Today’s invention is a skatepark with a flexible surface, supported on pneumatic pistons.
This allows the profile to change from occasion to occasion, so that a different challenge is offered to users each time.
Skaters can also be propelled across the park in complex orbits by lowering the surface just ahead of the board -a function which could be controlled either by a program or by the votes of spectators.
Today’s invention is an even more terrifying roller coaster ride.
As the passenger vehicle rides up a hill, as shown, the passengers see signs saying ‘under construction, gap ahead’.
They can see no track ahead but as they reach the missing section, the carriage engages with a swing arm (red) which rotates about a fixed point and creates the illusion that they flew through the air to connect with the next section of track.
(A better version of this might replace the arm, visible to those on the ground, with a section of track which extends from underneath the part which lies just before the gap).
I was lying awake last night, listening to the clock in my room and wondering what time it was.
Having taken my contact lenses out made it difficult to see the clock, let alone read the time.
Today’s invention is therefore a clock whose ticking changes, depending on the time.
If it’s 2 o’clock then one would hear tick,tick,tock. 9 o’clock and it would say tick,tick,tick,tick —tick,tick,tick,tick—tick,tock.
The grouping of ticks into sets of four would make it much easier to perceive accurately the totals involved.
Today’s invention is a new type of garden hose.
This would be made of quarter-circles of stiff tube(a bit like parts of a hula-hoop).
These would be joined together by plumbing stab-joints, which, once sealed together, allow free rotation of one quarter circle relative to the next.
The hose would thus be storable as a flat spiral of say 1m in diameter -without the usual tangles and damage caused by crimping.
It could access anywhere in a garden just by making the right selection of rotations and would also provide pretty much the same pressure drop -irrespective of its present layout.
If you wanted to lengthen or shorten your hose, it would just be a matter of adding or removing quadrants.
It seems that people who rent bikes don’t tend to wear safety helmets.
Today’s invention is therefore a bicycle helmet vending machine that would sit alongside a rank of rentable citybikes.
There would be a number of oval recesses on the machine’s front face into which one would try to place the crown of one’s head. Having found one that fitted, the user would pay and receive a helmet in the right size (these would be stacked, nested tightly together inside).
The helmet would have bonded to its strap a key which would then be used to release the lock on a bike.
Locking the bike at some intermediate stop would require the same key to be used, so that the helmet would need to accompany the rider -and thus be much more likely to be worn.
Failure to return the helmet to a machine would result in an extra charge made to the credit card used to rent the bike.
The whole business of seat reservations on trains causes major difficulty. In particular, the mix of reserved seats and non-reserved seats always makes life hard for passengers and train staff.
Passengers find it hard to detect where they are supposed to sit and if the vehicle itself has to be changed at the last minute (as happens regularly on the trains I use) then all those little bits of cardboard slotted into seat backs have to be either reset, by hand, or disregarded.
The situation is further complicated by the fact that seats may reserved only between some intermediate stations during a long journey.
What is needed is a cheap, flexible, software-controlled way to update central information about seating so that it is visible on the train.
Today’s invention is therefore a small robot printer (red) which moves in a straight line along the outside of a train at window level. It would be held in place by suction cups alternately attaching and detaching as it scuttles along. This action would be undertaken only in stations, with the device sheltering on board whilst in transit.
Each window would have temporary images sprayed onto it by the bot using eg bright yellow, water-resistant, non-drying paint. There would be a number related to the seat position and another unique to the passenger’s ticket for that seat. It would state the stations between which the seat was reserved and I’d also like to see a small image of the passenger’s face (eg for season ticket verification) but that could be optionally obtained from one’s social network profile.
Thus a passenger could easily find their reserved seat and there could be no argument about who had made the reservation. A quick check in the preceding station would allow seat bookings to be refreshed with current data, enabling people without reservations to use seats which were not being used.
Any last minute changing of trains would allow the bot to wipe off its paint and repaint in seconds.
No disrespect to any company that makes absurdly-expensive vacuum cleaners and now hand-driers, but today’s invention is a cheaper approach to drying hands that might suit eg hospitals in countries that can’t afford £1000 a shot.
It consists of a plastic funnel, shaped to accommodate a pair of hands.
This attaches to a bog-standard vacuum cleaner.
The funnel is pegged to the wall above a sink. Wash hands, shake into sink. Switch on the vacuum with your foot. The airflow dries your hands. Any excess runs into a pipe and down the plughole.
Ok, it probably takes an extra ten seconds, but if air drying is such a safety boon, this might save some lives somewhere.
It’s not uncommon for a lift to admit people on one side of the compartment and discharge them from the opposite side when they reach their destination floor.
Today’s invention is a lift which travels inside a shaft big enough to allow it to rotate (slowly) about a vertical axis as it transits from floor to floor.
People would wait at one of four doors, out of sight of each other. The lift compartments would have a door on each face. When each door opens, a walkway is automatically dropped to allow ingress or egress across the gap (in directions indicated by internal displays before getting to the next floor).
In a multistorey building, each lift can decide, during transit, which way to face when it next stops.
This allows the lift itself to calculate, based on data about the current call button pressings, which doors to open so that the numbers of leavers and joiners are as nearly equal as possible. Since all four doors might open at once, loading and unloading can be smoother.
All of which means that the lifts would each run nearly full, and allow faster boarding, whilst minimising overcrowding.
E-waste is a growing problem. Batteries especially are generally hard for consumers to get recycled and end up getting dumped in landfill.
Today’s invention is to adopt one of the large circular batteries as a unit of currency.
Equipment manufacturers could design their kit to run off several of these. To operate your phone, it would be just like popping in some loose change.
When they can no longer be recharged, people are still going to hang onto them to use in making small purchases (perhaps tied to other green recyclable goods).
The battery cases would need to be stamped with some kind of hard-to-fake symbolism (at least as secure as current coinage).
Ultimately, they will all get returned to banks, which can act as collectors for the major recycling programmes.
Moore’s Law suggests that we get a doubling of computing power on chips of a given size every couple of years. Do we really need an ever increasing number of CPU cycles?
Yes of course. In future, tasks that currently take weeks of supercomputer churning will be accomplished in near real-time by relatively common equipment.
Today’s invention is an example. Imagine a drill press which has access to a massive database of engineering components. It also has a supercomputer built-in that can grab or generate a 3-D mesh of the barcoded component currently on its table.
A laser shines down the drill axis and is imaged by a camera so that the system knows where and how big a hole is about to be formed.
In under a second, it calculates the stress distribution of the part, post drilling, under typical loading conditions, and projects that onto the surface as a ‘heat map.’
Too many stress hotspots generated? Move the drill to one side and recalculate. Similar things could be done for fluid flows as part of the process of engine tuning.
