Category: Whimsical inventions

Left to their own devices, bees will form a hive with a nest chamber made of wax (wasps do a similar thing but their papery edifice is less useful…)

Today’s invention is to encourage a colony of bees to form a nest inside a former for some stress-bearing engineering component (eg an aerospace engine mounting).

The hexagonal, 3-D matrix which the bees will naturally build would, if made of eg aluminium, be phenomenally strong and lightweight.

Now, we use the ancient process of lost wax in which a thermosetting material coats the hexagonal mesh and forms a matrix from which the wax will escape when the whole thing is heated. This leaves behind a 3-D, complex mould into which some exotic molten alloy can be poured to create the desired components.

This represents a natural augmentation to finite element stress analysis in design.

It’s a well established fact (although not a well explained one) that smiling makes you feel happier. It’s something to do with signals from the muscles which normally create a smile being fed back to the brain. Maybe these signals get sent when we smile naturally and the brain therefore interprets any such messages as a sign that we are smiling for real -and that this must be for some good reason…(but who knows).

Today’s invention is a way to exploit this. Telling people ‘Smile and you’ll feel better’ is likely to be greeted fairly unenthusiastically by anyone who is actually glum. Instead, I propose a mask which has internal padded stubs (like erasers on a pencil). These stubs are moved inwards into contact with the facial features and then moved laterally so as to stretch the facial tissues gently into the shape of the opposite expression (eg a frown) from the one desired.

When after a few minutes, the mask is removed, the muscles overreact in the opposite direction to produce a longlasting expression of happiness….and one’s mood therefore lifts (Think how hard it is to look exaggeratedly sad, without breaking into at least a smirk).

Just walking about on uneven, slippery terrain is hard work. Conventional boot design is based on the idea that one’s foot has a hinge at the instep, allowing the forefoot and the heel to bend upwards from a normally stiff, flat-footed orientation. This seems to be more for the convenience of footwear manufacturers than footwear wearers -since it places large tensile and compressive loads on the achilles tendon when walking up and down hills (even if you are wearing boots with stiffened ankles).

Today’s invention attempts to both ease the stresses on a walker’s foot and to provide improved grip on unstable surfaces.

It consists of a pair of beanbags strapped tighly to the soles of one’s shoes or boots. The bags would have a textured surface and be made of a material which would either be durable for only a small number of walks before being binned and biodegrading…or of a tough, rubbery material which could stand longterm use.

I’m suggesting walking about wearing something like a pair of deep-section hot water bottles, part-filled with biodegradable beans. These would be soft enough to conform to an uneven track (alowing the foot to stay basically horizontal) whilst also splaying out somewhat to provide better grip.

I won’t get started on what’s wrong with TV…but it seems to me that satellite TV is even worse, consisting as it does of lots of the content that got rejected from the mediocre terrestrial portfolio. Not only that, but satellite dishes really don’t add much to the aesthetic appeal of houses to which they get attached (I was recently shocked to find one lurking on the back face of my chimney, left there by a previous owner with a subscription to Sky Sports -I know this because I continue to get post advertising all their ‘great new packages.’)

Anyway, today’s invention is a downloadable template which, when placed on someone’s satellite dish, allows them to spray paint a pattern on it. This consists of the markings required to make the dish act as a sundial.

The paint would be chosen so as to match the house colourscheme and the template for any given house would be calculated based on the precise direction in which a particular dish should be pointing to receive maximal signal strength.

When people eventually realise that TV is futile, the whole thing can be swung into a vertical orientation to act as a birdbath.

I’ve just been reading in some magazine for high flying corporate execs about the design of wineglasses (before anyone thinks I’ve got a subscription, I should say I was reading it in a waiting room).

I’m really not sure how true any of this stuff actually is because after a glass or two of Pinot, the focus required to conduct rigorous tests obviously becomes less acute.

Anyway, the thinking in wine buff circles is that the shape of a glass affects the taste …by as much as £10 a bottle (ie three times what I pay for a bottle).

This occurs, they say, due to the contact the glass creates between wine and air and because of where in the mouth the glass directs the wine. See e.g. this item on ‘stemware’.

