Category: Possible inventions

Today’s invention is a suitcase on wheels which packs clothing more tightly than normal, yet with fewer creases.

Once the top is opened, the handle on this case can be pulled upwards, bringing with it several coathangers.

Items of clothing, eg suits, can be hung on each hanger and then a thumbwheel twisted to pull the clothes down into a snailshell compartment, of which there are several.

This rolls the clothes up tightly, minimising their volume but without crumpling them.

A conventional optical disk always spins in one direction, whilst the laser read head moves radially across its surface -following the spiral path on which the recorded micro-depressions have been laid.

This movement is essentially the same for all disks.

Today’s invention is a way to make piracy of digital content much more difficult (albeit with a small increase in production time/cost).

My DVD player would come with the facility to generate a unique, 2-D read head motion program embedded securely within it -a new one for every disk. The spinning would continue as normal.

My machine is networked to the manufacturer and sends them a code from which they derive the required read pattern and use that to imprint my movie’s bits (together with an identifier which allows my machine to use the right internal movement pattern when reading it).

I can thus buy a DVD online which will be printed with exactly the same bit stream as yours…except that my bits will be laid out in a pattern which only my machine can read.

I can make you a copy of my disk, but it won’t play in your machine.

I’m told that fire appliance ladders can’t reach higher than the sixth floor of a burning building.

For people caught in a skyscraper or towerblock at higher altitudes than this, today’s invention could be a lifesaver.

The ladder is fitted, whilst at ground level, with a giant steel loop supporting a ‘stocking’ made of stretchable fabric.

People can jump into this, as they would a conventional ‘trampoline’ supported by firefighters. The difference is that they have less distance over which to build up speed and when hitting the stocking surface, the deceleration is much more gradual.

Many people can jump into this device at once without much danger of hitting each other. Each of them then slides down a narrow central tube of the same material, at an approximately constant speed, to emerge safely at ground level.

Everyone knows that barnacles are bad for boats…they increase drag and may actually damage the underlying hull surface itself.

The shells of these creatures are incredibly tough and impact resistant. Today’s invention is a way to make use of barnacles as a natural protective coating.

Imagine a diving suit for people who have to work in shark-infested waters. This could have barnacle shells epoxied to its outer surface, away from the inner sides of elbow and knee joints.

If attacked, these relatively light shells would act as effectve armour…allowing a diver enough time to retreat to a cage.

Today’s invention is a magazine for firearms which allows the user to choose the kind of round to fire next (ie blank, high-charge,tracer, rubber etc).

The magazine would be filled with a number of different types of round, in order.

It would have a spring at either end, so that as rounds were extracted and fired, as usual, the remaining ones would be available to choose, by moving the magazine up or down. This movement could be controlled manually or motorised in response to a switcahable safety catch indicating which type to select.

This offers the possibility that eg a police officer could, without stopping to swap ammunition clips, choose to fire a warning shot or a rubber bullet, rather than have only lethal projectiles to fire.