Category: Possible inventions

I’m always interested in ways to deal with birdstrikes on jet planes.

Today’s invention is basically a Dyson vortex vacuum cleaner cylinder bolted to the front of a jet engine.

Blades inside the sleeve rotate the incoming air (not so much as to churn the incoming flow to the fan, but enough to deflect say a 1kg bird to the periphery and exhaust it, as shown).

My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that it might be possible to get a bird out of the way using a tube ~3m long, but the extra fuel costs, due to drag and weight, are harder to quantify).

The streets are full of ‘furniture’ in the form of signage and lights -most of which is constructed from heavy-gauge metal tubing. Drive into one of these and you can expect to get decelerated very fast as well as becoming too closely acquainted with it via the windscreen.

Today’s invention is a small robot which travels along streets in search of cylindrical, vertical metal poles of about 80-100mm in diameter. When one is detected, the robot attaches itself and, using a small internal grinder wheel, gouges out a circumferential arc-shaped trench near the pole’s base.

This has the effect of weakening the metal just enough that a collision will cause it to bend away from the vehicle near ground level without jack-knifing it inside or firing it, javelin-like, across the road.

Given the simple, specific geometry, such robots might even undertake this task largely unsupervised.

Today’s invention is an electronically simulated mirror with special features. This would contain a camera system capable of detecting a face appearing in front of the screen.

This screen could be set to display the camera’s moving image of the person appearing in front of it, as usual. The invention would be to store a variety of movies of different people in front of their mirrors.

When your mirror ‘saw’ your face, it could detect the presence of eg hands and eyeblinks, smiles and nods and display those elements extracted and stitched together from someone else’s stored reflection (in the right places, very nearly in realtime and smoothed together to create the illusion of lifelike movements).

If you wanted always to see yourself as you were ten years ago, then this would be possible (using recorded footage or that of an avatar, based on some stills and a regression algorithm). You could even choose to view yourself as an ancestor, perhaps or a celebrity. This might also help people who had been disfigured to regain some confidence.

Today’s invention is a flexible factory for countries in which land is at a premium.

The factory is modular in design. Each unit is carried into position by a train and dropped so as to straddle the track. A series of these modules is connected to house the equipment needed to produce whatever the factory makes.

Special trains (or individual, autonomous wagons) with roof hatches transport material to the required tunnel module which then takes it up rapidly via ports in the floor (without even causing the delivery train to slow, in some cases).

Individual factory modules can be moved to new locations as required and even assembled into different factories from time to time.

When modules are joined, they can also communicate information and part-processed material longitudinally between each other via secondary tracks running on their rooves.

Motorcycles are anything but aerodynamic. Today’s invention is a hinged windshield with a camera on board which helps smooth the airflow around a bike.

The camera forms an image of the rider’s helmet, on which is located a symbol. It can detect the position and distance of this symbol and thus operate a small motor in the windshield hinge. This allows the shield to follow closely and smoothly the movements of the rider as he sits up or crouches down or slides forward, whilst keeping a fixed distance from his visor.

A similar arrangement could be made for a vortex baffle behind the rider.

Today’s invention is an extra antiterrorist measure for airliners.

In order to deny attackers the use of an aircraft as a missile, a bombproof bulkhead is provided that insulates the passenger section from the cockpit completely. The only way to communicate between the two would be via either a satellite link or a ground station.

Pressing a panic button inside the cabin would force both these channels to be monitored by a person. He or she would then have to choose what messages to relay, if any, between cabin and pilot.

This would stop any attempt to take over the plane (by eg threats) and cause it to be diverted at once to an airport where security was tight and both publicity and escape prevented.

Today’s invention is a tennis racket with a piezoelectric crystal in the frame underlying each string.

When a tennis ball is struck (off-centre), the crystals detect the location and voltages applied to them are automatically adjusted in order to change the string tension at the impact point.

This instantly creates a local ‘sweet spot’ on the racket head, allowing greater control of the return shot.

Now that even the highest ‘impact’ journals are available online, today’s invention is to provide a means by which any of the authors’ later publications, on the same subject, can be injected as an Appendix (perhaps appearing in red).

This would allow all readers to determine how up to date the thinking in any given publication was and avoid wasting time reading work that subsequently went nowhere.

A smart electronic journal would be able to do this automatically, at least for new developments to papers which had appeared in it previously -by grabbing a reference from the current copy.