Category: Possible inventions

Today’s invention is a way for people to board trains and disembark from them without the trains themselves ever slowing.

Having trains stop is pretty inefficient and it also means that the only place you can get aboard is at a station.

Instead, the idea is to have a small, electrically-driven micro-carriage running parallel to the train itself. People could get on this, via a simple siding, get up to speed, and when the two vehicles docked, simply walk from one to the other.

The accelerating engine would then disengage and run backwards to its siding, to wait for the next train and its passengers. Obviously this requires that the accelerative micro-carriages have efficient drive mechanisms and are monitored rigorously to avoid collisions. Some might stay docked, to allow for extra flexibility (A super clever system would have a range of microcarriages which would feed passengers from walking to bullet train speed).

In this way, main trains could avoid the problems of variable speed and passengers could board or get off at any one of a very large number of intermediate locations.

When attempting to allow someone to use my phone to make a simple call today, it became obvious that even the same model may be configured so differently for individuals that they can’t quickly be loaned.

Today’s invention is an application which records one’s phone settings and sends these to the phones of your friends.

This allows a phone owner to lend his device to one such person, have them enter a passphrase and access an emulator of their own interface (providing only basic calling, texting and browsing functionalities).

For people you want to help but who aren’t friends, they could still choose their phone model from a list to get access to a generic interface design with which they were familiar.

Fire drills are intended to get building occupants to safety as smoothly as possible.

They tend to involve people delaying leaving their desk in the hope that the alarm will be only a bell test and the noise will cease soon. Then everyone joins the same plodding stream of people they usually do on these occasions. It’s not at all clear, though, that this process helps people escape from a real fire.

Today’s invention is firedoors which are unidirectional (somewhat like veins, which constrain bloodflow direction). These would be arranged so that the doors would have no handles and, in an emergency, would open easily only when people heading away from a fire pushed them.

Each door would thus have to be wired into the existing (fire resistant) electrical circuit for the alarms. Fire detection equipment would locate fire(s) in a building and block the opening of each door for anyone trying to move towards a source.

Fire drills would certainly be less pedestrian and be programmed to require a different egress route every time.

Parking in streets is difficult, even for experienced drivers. It also requires that cars be sufficiently far apart to allow steering into a space, which in itself wastes about 30% of kerbside parking.

Today’s invention offers a way for vehicles to slide into very narrow gaps, without requiring any skill.

Each car would be fitted with an arched, low-friction bumper at front and rear. Beside a narrow parking spot, these bumpers would be flipped downwards and locked in place to from two rockers.

The car’s shock absorbers would then be pressurised from a central plenum: first the outside pair and then the kerbside pair.

This sequence of pressurising and depressurising would cause the vehicle to rock slightly and slide into the space in small jumps (something like a child vigorously translating a rocking chair across a shiny floor).

When you learn to drive, that reverse-parking thing seems so difficult.

Part of the reason is that the steering wheel’s connection to the wheels is geared. It’s hard to sense, especially when going slowly, where the wheels are actually pointing.

Today’s invention is a mobile app which sits on the dashboard above the steering wheel and shows a learner exactly where the wheels are pointing.

(It does this by using the mobile device’s camera to read the position of a circular barcode attached to the back face of the steering wheel and then entering the make of vehicle for calibration).

Today’s invention is to supply each weather forecast in the form of a single classic painting.

The weather conditions in a single image could quickly summarise what we were in for, in a way that works with mobile screens effectively and doesn’t rely on those silly ambiguous icons.

It also doesn’t involve a spurious level of unusable detail. Nor does it infringe on anyone’s IP rights (if the pics are old enough).

Humans are partly defined by our opposable thumbs.

Today’s invention is to equip robots with similar functionality in the form of a cellphone with two touch-screens.

When a robot selects this form of manipulator, the screens can detect and react to a range of different, soft materials (eg a foam rubber sphere will produce different screen imprints, when squeezed, than a grape).