Category: Possible inventions

Apparently more than 2.5 cruise ships become grounded every year on average.

The cost in terms of tugboats and prestige must be enormous (Nearly as much as when the toilets all block up).

Today’s invention is a simple addition to cruise ships to help them get out of these difficulties -whilst minimising the negative publicity.

A streamlined sledge is strapped to to the bottom of the hull. This contains a bank of sprung rollers, so that when the ship hits the bottom, the impact is less obvious to those on board.

Once stuck, the ties on deck are released and the engines thrown into reverse so that the vessel relaunches itself, leaving the sledge with a buoy attached so as to enable its later recovery.

Replacing hip joints is increasingly common.

Today’s invention is for people who have this operation but who may have, or develop, muscular wastage which makes walking difficult.

The hip joint has a strong magnet embedded within it (yellow).

The user wears a girdle which contains a selection of solenoids (red).

These can be switched on and off in a phased way, so that the system acts as an induction motor, rotating the hip joint back and forth through a controlled angle.

This supports the normal action of the leg muscles, either by way of permanent augmentation or during rehabilitation.

Windscreens are surprisingly strong but if you happen to have a collision with a wandering moose or some stationary street furniture, every additional reinforcement is welcome.

Today’s invention is a way to brace one’s windscreen and thus lessen the chance of penetration or widespread crazing of the glass.

Sensors in the bonnet detect the impact and cause the reinforced wipers to jump upwards as shown. These are longer and stronger than usual so that they extend over the top edge of the screen.

In this position, the wipers snap together to form a defensive barrier.

Professional athletes in training expend a lot of effort attempting to learn to reproduce the optimal pattern of steps in their event.

This applies to sprint, hurdles, high-jump etc. -anything which depends critically on precise foot placement.

Today’s invention is to equip an athlete’s shoes each with a tiny projector. Clipped to the top of the toe box, this projector would shine a simple outline of the left foot onto the track when the right foot impacted the ground…and vice versa.

This would show where one’s next foot placement should ideally be.

It would even be updateable in realtime….if, for example, a hurdle had been taken badly, so that the right foot landed in an unusual place, software would calculate the adjustment required to the planned left foot position to get back on track as fast as possible.

This might also be useful for teaching dance to those of us with two left feet.

I visited a supercomputer facility today which was located, for historical and security reasons, near the top floor of a tall building.

Today’s invention is inspired by the idea that, in the event of fire, or earthquake, a giant bank of servers and storage would all be destroyed (even if the data were backed up elsewhere).

So, imagine a supercomputer built into a purpose-built lift car, together with its cooling supply and electrical power supply.

This would allow the computer to be easily located at different levels within a building (by plugging into a network hub located near the lift shaft on different floors).

In the event of a fire, this lift would automaticaly disconnect, seal the doors and travel downwards. At ground level, the entire car would run out of the building, on rails, to a safe distance.

A film director may spend days working with cameramen to plan a complex scene with lots of actors. This is necessary to capture dramatic interactions without also getting bits of equipment in-shot.

Today’s invention is instead to equip each actor with a small, covert camera, which runs throughout a scene. This would involve a tiny lens probably best be positioned above an actor’s ear and, if necessary, coloured green to enable it to be automatically painted out later.

This would allow the actors to move much more freely and generate point-of-view footage from several perspectives. The views could later be intercut into a final version (or perhaps multiple different versions).

Each actor’s camera could automatically process their view using aspects of their character (such as sepia, for an older person, enhanced shake for someone who was cold, defocussed for a person with a visual impairment etc.)

Cameras with interchangeable lenses pose a problem -how to swap optics without allowing dust to enter both camera body and lens system….especially if you are shooting somewhere with airborne particles.

Today’s invention offers a solution, at least for high-end optical gear.

Starting to remove a lens would cause a small internal heater in the camera body to fire up briefly. This would pressurise the inside of the camera by a few Pascal over atmospheric pressure.

A gentle but steady puff of air would occur for a second or so through the lens attachment ring.

In this time, a new lens could be attached, thus minimising the amount of airborne grit etc which could get anywhere near the interior of the system.

The thermal effects on the optics would be not much more significant than those associated with photography on a hot day.