Category: Possible inventions

I’m fascinated by the attitude of the design industry to weaponry.

Today’s invention is a new form of machine gun with multiple barrels…a little like the original version of all such devices, the Gatling gun. The difference would be that the barrels were all of different calibres -corresponding to a given army’s most used sizes.

Unlike those guns that need belted ammunition, it would be fed with rounds from a hopper above.

Loose rounds of all calibres could be dropped into the hopper.

A camera would detect rounds which were in the wrong orientation and divert them to try again later.

It would then direct each bullet to the barrel of the right size so that multiple barrels could be firing in parallel.

Today’s invention addresses the problem of space to park our cars.

By using simple, steeply-raked ramps as shown, cars could be parked very closely together, thus using 1.41 times less space. (This is a solution related to storing fighter planes on a carrier deck).

This might require people to access their vehicle via a port in the floor, but that would make car bodies stronger and therefore safer in a collision.

People at business gatherings can find it difficult to approach each other time-efficiently.

Even if they are wearing namebadges, no-one wants to stare at those, face-to-face, before starting a conversation. The information tends to be sparse anyway, leaving you to guess about whether someone is going to be of interest or not.

Today’s invention is an aid to networking.

People would wear a tie with a QR code in the lined square at the rear face of its wider end (people who don’t wear a tie could use a necklace or a medallion).

Entering a meeting, they would flick this over their shoulder and place their mobile phone in their jacket pocket (with the camera facing outwards and the recognition software running).

Walking around behind people, you would get an alert if the camera detected anyone whose coded information matched some of the features you had specifed as of interest.

This would allow you to mingle around to the front and introduce yourself.

Today’s invention offers a way to make bicycle polo a bit easier to play, as well as safer.

Instead of swinging sticks around, each bike has an extra sprung wheel fitted to the front.

This is wide enough to accommodate the ball, so that as a player drives his wheel over the ball it is pushed upwards through a ring of brush bristles into the wheel interior.

There, it spins around clockwise, until an extra burst of speed allows it to be propelled outwards through the bristles again and onto the field of play.

You could hold the ball in the wheel for a while, but that would mean travelling very slowly.

It’s scarily easy to find yourself driving too fast or losing concentration when a favourite song or an absorbing conversation starts up on the radio.

Today’s invention is a car radio which records an identifier of every programme item which is played and when -whether that be a talk show or a particular track on an album.

It does this in order to gather data about what, if anything, was playing at the reported time when an accident occurred.

The statistics generated from an entire population of drivers would show up any patterns in what specific sounds and types of sounds, at different times of the day and locations, were most likely to have been playing, just pre-RTA.

If you insist on listening to heavy metal at top volume at 3am, you might find a message appearing on your in-car entertainment system alerting you to the increased cost of your insurance for that trip.

It’s common to find that one’s DVD has a commentary on the film made by the cast, Director etc.

Today’s invention is an upgrade of that process for complex movies and on behalf of those of us who sometimes struggle to understand nuances in the plot.

The movie would be shown on a touchscreen, so that a viewer could click on a particular character and have a thought bubble appear.

This would state, without plot spoilers, who the person was, what they were currently doing and why.

This would also allow the Directors of films to indulge in very complex storytelling, without having to dumb-down their vision because they suspected that it would be just too hard to follow.

Today’s invention is based on the idea that there is a difference between the accelerative and constant velocity regimes of vehicle movement.

We tend to rely on tyred wheels for both -which entails a compromise between maximising drive and minimising rolling resistance.

Instead, imagine a vehicle with a fat, high-grip drive band (yellow) to be used only during acceleration or deceleration, together with very thin-tyred, slim wheels (blue) to be used only when the vehicle is moving along at top speed on a smooth surface.

These two elements would be swapped in or out depending on the position of the accelerator pedal.

According to my back-of-the-envelope calculation, the flow velocity within an exhaust pipe of a standard sized car is a small fraction of the speed of sound in carbon dioxide.

This allows me to treat the exhaust pipe, for acoustic purposes, as if it were filled with static fluid.

Today’s invention is therefore a suppressor for combustion engine exhaust noise.

Each pulsewave emitted by the opening or closing of the exhaust valve is allowed to pass into the clockwise arm of the looped pipe at 1 o’clock * (using a valve linked to the exhaust valve itself -not shown).

Once the pulse travels around the loop, it is allowed to leave using another linked valve at the 11 o’clock position.

By tuning the length of the loop to be (n+ 1/2)*the exhaust note wavelength, destructive interference can occur between the exhaust and loop waves, greatly reducing the engine noise emitted.

*I had to rethink this whole thing to avoid using the valves and fixed-length loop (thanks Andy, see below). Instead, a toroidal loop would be inserted in the exhaust as shown. A port would allow waves to enter and propagate around the loop. The loop itself would be spun, much faster than the wave speed, so as to position its port against the exhaust pipe. It would do this in such a way that if a compression were moving down the exhaust, the loop would inject a rarifaction and vice versa. In this way, pressure fluctuations could be eliminated within the exhaust, without introducing extra ones by the operation of conventional valves.