Today’s invention is another set of windscreen wipers for spectacles.
Lower, jointed parts of the frame, coated with soft brush material, undertake a parallelogram motion across the lenses, as shown. This would be driven simply by an upwards flick of the head.
As well as keeping one’s glasses clean and dry, these could be flicked up into a locked position and thus used to help emphasise emotional responses by the naturally undemonstrative.
A propeller blade, like a wing, need only have an aerofoil section to minimise drag. Both could be made from flat planks, set an an angle to the airstream, given a big enough driving force.
Today’s invention is to make an aircraft propeller of strips of transparent plastic. Each strip would be essentially a plank, set at an angle to to axis of rotation and petal-shaped. These blades would sweep out a volume exactly like that of a large, bi-convex lens.
Rotating at speed, persistence of vision would cause it to act as a solid lens in front of the pilot of a single-engined plane.
When atempting to spot missing people on the ground, or a distant landing strip, the pilot could look forward and see a magnified view of reality.
I’m always looking for ways to stop soldiers from having to actually fight each other.
One reason for British Guards regiments wearing tall Bearskins in the past was to intimidate the enemy into running away from these apparent giants (with their eyes effectively hidden).
Today’s invention updates this approach by equipping helmets with an e-ink display.
The wearer would have a facemask attached to the helmet, to hide his own (probably fearful) features.
The e-ink display would be capable of switching on suddenly and portraying ghoulish, animated faces at a height in excess of that of normal people.
When well-designed, this would have a suitably disconcerting effect on the opposition.
It seems that typing on the right hand side of a qwerty keyboard has positive emotional associations.
Today’s invention is therefore a keyboard which has the keys arranged, not in qwerty formation, but using statistics -so that letters are arrayed by decreasing frequency of use, in say English, from left to right of the keyboard.
A more advanced version of this would examine the statistics of all the positive and negative words in a dictionary, placing the letters which dominate in the positive words towards the left of the keyboard and vice versa.
Licence plates are so very ugly, especially when applied to the beautiful, streamlined shape of a sportscar.
Today’s invention is therefore a system to make your plates visible only when they need to be.
Normally, as you drive along, the plate would be mounted on a sunvisor-like flap on the inside of both front and rear windscreens (thus creating no unnecessary drag).
When you stop your vehicle, on private property, the plate visor would automatically sense its location and fold up against the interior roof of the vehicle, so that its gorgeous lines could be appropriately admired.
The internal plate could even be automatically illuminated, when on display, in proportion to the ambient light level, so as not to invite accusations of law-breaking.
The parents of schoolchildren often get told to buy standard wellingtons for travel in school uniform on wet days.
These will probably all have to be black, which causes a major headache in most junior classes, when kids arrive home wearing two unpaired boots.
When I was five, a parent suggested the clothespeg solution, but this could sometimes result in the forgotten peg problem.
Today’s invention is wellies with left/right sole treads which interdigitate and remain joined as a pair when pressed together (at least until gratefully pulled apart at ‘home time’).
It seems that my nightly waking period starting at 3:14am (known domestically as Pi time) may not be insomnia but a natural break in a bimodal sleep pattern that we have mostly forgotten.
This is a period during which I often have a torrent of new ideas. Today’s invention is therefore designed to ensure that I wake up at the right time and, in case I fall asleep without resetting it, again in the morning.
It’s an alarm clock with two settable alarm times: one at 03:14 and the other at, in my case, 06:00.
If we can make a robot fish which convinces real ones to form a shoal around it, then today’s invention is one such cyber creature which can support the fishing industry.
A number of robot fish would be cast overboard and swim until they had attracted a sizeable number of fellow pisceans.
Each robot fish would then locate the nets of its home fleet and swim inside.
It would then exit, by homing in on a fish flap in the net -allowing the process to be repeated.
It seems that vertical stripes may make the zebra hard for parasitic flies to see.
Since I suffer greatly from insect bites, today’s invention is a travel suit, made in a vertically-striped pattern -at a similar spatial frequency to that of a zebra’s coat.
This might be enough to distract the attention of a variety of biting insects, but the suit would also be made to be reversible so that the inside would have horizontal stripes that could be worn on the outside when sleeping.
Cameras and phones are merging at the point-and-shoot end of the market. Novel products jostle for position by bolting on features such as Wi-Fi and GPS capabilities.
Today’s invention is based on this frenzy and is aimed at anyone who likes to travel but doesn’t want the bother of staring through a lens…
Imagine a device with which you hope to capture a stunning photograph at some beauty spot.
GPS and comms signals can track your location. A server somewhere will make a good guess at the scene you are viewing and send you some display-sized candidate images from a selection of expert shots. You choose one and show all your admiring friends the result of ‘your’ artistry on the back of your device.
You could even insert group shots of your friends and nudge them into position -or choose photos taken during a different season/time of day.
