Category: Whimsical inventions

Having plants around the place seems to freshen the air and provide a more relaxed atmosphere. These would both be particularly useful effects in an airliner.

Today’s invention is to provide passenger jets with beds of low-mass hydroponics substrate and to fill these with living bushes. The moisture in the exhaled air of the passengers, and from the galley, would be condensed and fed back to the substrate.

In the event of an emergency, the bushes could also provide some added protection from the airborne contents of overhead lockers.

Thinking up weird things that can connect to the USB slots in a computer is now something of an art form.

Today’s invention brings an element of gaming to the USB toys arena.

A modified thumbdrive consists of two parts as shown. The outer part contains a small motor, powered from the computer. This drives a spindle with a wire wrapped around it.

The rate at which the motor winds in the outer part of the drive ( a ‘car’ which is free to roll on a set of small wheels) depends on eg how quickly the computer user can answer questions on the screen. The completion time would be recorded on the computer for each competitor.

Other games for ubergeeks might involve storing programs on the thumbdrive eg intended to ‘bid’ competitively for processing resources from the CPU in order to make their car move inwards faster.

Several adjacent USB slots would allow a parallel car race to be simulated.

I find that having hard-to-read writing is a source of creativity in itself, so that when re-reading what I scribbled yesterday, many other, unintended interpretations come to mind.

For people who find having ideas is hard work, there are now many tools which pump out random combinations of words to help unstick the mental gearwheels.

Now it’s also easy to make a computer font from your hand-formed characters.

Today’s invention mashes these together so as to create and printout a list of word triplets in one’s own semi-legible handwriting. These can then be viewed later and are a surprisingly suggestive source of novelty.

Timekeeping has always fascinated me, as has the difference between appearance and substance (especially in connection with machines that may seem sentient, for example).

Today’s invention is a novel clock display. A conventional clockwork mechanism consists of a spring driving a single spindle via a ratchet. Protruding radially from the spindle are images of the face of a real clock -one image per minute.

As the ratchet operates, so a new picture is flicked into place every minute -just as in a circular flickbook or zoetrope. This allows one to have any clock face on the timepiece, from a hand-drawn one to photographs of Westminster clock tower taken one per minute.

Inspired by the sandwich bag with the fake mould printed on it, today’s invention is a more general way to reduce food theft from communal storage.

A hinged, denture-like set of simulated teeth is used covertly to make a very realistic, but germfree, bitemark in each of the elements of one’s packed lunch.

When this food is placed eg in a shared fridge, almost everyone will be deterred from eating stuff which already has toothprints embedded in it.

Vari-focal glasses are all very well, but I’d like to see something a bit more adaptive.

Imagine a pair of spectacles fitted with a rangefinder of the type supplied in autofocus cameras. Each of the lenses is circular and can be driven by an independent motor to rotate in a housing which only allows the eye to see through a portion of each lens (think CD drive control, here).

In today’s invention, these lenses would have optical properties which varied with circumferential position (12 o’clock might have a much greater refractive index and/or curvature than 3 o’clock).

The lenses automatically and independently react to the distance signals given by the rangefinding mechanism, so that the retinal images remain in focus as one’s viewing direction changes.

When it come right down to it, nobody looking at a weather forecast cares whether there will be light precipitation followed by a drop in pressure and an easterly gale. The question they really need answered is “What should I wear today?”

The weather forecast has been reduced to a single icon for a long time now. In the olden days of broadcast tv, representing the regional forecast as a stylised cloud symbol was probably as good as things got. Now, however, people expect a much more personalised preparation for what’s in store.

Today’s invention is an online weather forecast display in the form of images of the correct types of outer wear for the day ahead. This might be further personalised by taking into account the kinds of activities planned for the day (ie an October trip to the beach might involve taking a swimming costume as well as an overcoat).

This might even use images of clothing items from an individual’s own wardrobe to make the selection still easier.

Today’s invention is a way to provide people with a reminder that we are connected to even the most distant places on the planet.

A paving slab is replaced by a display screen mounted in a public space. This screen shows the view captured by a webcam pointing vertically upward, but located at exactly the opposite side of the globe.

By looking down onto the slab in London, for example, one would see the sky in a particular spot over Australia, giving the impression of being able to see straight through the Earth. During the day, Southern hemisphere stars would be visible, and at night, the floorscreen would illuminate the public space in which it was located with the bright light of someone’s else’s day.

Obviously the cameras and screens would be reciprocal, as would signs warning that walking across one wearing a kilt is probably a bad idea.

It is important to me to get a seat when I’m travelling by train in the rush hour. This means getting on board without having to indulge in fisticuffs and that, in turn, means that when a train stops, I need to be standing by the doors.

The trouble is that trains seem increasingly to come to a stop with a positional error of more than a few metres, so I miss the chance to park my rear end.

Today’s invention is a device, something like the toe-operated calculator described in ‘The Newtonian Casino. ‘

As a train passes me on the platform, I shine a torch at the windows of the first carriage. This torch incorporates a light sensor which allows a processor to count the number of seconds it takes for each of say three windows to pass (by noting the dark periods during which the light fails to reflect off them).

This allows a deceleration graph to be obtained and used to predict where the carriage doors will end up in relation to my current position. Before the train stops, the torch emits a directed flash which illuminates briefly a spot on the platform where the doors will stop and to which I can preemptively sprint.

I was watching a huge trail of steam exiting an industrial chimney yesterday and it seemed to me that it was a wasted opportunity.

Today’s invention is a chimney system which uses the steam produced by some existing process as a kind of aerial tickertape; providing onlookers with messages ranging from a one-word weather forecast to short adverts (just like sky writing by an aeroplane but at a lower altitude).

A chimney would be equipped with a ring of anemometers each held at a radius of a couple of metres from the flue in question and placed at the main points of the compass.

A rotating manifold would be installed so that the exiting steam could be controlled, via some computer operated valves, based on the local windspeed and direction.