Category: Possible inventions

When climbing mountains at very high altitude one’s mental function is impaired enormously. Even doing the simple mental arithmetic to decide how long one’s oxygen supply will last can be impossible.

Today’s invention is an indicator that does the thinking part for a befuddled alpinist.

It consists of a gauge which can monitor both one’s oxygen consumption rate and the present altitude. This profile is then compared with the data from a number of expert climbers, as measured at the same spot on this route during an earlier climb.

If one’s performance is noticeably poorer than the average for the earlier climbers (who survived) and the vertical distance to the summit is still large, the gauge could issue a warning saying “Descend now”.

Failure to do so would publicly label a climber as reckless and lessen his/her popularity as a partner in future.

During the descent, the oxygen might be dispensed automatically in response to eg panicky breathing or prolonged pauses with no change in altitude.

Refuelling between ships at sea or between planes in flight is not new.

Now that there are plans to built ultra-fast seagoing vessels and airships for stately global transport, another possibility opens up.

Today’s invention is a way to refuel one’s transoceanic airship from a fast-moving tanker ship.

These ships could slowly patrol underneath known flightpaths. Airships would carry only limited amounts of fuel at take-off in order to minimise manoeuvring fuel usage. When en route they could call on a tanker to accelerate and rendez-vous. Then they’d descend a little to allow a reinforced hose to be dropped to the ship.

A massive pump on board would deliver the fuel upwards, allowing much longer journeys than would otherwise be possible and providing a source of extra support in any emergency over the sea.

Today’s invention is inspired by the ice and snow of this Northern winter.

Rather than bolt spikes or crampons onto one’s shoes, perhaps an integral solution would work better.

A pair of boots would have an extra sole which splits down the middle and is hinged at either side.

Undoing the clips to split open this extra sole allows both the external sole halves to flap out and make contact with the icy ground. These flaps could be engineered so that when the wearer’s weight was applied, the flaps flexed elastically to provide extra grip between ridged undersurface and the ice/snow.

In deeper snow, these boots would act as snowshoes, spreading the weight and limiting the depth to which one’s feet could sink.

It seems crazily unsafe to me that railway stations have ticket barriers and yet we can still see crowds of people surging and shoving, as departures details are changed, whilst trains come and go between overcrowded platforms (we don’t let air travellers mill about runways).

Today’s invention is a modification to ticket barriers so that people can only move through them to the train side when the correct platform for the destination on their ticket has been displayed on the departures board and the train is stationary at the platform.

If I arrive with a ticket to Drumnadrochit I may have to queue briefly to get through the barrier when my train arrives but there is no point trying to get through to the dangerous side, where the trains are moving, until then.

Similarly, the barriers would restrict any more than the safe capacity of a given train from attempting to squeeze their way on.

Whether a cinema audience is captivated by a test screening of a movie is often a multi-million dollar issue. Such audiences are carefully grilled afterwards about which bits they liked but it’s hard to get objective measures of moment-by-moment engagement (certainly if a major re-edit is required).

Today’s invention is a way to detect signs of distraction among audience members.

Some microphones are placed under seats in a cinema (any voice recordings made would be distorted to protect identities of viewers). Since the sound field created at each showing of a given movie is largely repeatable, it would be possible to subtract the local background rustling, muttering, crunching, giggling noises from the film soundtrack (even if it was set to the earsplitting levels of “Revenge of the Mechanoid Zombies II”).

Just the total volume of noise would provide filmmakers with a second-by-second insight into whether a movie was grabbing attention (people sit very still when paying close attention).

It would be particularly good for assessing adverts (I would be easily detected saying “ohmygodhowcrass” in response to most of these).

Soldiers can sometimes find themselves with ammunition in magazines but without weapons into which to insert them.

Today’s invention is a magazine which comes equipped with an integrated barrel and manually-operated hammer mechanism.

These would be very cheap, are designed not to obstruct the normal function of the main weapon and yet, in its absence, would still allow rounds to be fired direct from the magazine.

Divers’ watches can be beautiful examples of precision engineering but they are also subject to damage, malfunction and misreading under pressure.

Given that their main function is to alert a diver to the need to surface, today’s invention achieves this in a simpler, cheaper way (and might be used as a low-tech backup).

Before descending, a diver would strap to his wrist a watch case containing an old-style 35 mm film cartridge. The film would lie over a high-contrast image of a downwards pointing arrow.

The diver would select a number of light filters to insert over the film, corresponding to the planned depth and duration of the dive. When the light available at depth had exposed the film enough to obscure the arrow, it would be time to surface again.

It seems that if you visualise eating something before doing so, you tend to eat significantly less of it.

Today’s invention is therefore a phone application which allows diners to record and upload a small section of video footage every time they eat a new meal.

They can download this to their phone when next they place an order for it in a restaurant or decide on this meal at home. Whilst it’s cooking, they view the previous version of this named meal being consumed and spend a moment or two thinking about how it tasted.

This provides those wishing to lose weight with a little extra support (and might also be linked to in the comments sections of restaurant websites etc).