Category: Possible inventions

How to get people seated quickly on an airliner? Some passengers are naturally slower-moving than others but some are totally unaware of the fact that they may be obstructing the embarkation process by dallying in a narrow aisle.

Airports already force passengers to walk significant distances between check-in and departure lounge. Today’s invention is to equip both these points with a ticket barrier, like the ones in railway stations.

Passengers would use their flight ticket to gain entry and the system would record transit time between these two locations. Boarding would then occur by displaying ticket numbers in order of passenger speed. The faster movers would board first, allowing staff more time to help the slower ones aboard afterwards.

This also creates lower frustration levels and injects an extra gamification element for highly impatient individuals.

Ballooning is not a sport for the impatient.

Today’s invention attempts to reduce both the awful hanging about and the potential damage to the balloon’s surface which conventional approaches entail.

The balloon basket (yellow) has a burner unit attached permanently above (red). Located above that is a telescopic carbon-fibre tower with a ‘mushroom’ on top.

The balloon is transported on top of the mushroom with the tower retracted. On arrival, the tower is lengthened, lifting the balloon upwards and sucking in air via the pipe at the bottom right. The burner is fired and the envelope inflated.

The tower and mushroom fly inside the inflated balloon and support it again on landing.

No more dropping the fragile balloon on the surface of an unfamiliar field, trampling about inside and flapping the edge ineffectually before engaging the burner in the hope that the weather won’t worsen.

It seems that people who make big steel structures like the ‘jackets’ that support offshore drilling platforms have a number of problems. One of the main ones is how to make many such frameworks quickly, inside buildings of limited size.

Traditional approaches to boosting production involve building one and then repeating the process alongside the first. If you can’t start shipping these to operational locations, due eg to bad weather, you have to put manufacture on pause.

Today’s invention is a system for making several such jackets at once.

First, finish one build completely -standing on one side using support legs (black). Then, use this as the scaffold from which to build the next (green).

Thereafter, if a delivery is required, the black one is ready to have its supports detached and pulled clear. The green acts as scaffold for the red one and so on.

Nesting the structures allows both reduced production time and storage space.

Today’s invention may have only a very minor effect on overall fuel economy but it may help to reduce wear and tear within conventional combustion engines.

Each piston crown would be equipped with a disc of permanent magnetic material (increasing inertia and compression ratio only slightly).

Each cylinder head would have an electromagnet powered by an upgraded spark-plug coil. Its magnetic field would be gradually powered up and reversed in polarity through the combustion cycle, so that the piston would be attracted upwards and then repelled downwards within the cylinder.

The main benefit of this would be to provide a more gradual, controlled piston motion than can be achieved using fuel detonation alone. This in turn would lessen inefficiencies and the damage caused by eg ‘knock’ effects and other sources of irreversibility.

I watched a security guard carrying a box full of money today. His armoured van had to park at the edge of a pedestrianised area, leaving him a vulnerable, 50m walk from the shop.

Today’s invention is a way to get the goodies to the van without someone wearing a crash helmet being required to defend them.

A very long extensible beam is attached to each security van. This would be part fire ladder, part robot arm. It would be steerable from inside the vehicle (just as ‘cherry picker’ platforms currently are).

Wherever the van parked, it would send the arm into a high, slow arc, until it penetrated the door of the shop. The shopkeeper would lock his/her cashbox to the arm and watch it quickly withdraw, dropping the box into an aperture in the roof.

Many shops in a given area could be served without moving the van and without anyone being placed in danger by thieves.

The brakelight is a fairly primitive tool, given the complexity of today’s road movements. Today’s invention attempts to smooth out the kind of jumpy driving which causes delays and accidents.

As each car brakes, it sends a radio message. Using GPS, only cars which are behind and heading in the same direction interpret this message. This signal encodes information about the duration and sharpness of the current braking manoeuvres ahead.

If a car is told that several vehicles travelling close together on the road ahead have all just decelerated hard then that car will extract a clear interpretation and issue its driver some kind of audible warning. If they have applied their brakes, but not slowed, it may indicate ice or oil on the surface.

If however, a chain of cars up front is repeatedly just brushing their brakes (because eg they are driving too close in the wrong gear) then the following car will issue its driver with a message to say “poor anticipation but little actual deceleration ahead.”

In this way, information about the ensemble behaviour of vehicles ahead is condensed into a more meaningful summary than a driver can derive from seeing the brake lights of only the car in front.

Adverts are designed to attract the attention of some subpopulation of buyers.

For each subpopulation, many different adverts exist.

Today’s invention is the idea of metadverts…online advertisements which are designed to appeal to a particular segment of consumers, but instead of directing them to any product, each metadvert directs its target audience to a webpage of cool product ads all of which appeal to a common, narrow range of customer.

Such a collection may reinforce the effect on a particular group of people and although the number of clicks for any one ad will be diluted somewhat by being in the presence of so many others, customers may well enjoy being able to choose from a range of viewing experiences which are likely to appeal to them.

Bees, on which we rely for fertilisation of food crops, are having a hard time dealing with various pests such as the varroa mite.

In order to help them, today’s invention attempts to help honeybees find sources of food more easily.

Given that we know so much about the ‘waggle dance’ which informs the hive about the location of food, the invention takes the form of a small, simulated bee on a stick. This would be inserted into a hive and waggled by a computer driven motor so as to simulate the dance of a returning forager.

The direction and distance of the source of food, as represented in the simulated dance, would be programmed to help direct bees more effectively to reliable, known sources of high quality food (some of which might be left by beekeepers).

This would also allow us to determine more precisely which fields the bees would pollinate (supporting the existing industry of mobile bee pollination).

It seems that people are affected by the shape and colour of the pills they take.

Aside from this placebo effect, it seems to me that a major safety benefit would be derived from having tablets made to represent the bit of the body they were intended to heal.

It would be straightforward to create a mould in the shape of a small, iconic head for headache pills or one shaped like a stomach for indigestion, like a heart for angina…etc

This might lessen the confusion which people have between all those similar pills and also help everyone, including blind people, to avoid taking inappropriate medicine.

One of the inventions which most astonished me as a boy was the coordinated mechanism allowing machine guns to fire through the arc of the propeller of a Bf109 fighter. The crank driving both was an amazingly elegant solution (When I discovered the engine was actually built around a canon firing through the propeller boss, I was doubly impressed).

Today’s invention is loosely related to this synchronisation idea.

When a transport helicopter drops something very heavy attached to a parachute, like a small tank, the rotor(s) are suddenly significantly unloaded (which is generally bad for their service life).

Helicopters (and transport planes) would be fitted with extra-long tail ramps and pallets with fold-out winglets.

As the load traverses the ramp, sensors along its surface could signal the engines to gradually slow a little as the pallets winglets extend and the payload ‘takes off.’ Thus the unweighting of the aircraft would be as gradual as possible.

(I’m sure Gerry Anderson thought of this first -and his has better sound effects ;).