Category: Whimsical inventions

I’m amazed by the upsurge in numbers of tattoo parlours. It used to be that only sailors and soldiers had forearms emblazoned with “I love mum” or crossed swords emblems but now everyone who’s old enough to defy their parents (ie over about six) has got a butterfly on their shoulder, a dragon on their ankle or Polynesian-style razorwire across their backside.

So today’s invention is a new variant on this body defacement theme: a home branding kit. Guaranteed not to cause blood poisoning, this is based on the 800deg C ceramic hair straighteners which are now part of every teenage girl’s beauty toolkit.

In order to express their personality, kids could heat the branding iron and, using the collection of metal templates supplied, decorate their epidermis with the icon of their favourite football club or rock group.

By varying the local burn time, using the supplied timer, different shades from red to black can be achieved, thus creating a pallet of contrasting skin colours. This has got to be at least as safe as sun tanning, but without the cancer risk. The kit would come with a vial of anaesthetic and a strip of balsawood to bite into.

Don’t try this at home.

Way back in the dotcom era, there were business plans aimed at making the web smell good. A series of inkjets (embedded perhaps in one’s computer) would be programmed to react to codes in a webpage and blast out scent at the unsuspecting surfer.

Today’s invention is an adaptation of that idea. Given that many existing inket cartridges have a chip on board that can regulate the amount dispensed precisely, I suggest creating a handbag-compatible scent ‘printer’. This would have an ipod-like interface and allow the user to dial up the amounts of each of, say, three or four scents in order to deliver a blended smell that would be unique to the individual.

If uniqueness were particularly important to the marketing process, each machine might be enabled to dispense only a certain subset of possible scent combinations, as authorised by the codes on a prepaid swipe card. Scent intensity might be automatically varied with the time of day, becoming ‘heavier’ for evening events.

A simpler approach might be to cannibalise existing inkjet technology on the desktop and allow it to fill a conventional spray bottle with the right proportions of material.

For the more desperate male customer, a range of pheromone extracts could of course be supplied. People might be allowed to swap or trade scentcodes and, on foming relatiionships, hybridise their individual smells.

Socks are for most adults, a utility purchase: they aren’t on show when worn and therefore don’t self-advertise.

Today’s invention attempts to address the second class citizenship of socks in the world of high fashion.

Children have long been familiar with ‘jelly’ shoes, mostly as beach wear. I propose to create a range of similar, ultra simple clear shoes for adults and to sell, with each pair, six pairs of highly-priced, limited edition, ‘designer’ socks (think Swatch for feet).

With socks now highly visible, these would be a topic for conversation and a further opportunity for self expression (if people will wear Crocs, they will certainly go for this).

The Mars Rovers have been spectacularly successful in their mission. The cost though, for a species like ours that can’t even feed itself, has been high: a billion dollars, give or take.

Today’s invention is a way to help recoup some of the costs. Although Spirit and Discovery move at the pace of a NASA committee on decision day, their capabilities are constantly being enhanced by remote uplink from Earth. At some stage, they may be deemed effectively obsolete, at which point I propose that their speed be upped in order to allow them to draw messages on the red planet’s surface.

This would, for a while, be the prime advertising real estate in the Solar System. With the eyes of the world watching (having the robots fight or crash over a cliff would help here), corporations would be allowed to bid for ‘scratch-time’, ie to have their logos and other marketing messages engraved by the trowels and ploughs of the intrepid robot explorers…

I’m always shocked when walking in the countryside to see how much litter is casually dumped everywhere. I can’t understand why anyone would carry a full bottle of lemonade up a mountain and then not bother to cart the empty down again (although I believe this is true even of professional mountaineers).

I tend to enhance my reputation for eccentricity by walking with a nylon sack and collecting as much of this crap as I can (from discarded crisp packets to entire glue sniffing kits).

Today’s invention would have been a robot capable of doing this work autonomously, but the greatest barrier to that approach is that it’s very hard to get a robot vision system to discrimnate reliably between rubbish and other objects in the countryside -determining items by eg their bright colours, as perceived by people, is a fiendishly hard problem. . Any such system might well cart back only boulders and cowpats.

Dogs, on the other hand are readily trainable to make this distinction (both in terms of colour and scent). Today’s invention is therefore a pannier system capable of standing stably on a rough path whilst a trained litter dog scampers about and gathers anything it has been trained to recognise as rubbish. When the pannier detects that it is full (by eg sensing the weight inside itself) it displays a small light. This alerts the dog to squeeze under the pannier and lift it home on its back.

Personally, I’d also train these dogs to bite anyone found making a mess, but that might be considered too enthusiastic (A dog-operated excrement scoop is already on my drawing board).

I admit it. I’m obsessed by flying machines. Not just aeroplanes, but especially those systems which can lift an individual and take him over the rooftops just like James Bond’s rocket belt in Thunderball. In these days when unmanned aerial vehicles are gaining credibility, I still want to get up there myself (as long as I’m not required to be a passenger).

I’d settle for a regular helicopter, but the price tag and running costs are on the steep side of vertical take-off. So today’s invention is a way to make commuting exciting again.

A high-spec. remote controlled model helicopter can be bought for $1,000. It will lift 5Kg +fuel and fly at 20mph under load for about 20 minutes. For a lot of people, this would be sufficient range to get them to work -if they weighed 5Kg.

