Category: Possible inventions

When you take a flash photograph, the brightness can dazzle people, disrupting the composition of subsequent shots and annoying their subjects.

Today’s invention is therefore a flash gun, equipped with face recognition. This allows it to know where any eyes are located within the image.

Just before the flashgun fires, an LCD mask over the flash window blanks out a patch corresponding to the rays heading to any pairs of eyes in the scene.

Although diffraction around the mask would cause some flash light to enter people’s eyes, the intensity could be arranged to be so low that the flash event itself went largely unnoticed.

The result would be effective illumination, without dazzling anyone, and also enabling largely unobserved photography.

I’ve seen people in a gym ‘working out’ using a system consisting of a central rail with moving handholds and footpegs on the outside.

Today’s invention (didn’t find it in a search of the patents) is a variant on this which works as a ladder.

As shown, a person would place their feet in the stirrups and hold the handles. Both stirrups and handles would be free to slide up in slots on the inside of each of the risers.

When any downward pressure was applied to either, a simple ratchet would stop any downwards movement.

This would allow someone to climb the ladder conveniently, using steps with a variable size.

Today’s invention is a safety device for ladders.

The ladder contains an embedded smartphone, incorporating accelerometers. This is switched on when a sensor in the first rung detects the weight of a foot.

If, in the next second or two, the ladder moves, or remains at a dangerously non-vertical angle, the phone issues an alarm (and may automatically contact the hire company -or the homeowner).

I have a pretty boring car but I’d still like to preserve it until I can afford a real one. So when people bang the doors of my vehicle shut, I lose my sense of proportion (such as it was).

Today’s invention is a simple add-on to stop the eardrum and door-catch damage caused by well meaning, but mechanically inept, door users.

Each door has a nylon rope attached to it firmly. Along the length of each rope are tough foam cylinders.

When someone is getting out of the car, just as they are about to slam a door shut, the driver, who is holding the other end of the rope, pulls it tight whilst gripping the nearest cylinder.

Like the legs of those wooden toys that collapse when their elastic limb cores are slackened, the door in question would be braced -even against an enthusiastic exiter. You could say “I’ve got the door, thanks” and then pull the rope until the door closed properly.

These props would be flexible enough to lie within the car out of the way when not being used and might even offer a new chivalry in that once a door catch was released, the driver could push the door open from a seated position.

Today’s invention is a holster for handguns that guarantees that, when drawn, the weapon’s safety catch is automatically released.

The interior of the holster would be fitted with a moulded channel component. This would act as a cam for the particular gun in question, bearing on the safety catch both when withdrawn and re-holstered so that moving the gun relative to the holster moves the catch relative to the weapon.

This means that every time a gun is unholstered (from a safe condition), the user can’t be confused about whether or not they are holding a live weapon.

It turns out that spinach is the hardest thing to remove from plates in a dishwasher.

It may be that such residues are washed off and then somehow stuck back on in a secondary wash phase -no-one seems to know.

Today’s invention is a new form of dishwasher. Rather than dump dishes etc inside and sluice everything about, plates and cups would each be firmly located in separate compartments in a known orientation. Then, a small water nozzle would pass from item to item blasting each with a very high pressure jet.

A camera attached to the nozzle would compare each item against a stored image of it when it was pristine. If differences were detected, the jet would be sent back until each was spotless.

Given that water jets can cut steel, there is no way that some surface vegetation or coffee grounds are going to remain in place. This might actually allow less water to be used than the conventional random splash approach.

When you make a parachute jump, the impact as you hit the ground is similar to that experienced when jumping off a 12 foot wall (who would be crazy enough to do that?)

You are supposed to do a parachute landing fall, but even so, many professional jumpers still get hurt on landing (especially when the terrain is rough and there is a crosswind).

Today’s invention is a device to help cushion the impact. It consists of a springy foam keel or blade in the shape of a wishbone. Before landing, the user would slot his feet into the footrests, lock his bent knees into the blade sides and hold onto the two handles.

This helps ensures the correct landing position is adopted and the blade absorbs a huge amount of impact energy when the ground suddenly rushes up.

If the blade is not broken, it could even have a small wheel fitted to allow eg soldiers to transport a significant weight when the wishbone becomes reused as a form of wheelbarrow.

Various female athletes I know object to shaving their legs when going running in shorts -and yet don’t want to be stared at by morons who seem to think hair is evil.

Today’s invention is a pair of training tights which can be worn on the lower legs. These have an open-weave construction and are held in position at the top and bottom by elastic loops around knee and ankle.

The tights have circumferential bands of heavier fabric. During running, hairs naturally poke through the weave and as the weighted rings oscillate vertically, under the normal running action, the hairs are shaved off.

Wearing the tights during training runs at the start of the bare-legs season would be enough to automatically remove any leg hair.