Category: Whimsical inventions

Young dogs seem to chew anything within reach. This is obviously hard to discourage and may even do damage to the animal’s mouth. In particular, they seem to like to gnaw on their bedding and, if not closely supervised, their baskets.

Today’s invention is a puppy basket in a woven construction. The weave is made not of wicker, but of rawhide strips impregnated with a dental disinfectant. Since the animal will soon grow out of both this bad habit and the basket itself, it might as well contribute to the pup’s health.

I have to admit to an interest in building models…aircraft, tanks…almost any kind of warlike machinery interests me enough to want to recreate it as a plastic miniature. I don’t understand it either: but at least I’m not alone.

There is a subset of model buyers that likes to keep their construction kits in-box, pristine, unassembled. That’s fine (if a little obsessive) until they happen to own a very rare (and valuable) kit. Today’s invention is a way to build it without ever having to separate the components from the virginal sprue.

The contents of a box of parts would be laser-scanned whilst still attached to that holy sprue. This would result in the creation of a 3-D computer model of the components which could be ‘detached’ and assembled in silico to build a virtual 3-D model.

This could then be passed to a rapid prototyping device in order to create (and sell) unlimited reproductions of a very rare model design.

Another nice feature is the ability to make those versions at different scales…so if you only have a 1/24 scale model of the 1973 Airfix Hawker Hurricane, you can use that to create a highly-detailed 1/72 squadron.

Many websites aren’t updated very often. In some cases this is merciful (eg ‘my pets/poetry/V8 engine mods’).

Today’s invention is a way to give visitors a rapid, visual indication of the freshness of online content. The elements of a webpage which had not been updated recently would be modified, on the fly, by one’s browser. At its simplest, this would involve a browser plug-in which detects stale content and greys it out, by replacing graphics and text with versions decoloured in proportion to the date of the latest change made to the page.

More spohisticated versions might auto-age faces, add noise, simulate cobwebs, apply sepia tinting and replace modern looking fonts with eg Gothic or Copperplate variants.

People who wear glasses still have a certain amount of faffing about to do when the sun shines brightly. They can have their glasses tinted or use reactolite lenses, but these can be insufficiently responsive to rapidly changing lighting conditions.

Today’s invention is glasses which have a rapidly changeable filter built in. Each lens would be backed by a very thin sheet of plastic, offset from the lens surface itself by a fraction of a millimeter. The spaces between sheet and lens would be filled with a film of water (engineered to be nearly refractively neutral). These spaces would communicate with each other via a small-bore pipe running within the bridge of the glasses. A similar pipe would be embedded in each ‘leg’ of the specs.

The flow circuit thus formed would allow water to be quickly pumped from a reservoir in a pocket, up a pipe to behind one ear, from lens to lens and back down to a different reservoir. This could be by electrical pumping or via manual bellows.

The water would be filled with dye which would shade the eyes. The concentration could be varied automatically by feedback from a light sensor located on the glasses frame.

Dyes of different colour could be used to provide a match with one’s couture du jour. Stopping the flow, with one lens red and one green, would allow the wearer to view 3-D imagery with maximal convenience.

When there’s a fire aboard an airliner, the people who are sitting on an aisle tend to have a much higher chance of escaping than those seated nearest to a window.

This is because airline furniture is very effective in obstructing people from moving about inside the fuselage: those who can migrate directly down an aisle seem to move very much faster. Today’s invention is a new arrangement designed to allow the easiest possible egress in the event of an emergency.

Each seat is already mounted onto a track fitted securely into the cabin floor. These rails could be fairly easily rearranged so as to form a layout something like a railway shunting yard. In the event of eg an emergency landing, passengers would remain strapped in their places. The seats would then all be mechanically released and free to move, on rollers, along the tracks. The tracks would allow seats to carry their occupants to one exit at the front and/or one at the rear where they would roll out and down inflatable chutes as normal.

Seats would be attached to each other by a cable (normally hidden in the floor). As the first seat is manually pushed overboard, it drags the next and thus all the passengers can be ejected in a few seconds. Injuries by impact with flying seats would be minimised by providing sufficient cable length between them (and possibly extra padding on the seats themselves).

The web has no real sense of being a world…somewhere with locations which are traveled between. One clicks and the next site appears as fast as the available bandwidth will allow. This is a little like sleeping on a flight around the world, only then to awake in a completely foreign place, with no intervening awareness of transit.

Today’s invention attempts to inject some sense of ‘going places’ into the inevitable pauses between pages.

A ‘virtual landscape’ would be computed, on the fly by one’s browser, between any two successive pages (A->B). This would consist of a sequence of low-res, motion-blurred images of page A morphing into an ultra low-res pre-loaded version of page B -probably flashing right to left across the screen, giving the effect of looking out of the window of a highspeed train. The longer a page B takes to load, the longer the route would appear.

We’ve all done it; sent that pointedly truthful email to some authority figure at the end of the week, when silence might have been a better idea. Monday morning comes around and we wonder why our sense of restraint was momentarily relaxed by the thought of a couple of days’ freedom from the idiocies of the daily grind.

Today’s invention is a piece of code which dwells in your email client and which ensures that when you click Send in the last hour of a Friday afternoon, or just before a holiday, nothing actually gets delivered.

On returning to your desk, refreshed and with an added sense of perspective on the slings and arrows of the previous period, the code will issue a query about whether you really want to send the draft it created.

At least then you get the option to nuke your career in cold blood or safely press Delete.

It may be that fancy restaurants, interview lunches and dinner parties will soon benefit from serving dinner on a sensitive computing table device.

Today’s invention is a program for such a system which would be able to monitor and control a formal meal. It could display menus, ensure the place settings were correctly arrayed and alert diners to the appropriate knife to be using…if they were to pick up eating irons or glassware in the wrong order (horrors!), a small light would flash on the surface. If the wine bottle wasn’t cold enough, a message would be sent to that effect to the earpiece of the relevant waiter.

It could even determine the rate at which food was being eaten from a plate and assess, over repeated visits, the likelihood of eating disorders. If, heaven forfend, one were talking whilst food had just been lifted or had one’s elbows on the table, such faux pas could be sent in an advisory report to diners after the event.

Messy eater? The table program would even be able to calculate the area of food debris around one’s place setting and might even lower your priority on future guestlists.

Today’s invention is another attempt to stop thieves ripping off one’s fancy new in-car entertainment system.

When leaving the vehicle, a coverplate is often attached to hide the player in the fascia. My suggestion is to avoid those enticing matt black plates and use instead one which takes the shape of a convincing cassette tape player, complete with protruding cassette.

No thief in their right mind will be interested in stealing such an outdated, unsaleable unit and one’s car will therefore remain unmolested.

Many thermometers operate on the basis that some internal fluid expands when heated.

Today’s invention turns that on its head by making a thermometer consisting of a fluid with a very low coefficient of thermal expansion (eg coloured water) in a glass enclosure which expands greatly on heating (eg soda glass).

When this device comes into thermal equilibrium with something hot, the glass will expand, whilst the liquid stays at almost constant volume. The temperature will thus be measured by the fall in the liquid level.

Similarly, a temperature fall will be registered as a rise on the coolness scale.