Category: Possible inventions

Most people will never compete in a major sporting event and yet many will pay heavily just to be present at one.

Today’s invention is a way for ordinary people to be more involved -not quite competing but close to the action.

It is a wheeled platform which allows a spectator to stand on it and be propelled alongside eg runners in a track race or even swimmers in a pool (without interfering too much with the race itself). They would thus not only be participants in the making of sporting history, but also gain a better insight into the almost superhuman performances of professional athletes.

Spectators might pay a large amount to actually be among the competitors or be chosen by lottery.

Obsessive as I am about tracked vehicles (almost as much as helicopters and electric paramotors), today’s invention is a new form of trackless, cross-country vehicle drive.

The tracks on tractors, tanks etc would be replaced by a large number of conical drive elements (each heavily-textured to provide grip). Each cone (frustum) would have a hard rubber ring at its base. On the left side, this is shown as acting as a wheel, on the right side the cone is lowered into position for optimal grip on rough terrain.

This arrangement allows wheeled operation for high speed, manoeuvrability and low damage on roads. It also enables the vehicle, with lowered, conical wheels forming a drive strip on each side, to get nearly as good grip as with tracks, but with much less susceptibility to damage.

Each of the cones could be individually powered and independently sprung, raised and lowered.

Cats can adjust their moments of inertia as they fall from a height so that they tend to land feet first.

Today’s invention exploits this thinking by equipping eg cellphones with mutipart batteries (or other masses) which can be driven rapidly from place to place within the casing.

If a phone (or other fragile, portable electronic device) is dropped, for example, the accelerometers on board, which would normally just switch it off before impact, detect the axes of spin and move the battery masses so as to orientate the device (since rotational momentum is conserved).

This ensures the phone will always land on a small, impact-absorbing pad at one end and thus avoid being damaged.

If an airliner turns out to be carrying a bomb, hidden in the luggage/freight hold, today’s invention is an internal arrangement designed to protect the plane and its occupants.

The baggage etc would be held in containers as usual, but these would be located on heavily reinforced racks so that if a bomb detonated, the containers would be expelled rearwards from the fuselage, by the explosion itself, leaving the plane free to continue.

Each container would have its own parachute to allow later collection of the luggage etc and also any forensic evidence.

Multistage rockets work well but today’s invention is a possible enhancement.

Each stage is nested within the previous one, so that when its annular rocket is ignited, the expanding gas pushes against the mass of the previous, expended can and provides the subsequent, nested stages with some extra boost as they travel together down the bore (like a shell fired from a flying cannon).

Having a large number of stages would allow orbit to be achieved, even if there were some misfires, in a way that would make a conventional rocket just too long and unwieldy.

Sick to death of screwdrivers which can’t stay in contact with their screws, today’s invention is a combination which remains firmly together during screwing in or out.

It takes the form of a screw with a tapering notch made in the head. All sizes of this screw can make use of a single screwdriver with a correspondingly tapered blade which fits inside snugly…in such a way that springing out under load is impossible.

This design also allows the user to attach a screw to the driver blade firmly, so that the screw can then be used in places where fingers can’t reach to steady it.

Presenter-View mode in PowerPoint can be very useful.

Today’s invention is a different viewing mode, for the authors of presentations, which allows them to see what their slides will look like to someone sitting at various locations in an auditorium.

This might be integrated in such a way that each presentation room in a large corporation or university could have its geometry, projector details and lighting characteristics accessible to the presentation program.

This would help avoid creating slides with illegible wording or imagery which was meaningless when viewed from an oblique-angled seating position. It might even be possible to have the program boost the slides’ contrast, increase fontsize etc automatically -to suit a particular set of viewing conditions.

Vertical take-off planes have had vectored thrust engines since the sixties.

Today’s invention is to supply multi-engined airliners with jet engines mounted on gimbals, so that their thrust can be precisely controlled using electronics.

The jets could be mounted on upper and lower wing surfaces, since there would be much less need for all those complex, vulnerable and wing-weakening ailerons and flaps.