Category: Possible inventions

People are scared witless about identity theft online and yet we are remarkably trusting when introduced, face-to-face, that people are who they say they are.

Today’s invention would offer a first line of defence against scam artists, fraudsters and potential kidnappers.

To protect oneself, you would wear a couple of special adhesive plasters (shown as orange in the image but transparent in reality).

These would have a soft, skinlike texture (something like the remarkable anti-blister material, Compeed), thus making them hard to detect during a handshake.

Embedded in the surfaces would be a number of plastic-electronic fingerprint detector pads, wired to an earpiece.

If there was a mismatch between the name given during an introduction and the identity indicated by the prints, one would know to treat the meeting with extra caution.

The whole process of hiring a car is a brutal business.

Even if you have booked online, you still have to queue for ages while various punitive small print gets ‘explained’ and mysterious extra charges are applied.

I watched the queues at an airport hire centre recently and so today’s invention is an open-call market for hire cars.

Customers in longer queues would listen for realtime announcements from desks with fewer potential customers. These would say ‘hire from us instead and we will give you an x% price cut and deal with all the paperwork’.

As you near a desk, your susceptibility to a rival company’s discount decreases and so I believe that swapping of positions after announcements would be limited, not perpetually chaotic.

The customers would benefit directly from this red-blooded capitalism, as opposed to the current practices of shady cartels which seem only to make an empty show of competitive customer service.

If, when flying in an airliner, a window is somehow perforated or its seal compromised, today’s invention might help.

As the cabin decompresses, anyone still strapped in near the window affected, can reach down and pull up a section of reinforced carpet from the floor nearby.

This would be clearly marked and mentioned in the flight safety video.

The tiles would be much wider than the window and could be coarsely applied to the aperture, forming a good enough seal to stop any further significant air loss.

There would be several such tiles near each window to allow for the possibility that one may be blown out. More than one tile could be used to form a multilayer plug for extra reassurance during the subsequent descent.

Today’s invention offers a way to limit the amounts of prescription medicines in circulation.

A medical practitioner would hand you a disc-shaped, steel case of the type shown, containing a limited number of the required tablets or capsules.

The case has to be inserted into a disk drive and left there until empty.

The computer runs some downloadable code which unlocks a rotating magazine within the case and turns the disk drive spindle at a fixed rate of say one revolution per day.

This ejects one pill after the next so that the rate of consumption is limited and makes overdosing or reselling very difficult. It also reduces the opportunities for taking out-of-date medicines.

Today’s invention is a new form of motorcycle wheel.

It consists of several concentric, tyred wheels on the same axle as the main wheel.

Half of these smaller wheels can be driven hydraulically to the right (and the other half left), so as to provide much better support and roadholding when cornering aggressively.

This arrangement could also be used to minimise drag on the straights and fine-tune the front forks’ angular momentum when steering into and out of corners.

Many containers on board ships are actually filled not with whole products but semi-finished parts, half-processed materials and other constituents of complex, worldwide supply chains.

In accordance with the whole just-in-time industrial philosophy, today’s invention is to enable more flexible finishing and assembly operations whilst at sea.

Factory ships are currently used for fish processing of course, but imagine if you could take for example a robotic car manufacturing plant and build a supertanker-sized ship around it.

Containers full of materials, parts, and subsystems would be loaded on at various docks and completed vehicles dropped off in major marketplaces.

The ship would be receiving data feeds about how many of which parts could be purchased when and where, in order to optimise its route in terms of delivery times and fuel usage.( I can imagine a container factory on the high seas).

This would potentially make the manufacturing processes more globalised and lessen the pressure on land use in populated areas.