Category: Possible inventions

I’m interested in the idea of a sub-two-hour marathon. The most common view seems to be that, if this is ever achieved, it will happen on a flat course.

It might be said that any hills on a marathon circuit add to finish times. When I plod around a much shorter, hillier route, however, I’m always aware that it’s a lot faster/easier in one direction than the other. In other words, the order in which any hills occur has a big effect on the completion time.

In particular, hills with a small, but sustained, upward gradient are good to encounter near the start so that the descent to the finish line can be used to boost one’s overall speed, when fatigued, nearer the end.

Today’s invention is therefore a marathon course specifically tuned to enable record times.

It would be designed with a number of sustained, gentle hills in the first half and a sequence of steeper descents towards the end. The precise slopes and their spacing could be determined from a programme of treadmill tests.

Once the best course profile was determined, this could be searched for among the known routes through cities or created synthetically inside a stadium, using multiple loops of an undulating, temporary track.

I couldn’t find this in the course of my usual patent searching, so here goes…

Today’s invention is robotic suitcases that follow the owner about. The cases each have powered wheels and sensors which allow them to form a (disconnected) line behind the owner -like ducklings (the owner would strap a sensor to his/her ankle).

This would allow rapid movement with more luggage than could be carried.

The spacing between cases could be automatically adjusted to cope with crowd conditions. If they were scattered by pressing crowds, they would automatically reform (like BOIDS) or, if separated by too great a distance, they might stop and issue an alarm.

We hear a lot these days about e-learning and gamification.

Today’s invention incorporates both these elements into a system to help students.

A laptop DVD drive would be fitted with a shallow cylindrical box, full of flat circular sweets (these sweets would be arranged in a spiral and pressed towards a small aperture in the box using a spring, in a similar way to rounds in a drum magazine).

On completion of some on-screen task, the drive would rotate the box so that the aperture in its base arrived at a specified location and then the drive would be opened.

Having arranged for the aperture to be unobstructed by the drive base, this would allow a student working on the machine to catch a sweet as it falls out of the box’s underside.

The drive would be closed and a new task begun.

I’m astonished that sometimes airliners dump fuel into the air without being involved in an emergency landing.

Even if it can be justified by virtue of the reduction in undercarriage damage, just spraying kerosene, especially over populated areas, can’t be acceptable in terms of human health or cost.

Today’s invention is a reusable auxiliary fuel tank for airliners in the form of a long flexible tube. This would have a valve at one end and a tough, wire-reinforced outer coating (like an offshore hose).

In flight, fuel could be drawn through the valve for use by the engines. If a landing was in prospect with too much fuel in board, several of these hoses would have surplus liquid from the main tanks pumped into them, be sealed and then extruded from the belly of the aircraft during the final approach to the runway.

The hoses, would impact the ground and flex, as in a parachute landing fall, spreading the shock as more of their length came into contact with the earth.

The hoses could be coloured for easy retrieval from the designated drop zone at an airport and multiply reused.

Today’s invention is a domestic storage/display case for anything which one thinks of as valuable. This would be in the form of a wall safe with the ability to display the contents behind an armoured glass window -when the safe door is opened.

In the event of a fire alarm, or some other reason for a fast evacuation, this unit would seal its door and be expelled, by eg a strong spring, out of the house and through the wall -guided by a rail to which it is secured by a strong cable lock.

Activated by the fire alarm, this allows precious items to be rapidly moved to a place of safety, removing the temptation to save material things instead of getting the hell out.

I noticed that if people use a networked printer, they have to run to the device in question in order to stop others reading their top-secret material (or notices of their forthcoming village fete).

Today’s invention is therefore a security-enhanced network printer.

This can be set in secure mode remotely by a user. Printed pages they then generate are directed into a locked tray. Each machine would have several such trays, each with an electronic keypad to allow access to the hardcopy in question.

The machine itself would generate a new lock PIN every time secure mode was entered and transmit this by email to the author so that he/she could approach the machine in due course, at walking pace.

The paper could then be extracted without being seen by anyone else (and without obstructing anyone else’s printing work).

Today’s invention is a way to stop me eating distractedly whilst surfing the web (apparently the TV dinner has been largely replaced by IP grazing).

A pressure-sensitive graphics tablet (or digital scale) is usb-connected to one’s laptop. Every time a forkful is lifted off a plate of food placed on the tablet (as inferred from a decrease in weight), whatever is on-screen automatically greys-out and, if a movie, is paused.

When the weight of the bare fork is added to the plate again, the screen is once more made live.

This would enable food to be eaten less mindlessly and during natural breaks in on-screen attention.

Keeping any animal in captivity is potentially a cruel thing to do. I’m therefore very keen to maximise the health of domesticated creatures.

Many fish have very advanced colour vision, so today’s invention is aimed at preserving what might be thought of as their mental health, by giving them some control over their environment.

It involves fitting their tank with a number of coloured lights. Each is wired to illuminate locally as a fish approaches. Fish will tend to congregate at positions which are lit in their preferred shade(s).

Each light in the tank could be placed opposite a simple photocell. The signal from each of these would depend on the number of fish occluding the lamp.

This could be used automatically to infer the distribution of fish and then to control which colours should be ‘on’ most frequently. This would enable the tank’s occupants to customise their own visual environment.

(It would interesting eg to see what spatial distributions developed within different subspecies and whether colour preference varied with the time of day).

Young dogs seem to chew anything within reach. In particular, they seem to like to gnaw on their bedding and, if not closely supervised, their baskets. This has some benefits though for their teeth and jaw muscle development.

Today’s invention is a puppy basket in a woven construction. The upper layers of the weave are made not of wicker, but of rawhide strips impregnated with a dental disinfectant.

The action of chewing the basket focuses the dog’s attention on this object, rather than other, more valuable, furniture.

Since the animal will soon grow out of both this bad habit and the basket itself, it might as well contribute to the pup’s health.

Steering wheels in in Formula1 are becoming highly elaborate, almost organic designs. They have paddles, levers and buttons appearing each season in a variety of different locations (Outside racing, the biggest design changes I can remember were the squarish one they fitted to the ancient Austin Allegro and the airbags which are now fitted everywhere).

On the track though, airbags are thought to be too hard to make work effectively. Given the massive accelerations and occasional bumps which cars sustain, the last thing you need is a driver suddenly blinded at high speed behind his own barrage balloon.

Drivers’ bodies are held in pretty tightly by five-point harnesses, but their heads and necks can still come to grief.

Today’s invention is steering ‘wheel’ which doubles as a safety head restraint for racing drivers. It takes the form of a tube of metal which is springloaded and latched into a flat spiral (This also allows drivers to vary the torque they can apply to the wheel over a bigger range).

When colliding with something in front, the spiral is released, approximately maintains its outer diameter and springs towards the driver, forming a springy cone into which his helmet is guided and which gently arrests the dangerous acceleration of the cranium relative to the car.

This is achieved without obscuring the driver’s vision, so that he can, if he chooses, re-latch the spiral into its flat plane and continue racing.