Category: Whimsical inventions

Polevaulters have great difficulty in transporting their poles around the globe.

Airlines don’t like having to take bundles of ten or so at a time into the holds of their aircraft (and they don’t tend to fit in overhead lockers).

Today’s invention is a way to get around this problem.

Instead of carting these devices around, athletes would only have to carry two additional suitcase-sizes containers.

One of these would contain a desktop 3-D printer with a motorised bobbin feeder and the other the various goop and fibres needed to make a pole or two.

Traditional poles consist of glass fibre and kevlar composites wound around a long metal mandrel and baked in a huge oven.

Achieving the required properties using a fabricator would be a trial and error process months in advance and far from the competition itself. Once the recipe had been perfected, this could be carried as a secret program on a thumbdrive.

I’d suggest using a 1m metal mandrel and winding kevlar fibres into a printed matrix on top of this…matrix, fibre, matrix etc.

Each new stretch of pole could be automatically fed slowly along the mandrel and through a small oven so that the whole system would maintain strength. This would also allow pre-bending to be built in, as well as experimenting with highly variable material properties from point to point (I’d be keen to try incorporating a section with enhanced axial springiness for a bit of extra lift in the final phase of the vault).

This approach would work well for exponents of the javelin who have similar transport difficulties.

Today’s invention is a posture improver for those of us who spend a lot of time seated at a desk.

When seated, a person would wear an inflatable vest attached to the back of an office chair so that it can move vertically.

This is tied to a helium-filled balloon (orange).

The buoyancy force, acting to straighten the wearer’s back, would be the weight of about 3kg (this could easily be supplied by a weight strung over a pulley, but the balloon is more fun, and advertises the need for better posture).

In addition to an improvement in posture, this system lightens the load on one’s backside, which is now known to be life shortening, if you sit still for hours at a stretch.

Today’s invention is a smartphone app (based on this physics) which holds approximate body shape data.

You take a few photos of the rain hitting the toecap of your shoe (pointing in your proposed direction of travel). These can be used to estimate the rainfall rate, as well as its direction of descent.

Entry of your distance from the next available shelter then allows calculation of the speed you need to run at to keep you as dry as possible.

Since we are headed back into the James Bond film season, today’s invention is, I hope, worthy of Q.

The spokes of a motorcycle or bicycle wheel could each have a crossbow bolt attached, so that the sharp ends point radially outward.

A signal from the intrepid, double-0-licensed rider would cause these bolts to be released at the right moment and flung from the wheels (backwards from the rear one or forwards from the front one).

An approaching assailant would be at least distracted by these, if not actually skewered.

We have all heard about the phenomenon entitled ‘Google Bubble‘ -in other words the tendency of certain search engines to intuit one’s interests based on previous searches and thus supply strongly filtered (tuned) data when next you search.

Instead of seeing this as just a potential problem, several gurus in a particular field will have bubbles from which extra information may be gleaned.

Today’s invention is a scheme in which a handful of subject experts agree to license their search results over time (anonymously) so that topics they are looking into can be recorded.

These are then combined to illustrate regions of common interest (blue), priority areas (yellow), potential controversy(green), as well as highlighting unexplored subdomains of their field (red).

Today’s invention is a way for kayakers and surfers to personsalise their vehicles.

Having their face moulded into the underside of the hull could be just for fun when driving down the road to the beach.

If they capsize, however, the rescue services would have a clear idea of exactly whom they were aiming to save.

Today’s invention is a goblet (with opaque sides) and which contains a false bottom. This can be used as a joke for party guests.

Initially, the false bottom disguises a reservoir of liquid below it (A).

After some of the drink has been consumed (B), the lower plunger moves gradually upwards so as to make the level of the drink seem nearly the same as before.

This allows eg a party host (or bar owner) to encourage people to drink at a faster rate than the one they perceive (at least for a while).

Today’s invention is a stunt vehicle which works on the same basis as the Barnes-Wallis bouncing bomb (actually more like the Waboba).

A low-weight car with extra-large, deformable tyres would accelerate to up a shallow ramp and fly across a water surface at high speed.

Just before hitting the water, its front wheels would be spun about vertical axes (red) so that their rotation was now in the backspin direction.

This would allow the vehicle to skim (for at least one bounce) across the water and land on the opposite side of eg a river.

This could be used as a magic trick or as part of an advertising campaign.