Category: Possible inventions

Today’s invention is aimed at saving the lives of occupants of a light aircraft which is about to crash.

The crew compartment consists of a vertical-axis cylindrical canister attached to a high wing. Each semicircular edge of the cylinder’s upper face is attached to the wing by a separate set of explosive bolts.

In such an emergency, the pilot would decide which wing was less badly damaged and fire the bolts on the opposite semicircle.

The crew cannister, attached to one half of the wing, would be ejected and would spin like a sycamore seed towards earth (a sickening journey, but with a much lower terminal velocity than the stricken aircraft has as a whole).

Boxing can be a dangerous sport, but it’s compelling for many people.

Today’s invention tries to lessen the danger caused by widely-hooked punches, which are hard to see as they swing across the visual periphery and are thus responsible for concussions to the unprepared boxer’s brain.

It consists of boxing gloves which are coloured bright green (this colour being the most detectable in the periphery of the retina).

For anyone interested in counting punches who insists that opponents’ gloves should be visibly different, I’d also propose that the gloves carry different green patterns (eg noughts and crosses or dots and stripes?)

Today’s invention is a conjoining of two ancient military technologies.

It takes the form of arrows which have a rocket in their rear ends.

As each arrow passes the bow, a rubbing strip on the bow lights a match in the tail of the arrow.

This causes the rocket to ignite in flight, accelerating the arrow to a much higher speed than a human archer could achieve. It thus improves accuracy and also acts as a tracer, showing where the arrow has gone.

Today’s invention is a way to help with the issue of urban parking.

A trailer, made of aluminium struts, is attached to one’s car when going into town. This is then detached, a ramp is pulled out and the front of the trailer raised (using a motor or winch).

The car is driven up the ramp which has been formed and braked in position. Running the engine against a flywheel raises the back end of the platform.

Last, the ramp is slotted back in and the whole thing rolled towards the pavement over the top of other parked vehicles or pedestrian walkways.

As students move into dormitories and shared rooms, the security of their proliferating electronic devices and other valuables becomes an issue (Amongst several such projects, I had to use a cable lock to secure my daughter’s laptop to her student hall radiator. No-one stole the radiator).

It’s also essential that, when defending one’s rent deposit, that no damage be detectable by a landlord later.

Today’s invention is a cheap, secure box which can be firmly attached to floorboards so that stealing it in toto becomes difficult.

A strong, lockable box (blue) has an array of holes in the base. The box is placed on a wooden floor and, where the holes match the gaps in the floorboards, a drill can be used to penetrate the tongues, as shown.

A bolt with a pivoted bar (yellow) is passed through to the underside of the board and twisted so that the bar’s asymmetric weight allows it to lie flat and grip the board when the bolt is tightened.

To remove, untighten the bolt and tap it to disengage from the wood, leaving no sign of its presence (and no need to hide aftereffects under a rug).

Predictive text can be useful but it has the potential to annoy those people who insist on using a large vocabulary whilst typing into a small device. All too often, the word that appears will not be the one intended and some form of substitution then has to occur (sometimes it involves retyping and hoping that the system will learn the new word).

Today’s invention attempts to supply some of the benefits of predictive text generation with less of the downside.

A text messaging device would generate its best guess about what a user was about to type next. Rather than display this, it would simply change the ease of selecting and typing the next predicted letter(s).

On a conventional keyboard, this might involve raising the key for the next character slightly. On a touchscreen or projected keyboard, the guessed character could be displayed as larger (with its size increase dependent on the confidence level).

An enhancement might be to boost the size of the next 1 to n characters predicted, by an amount which would decrease from future-character 1 to n.

Airships are increasingly thought of as global transport vehicles for the future.

Today’s invention is a dirigible design which consists of a number of modules, many of which contain a vertical matrix of super-strong, partially evacuated tubes (the others would contain cargo or passengers).

These tubes can withstand atmospheric pressure but should some become damaged, the whole vehicle will remain aloft.

All these tubes are arranged so as to form a very tall, vertical aerofoil section. The pressure difference between top and bottom faces provides the upthrust required to support the ship (as usual) and the blade-like section minimises drag.

I imagine this would be driven by jet engines embedded in a subset of modules.

For flexibility of operation and safety, groups of modules might be extractable from the stack, rotated through 90 degrees to form a wing, and flown earthwards.

Here’s another of my seemingly unavoidable weaponry ideas.

One problem when firing a handgun is the twisting that happens during recoil. Watch a high-speed film of this and it’s amazing that people don’t break their wrists. Getting the next shot anywhere near on target is therefore going to be difficult.

In order to help alleviate this difficulty, I suggest creating a revolver with two barrels. These admit bullets simultaneously from diametrically-opposite chambers and fire together using a unified hammer system.

The propellant in each bullet could be halved to lessen the overall recoil. The barrels are rifled in opposite directions so that the torques created cancel each other out and the wrist twisting is greatly reduced.

No need to restrict the cylinder to only six bullets of course. More bullets = lower recoil movement.

Lego bricks (never ‘Legos’) have always been important in my life. I even built several working demo machines using them whilst at Imperial college, much to the irritation of the staff who didn’t understand creativity.

One annoying aspect though is the colours. The only way to get 10,000 pale grey bricks is to shell out a fortune and buy them individually -assuming the shade is even manufactured.

Today’s invention is a modification to the classic brick design. Each brick would be made so that the walls, which are currently solid, would be hollow. A huge number of say 4*4 bricks would be made in this way using transparent plastic and with one of the lugs on each a screw-in plug.

This would allow all bricks to be submerged in a tub of water-soluble, coloured dye. They would fill with colour and the screw lugs would be sealed.

In this way, one could build a massive sculpture in colours of one’s own choice (perhaps subtler than the stock ones).

Ladders remain both ubiquitous and potentially lethal. Someone I know fell off one and broke both femurs.

Today’s invention is a system designed to lessen the severity of such accidents.

It consists of a number of automotive-type airbags which are stored in pods attached to the base of a ladder. These would be wired to pressure sensors in the ladder rungs and feet, so that the position of a worker would be known to a processor in the pod control unit.

When a fall was in progress (as detected by a sudden asymmetry in rung and foot loadings), the airbags would be timed to fire so as to be fully inflated at the instant the victim made contact with them.