So I propose to get together an array of 12 of these machines, attach them to a light aluminium frame using climbing rope and then secure myself to the frame with a hangliding harness.

Not having 24 arms means that all of them would be controlled using a single R/C system, tuned to the same frequency. The frame would prevent (most) collisions and in the event of some malfunction, the multiplicity of lift sources would provide ‘graceful degradation,’ of a sort.

Fuel consumption? Probably not that much worse than a thirsty, 4×4, school-run tank. Noise level? Off the scale. Think of it as a safety feature -no one can claim they didn’t hear you coming.

It’s all too easy to misinterpret the emotional tone of an email you are sending or have just received. Today’s invention is an attempt to alleviate this problem.

Everyone who writes email (ie soon everyone on the planet) could be prompted by their computer, at random times throughout the course of say one month, to answer this question: “How are you feeling, right now?”

If the answer is different from those previously given, a webcam would capture your facial expression (perhaps also asking you to exaggerate your look or to use a face morphing tool for the same purpose).

Your emotional state is correlated with eg your most recent typing and mouse movement behaviour (See eg this research). These data would enable the system to learn something about your mindset on future occasions and automatically inject stored images which mirror it into the current missive.

(Another technique would be to exploit the fact that certain fonts are good at conveying particular moods. Comic Sans, for example is so unwaveringly jolly it drives large numbers of people crazy. I’d suggest that the local font could be set for each sentence, based on the writer’s detected state of mind. It might even be possible to create new fonts specifically tuned to different, as yet unrepresented feelings: ’emotifonts’).

When composing, you can set the frequency with which images are inserted, as thumbnails, into your message (ie every paragraph or after every string of exclamation marks -or when you resort to CAPITALS). As well as performing a spellcheck before sending, it would become necessary to do a moodcheck of the embedded images too.

Naturally, techie types who regard html email as a heinous aberration, will miss out on this, but they tend not to care too much about whom they might offend anyway ; )

Even though I don’t get to drink expensive wine very often, it bugs me that half a bottle left overnight just doesn’t taste as good (no amount of pumps or seals of duck-billed valves makes much difference). No doubt some wine-snob chemists could explain that it’s to do with the air removing certain volatile components in a particular sequence.

So today’s invention will scandalise them: it’s wine in a bag, in a bottle. Boxed wine stays fresh for longer, so why not insert a smaller than average wine bag into each bottle of quality wine before it is filled and ‘laid down’ ? No air contact with the wine, even when the bag collapses years later during dinner (moments before I do).

For those of us who aren’t compelled to quaff a whole bottle once it’s open, this could be a way to enjoy pricier wines…certainly the additional cost of the inserted bag would be negligible.

A seriously sneakier thing to do would be to allow the wine to mature and be transported across the globe in individual bags but then to carefully feed those wine-filled bags into bottles of local origin…thus saving the horrendous cost of transporting all that glass (might require bags shaped like tapeworms, but that’s a marketing issue).

Sacrilege, I hear them yelling? Only a few years ago, people were baulking at the idea of plastic corks; now even they are gaining viticultural credibility.

Wind energy is obviously valuable but limited by the fact that not everywhere with a pressing need to operate the toaster has sufficient wind speed to justify spending $20M on a windfarm (Doubling wind speed creates an eight-fold increase in potential power output).

Windspeed basically increases with altitude, so that jet steams, at about five miles up, can be moving at 300 MPH.

Today’s invention: Imagine piggybacking a redundant airliner (as in the early days of space shuttle testing), stripped of non-essential components, to an altitude of five miles or so.

The airliner could be equipped with a very large set of turbine blades (which would fold out once the machine had been released from the piggyback plane and tethered to the earth using draglines, like a large kite). Inside, there would be a gearbox and an ac generator. These days we are actively planning carbon-nanotube space elevators, so much of this technology is not actually rocket science).

The result would be massively efficient, renewable energy output (via electric cables down a tether cable)…also there would be few complaints about unsightly turbines, or the impact on birdlife. And if the wind speed drops off? Well, you could run the fans and generator backwards for a while on electricity previously harvested to big batteries on the ground.

I just discovered this…hope they aren’t thinking of applying for a patent!

I’ve had to undertake a lot of practical research into the phenomenon of blocked drains, lately…we are talking toilets here actually, I’m afraid. I’ve been astonished by how poorly a sink plunger performed, even when combined with gallons of chemical unblocker. There is no way to form the required seal, so I resorted to a different tactic.

Ideally, I’d use a high-pressure hose, but if the drain isn’t clear within about 10 seconds, the entire house fills with effluent: -nasty. Turbulent vortices, created by a flapping motion under the water surface, are the answer, I’ve discovered. These can be made energetic enough to erode and dislodge the most stubborn of blockages.

Today’s invention is an attempt to achieve the intense flapping required without having to use your hand. Instead, a variant on this trash picker device is suggested, with a flipper in place of the ‘beak’ and the whole thing encased in some kind of ezy-clene rubber sleeve. I still haven’t thought up a way to make this flexible enough to go around a U bend, but fortunately, water is sufficiently incompressible for pressure waves to be transmitted over longish distances -making this usually unnecessary.