Category: Possible inventions

There is a competition* to redesign the electricity supply pylon.

Today’s invention is an arch-shaped improvement whose top section is made of glass in an inverted catenary shape. This is good for carrying the weight of one (uninsulated) cable whilst retaining very low visibility.

It is embedded in a steel base which can be levered up in order to raise the arch and cable into position (and provide rigidity in high winds).

Each cable would also form a catenary, so that the visual effect would be of eight or so slightly out of phase sinusoids passing over the landscape: a metaphor for fluctuating voltage.

(*It’s £50 to enter)

The world market for armoured vehicles is booming, I’m told, as more and more citizens live in fear of hijackings or kidnaps.

The advent of autonomous vehicles therefore presents a potential opportunity, which is the subject of today’s invention.

In the event of a suspected attack, or impending hijack, a driver could press a panic button which would have the vehicle automatically execute an evasive manoeuvre (eg a J-turn).

Control would be passed only briefly to the vehicle, so that an aggressive, skilful escape could be performed.

I may have mentioned before how sensitive I am to loud noises (especially that low frequency drumbeat that young people seem to enjoy).

Despite that, today’s invention is a way for lovers of loud music to achieve large-scale stereo sound (when, for example, watching a drive-in movie on an outside screen).

A submodule would be provided within in-car entertainment systems which enabled any pair of vehicles equipped in this way to reroute the normal signals to their speakers so that one car would emit the left hand channel and another car, parked at a suitable distance, would blast out the right-hand channel.

(Could even do quod/surround sound, just so long as I’m out of earshot please).

Today’s invention is a paper-wrapped chocolate bar which contains paper-wrapped chocolate bars.

Removing the outer wrapper allows one to break the chocolate layer off the inner bars. This can be eaten, leaving the inner bars still wrapped.

Still feeling peckish? The inner bars can themselves be unwrapped, shedding chocolate to eat and another layer of wrapped bars.

This allows a block of chocolate to contain separately-flavoured interior packs as a pleasant surprise.

Also, the requirement to unwrap at each level allows one to pause, rather than devour the whole thing instantly (thereby helping overweight people limit their sweet intake, to some extent).

(It would be possible to enrobe wrapped bars in liquid chocolate and then wrap the result -several times…thus providing an extra measure of hygiene too).

Today’s invention is for parents of young children. It’s a toy-organising chest-of drawers.

New toys almost always come in a bar-coded box. Each of these would be scanned by a parent on entry to one of the glass-fronted drawers. These would have the ability to weigh each box added to them.

A child would be able to enter a code given to it to extract the next toy of choice, only if it had placed some other toy in its box, scanned it and replaced it in the cupboard somewhere.

Parents could set the system to allow a child say x active, out-of-cupboard toys at any one time.

The cupboard could gamify the process further by awarding access to additional or surprise toys and games from inside it after a period of sustained playing with a variety of things and then clearing up (without eg trying to enter boxes only half-full of Lego or obsessing about only one toy for weeks).

Todays invention is a new form of cockpit canopy for small jets flying over water.

If the crew has to eject, instead of shattering, the canopy rotates under the seat and ejects with it.

The canopy is then jettisoned into the water below and, equipped with buoyancy bags, acts as a durable life raft to which the crew can then swim.

Today’s invention is a new way to index and compare movies. Instead of using subtitles or timings, each scene is labeled by how many dollars-per-screen-second it took to make.

These figures are constantly being monitored by production accountants, so that it would be fairly simple to add these data to the raw movie and then keep track of them during editing.

This would allow people who were fans of the spectacular, or high-price stars, to skip to the most expensive scenes. Student directors could perhaps determine how to tell a story more cheaply.

It may be that the bar chart of spend-per-scene throughout a film is a common characteristic of a given genre -a fingerprint that might be *searched* for by devotees of a particular movie type.

The cost-rate statistics could also be compared with standard audience appreciation metrics for each scene to assess whether spending more is actually correlated with increased entertainment.

It would also provide a new way for candidate directors to be compared before contracts are signed. Allow say two or three to make the same scene and compare their test audience ratings with their respective costs.

It’s easy to get confused by the images created in one’s driving mirrors.

I noticed the other day what looked like a single blue car (1) in my door mirror -just about to pass me on a dual carriageway. Looking forward through the screen, a moment later, I could see it had overtaken (2).

Since it was apparently the only other car on the road. I was just about to pull out into the overtaking lane myself. Only then did I notice that the blue blur seen peripherally in my door mirror (which I’d somehow associated with the passing vehicle) was actually a second, almost identical blue car which had been following the first.

Today’s invention attempts to overcome this powerful, and dangerous, illusion (A perceptual blindspot: I’d looked in my mirror and still thought it safe to pull out).

The problem is that the mirror is insufficiently identified with the view backwards -especially when the colour in it is the same as that seen through the screen. The mirror is being misinterpreted as a window.

One way to stop this is shown in 3, where there is a gap between mirror and car and a bright support arm runs behind the mirror, making it almost impossible to see this as transparent.

In olden days, tourist sites used to be bedeviled by photographers vying with each other to take pictures of visitors in return for cash.

Today’s invention upgrades that idea to allow venues more control of the concession. Each tourist location would have a small number of mobile photobooths: robot photo-vending machines which would:

–accept credit card payment
–shine a light onto the ground indicating where the subjects should stand
–move themselves so as to guarantee a unique shot
–use face recognition so people are not obscuring the location’s main features
–take a near-professional quality image (or video)
–display the shots and then send the photos wirelessly to mobile or home systems.