Category: Possible inventions

If you are felling trees in a remote wilderness and your truck breaks down, it can be life-threatening.

Today’s invention is an emergency vehicle designed to be formed from a small wooden platform and two (or more) chainsaws.

The saws are therefore designed to accommodate a steel band which fits over each set of teeth, transforming them into a passable caterpillar track.

They can then be clamped, using their integral fittings, onto any board (if necessary, one cut from a big tree) and the resulting vehicle used to get eg an injured person back to base safely, using the remote throttle cable controls shown.

I object to the fact that huge acreages of the UK’s roads are now bounded by painted no-parking lines. They are truly ugly and don’t seem to have that much effect on people who are too thick not to understand if they are causing an obstruction.

In addition, the cost of maintaining millions of metres of road paint is enormous.

Today’s invention is to have any such parking restriction symbols projected onto the road surface by streetlights which are almost always overhead in such urban zones.

Each streetlight could be fitted with a lens and some computer-controlled, coloured filters.

This would allow parking regulations to be timed more flexibly and the symbols would be visible even on snowy days.

The extra cost of running the lights during daylight hours could be minimised by using high efficiency lamps and projecting eg a row of bright blobs rather than continuous lines.

No more road closures would be required for the endless task of paint burning and upgrading.

Many industries rely on being able to abrade or erode large areas of material in order to prepare for coating or to reduce weight by thinning.

Today’s invention is a small robot device consisting of a mobile milling head on the outside of a skin or bulkhead and a mobile ultrasound sensor, moving in step with it, on the other side.

This would allow material to be removed in an automated but controlled way so that the sensor could determine the remaining local thickness and instruct the mill head when to move to the next target area.

There would also be a narrow vacuum hose to remove the abraded particles.

Trucks which pull out and pass each other create enormous drag effects.

Today’s invention tries to minimise these.

Each of the thre trucks driving up the page is equipped with an oval-section trailer. A continuous curtain runs in very low friction rails at the top and bottom edge of the trailer.

Each curtain is driven by a small motor clockwise or anticlockwise, depending on the direction of the curtain to the left (which would be sensed optically, on approach).

In this way, the normal Couette flow between trailers is avoided, since the curtains maintain a flat velocity profile between trucks which overtake each other with small relative velocities.

Today’s invention is a flag made of two layers of the same material from which weather balloons are constructed.

This is very flexible and yet can contain helium for long periods.

Several small helium-filled spaces would be created when the two sheets were joined, located along the upper edge of the flag.

These would help support the (small) weight of the flag and allow it to ‘fly’ even when the windspeed was very low.

Visiting Australia recently made me think a lot about the dangers of bushfires.

Today’s invention is an attempt to help.

When a fire approaches one of a number of outstations, the temperature difference between the firefront and underground can be used to power eg a Stirling engine.

This could then be used to automatically pump water onto the roof of a building under threat, damping down any windblown sparks and smouldering embers.

Synaesthetes come in several different shades (as well as textures, sounds…)

Those of us who associate colours with letters and numbers often have trouble when eg learning mathematical symbols and reading text (My associations include
1=black, 2 =yellow, 3=red/brown, 4=black, 5=mustard…)

Today’s invention therefore is a piece of code which will let a user list their individual associations for an entire set of alphanumerics or other set of symbols and then display each of those symbols on every screen in a pale, complementary colour (eg red for green).

This would lessen the strength of the links to colour and could be finely calibrated to suit the individual concerned.

If you have a multi-seat peoplemover vehicle, there is often quibbling within a family about who gets to sit where.

Today’s invention is to have the seats in such a vehicle movable -like the pieces in one of those sliding puzzle squares.

Seats can slide so that there is always one empty space and thus any arrangement is possible. The sliding might also occur whilst in transit.

In addition, this allows individuals to preserve their complicated seat settings, rather than having constantly to reset these -as well as permuting family members to achieve minimised social friction.

It drives me crazy that online movie clips stop and start irregularly, depending on what else is happening over the network and within my local operating system.

Today’s invention is a new way to script movies designed specifically to be watched over a limited bandwidth web connection, without the usual stuttering.

New scripts would consist of a series of discrete, punchy scenes. Each of these would be shown only after it was downloaded in full.

In this way, you could watch a long movie as a series of unfragmented events, separated by a minute or so if necessary.

This would change the nature of filmwatching somewhat, but would greatly reduce the frustration.