Today’s invention is an attempt to optimise the second (and presumably dominant, effect). This takes the form of an insert which clips to the side of any ordinary wineglass and which holds several plastic drinking straws. The straws then pass, in a tight bundle, through a mouthpiece which forms a seal with the tippler’s lips.

Each of the straws can be extended and rotated within the mouthpiece so as to be pointed at the parts of a drinker’s mouth which are thought to optimise the experience for each particular wine.

Small printed tongue icons, indicating the best straw positions for each wine would be provided (ideally on the rear of the bottle’s label).

I find it maddening that when I want to consult my wristwatch, I have to hoist my shirt cuff out of the way.

For people who insist on wearing a chunky watch, it must be a burden to scrape the material across its surface numerous times a day. Add French cuffs and a pair of links and you can forget any attempt at chronometry.

Today’s invention is a straightforward solution. Shirts would be equipped with a small window in their left cuff, allowing the watch face to be conveniently viewed -without all the usual contortions.

In some parts of the world, gunpowder is only about 100 times more expensive, per unit of energy, than gasoline (petrol engines and machine guns have similar levels of energy efficiency, by the way -a surprising 30%). These always seem to be the places where a profusion of weapons constitutes a major barrier to economic development and social stability (think Belfast, eg).

Today’s invention is a simple motor that can be used to do valuable work, in places without cash to buy engines, whilst also soaking up any bullets which happen to be lying around waiting to create further tragedies.

Take an automatic rifle, such as the ubiquitous AK47, and place it handle-down between two metal rails. These are to guide the weapon. A return spring attaches the gun to the wall of the factory. It is pointed through a hole in the wall into an oil drum full of wet sand -oriented so that the long axis of the drum is in line with the barrel (wet sand is particularly effective at slowing bullets -hence sandbags). You might need to weld a couple of drums together lengthwise, but at least you get to reclaim all that lead (as well as the brass cartridges).

The butt end of the weapon can now be attached to eg a mechanical linkage or a hammer. When the gun is set to ‘semiautomatic’ and the trigger pulled, it will repeatedly recoil along the rails, and be returned by the spring. In this way, some of the recoli energy can be used to break rocks, hammer nails or drive production machinery.

The most obvious way to work this is to have a few such weapons linked to a flywheel, so that firing need not be continuous (although using a drum magazine or ammunition belt feed would also make things simpler).

Cliched or not, those old stories about people not washing their hands after using the lavatory really aren’t funny.

Today’s invention represents a low cost way for an organisation (including eg a hospital) to monitor handwashing among its staff…and thus consider the urgency of conducting an in-house hygiene campaign.

For each washroom, take a credit card calculator and place it in the door frame with only the “+” button left exposed (the others could be prised out of the keboard). Every time the door springs closed, this device will add 1 to the ongoing total.

Repeat the exercise with the push plate on the hand dryer units (this will require removing the outer cover and placing a calculator behind each plate).

After a few weeks, the ratio between total number of door openings and the number of hand drying occurrences can be calculated. If the figure differs significantly from 1.0, then maybe eating those peanuts at the christmas party is a bad idea.

It’s not exactly a majority interest, but riding a unicycle has always been on my list of personal challenges (ever since I learned how to juggle three small oranges for as long as 10 consecutive seconds. I already dropped out of astronaut training; after becoming travel sick on the bus).

Thrill-seeker that I am, I could always just buy a Segway, I suppose, but they have been outlawed as too dangerous for pavement use -this in a country where people routinely hammer down the streets in unlicensed electric wheelchairs.

Today’s invention is a training device which gradually enables unicycling. It consists of a skateboard cut in half and then bolted together in such a way that front and back halves can be slid over one other and then locked in position. A longitudinal slot allows the unicycle wheel to pass through the board. The board is then bracketed to the unicycle hub so that the main wheel and a maximum of two skateboard wheels are in contact with the ground at any one time.

This system thus acts as unicycle trainer wheels (combining two great ways to break your legs with the advantage that the wheelbase can be reduced as experience is gained). And not a gyroscope in sight.