting, names would once more get transmitted to earpieces for a more personalised leave-taking.

(Freemasons’ handshaking habits would be unaffected of course. What would it take to affect them?).