#1050: ChargeChair

Wheelchairs tend to be heavy and pretty bulky, but why not take advantage of this shape factor that’s designed primarily for stability?

Here’s one idea I thought up earlier.

Kriss_Szkurlatowski_wheelchair

In an electrically driven chair, there’s room on board for all manner of useful stuff. Today’s invention is to equip wheelchairs with battery-charging facilities for mobile phones and wireless hubs providing extra bandwidth that can be rented out to other members of the public.

This would make those disabled people who chose to carry a suitable sign, a source of some very valuable (but hard to steal) resources. It might also encourage communication with people who sometimes find themselves overlooked.

#1049: Timeline

Yet another one-handed alternative watch, I’m afraid.

Today’s invention is a watch with an hour hand only.

clockface

As the (longer than average) hour hand rotates, so a slider (driven by a counter-rotating cam with a return spring) moves outwards along it from the centre (indicating ‘0 minutes past’) to the end (indicating ’60 minutes past’).

This gives more than sufficient precision for most events and is especially good at allowing the half-past position to be read (due to our sensitivity to symmetry).

#1048: Shaveshaker

Still irritated by the mess which my multiblade razor picks up, I tried oscillating it underwater. Good news, it gets pretty clean; extending its life and saving some of the fortune required to stay shaven.

Today’s invention is a multiblade razor with a handle which fits my electric toothbrush drive unit (in place of the brush head).

dreamguy_shave

Attach razor to brush and hold under warm water. The resulting buzzing seems to work quite well as a way to dislodge the stubble.

Repeating this in the air afterwards holds corrosion at bay and maintains the blades for even longer.

#1047: Cowlloud

Wearing a goose down insulated coat recently, I found myself in a rainstorm with the hood up, just before crossing the road. Bad move. It turns out that this material, which is great at heat insulation, also forms a really good sound barrier.

Today’s invention is a way to help hood wearers avoid getting run over.

Julia_Freeman-Woolpert_hood

It consists of a pair of inbuilt earbuds which are wired to a pair of small microphones on the outside of the hood. This would be good for getting to sleep in noisy, outside environments…to silence the background din, just switch off one’s mics.

I’d also like these to be steerable by the wearer, so that one could listen more clearly to certain noise sources rather than others by pointing the mics in that direction.

#1046: WarWords

I read yesterday about the tragic case of a girl who was killed when hit by a box of leaflets airdropped over Afghanistan.

The boxes containing leaflets are supposed to break open in midair, when dumped from the back of a plane and shower the paperwork across the countryside. The messages are intended to demoralise attackers or warn civilians of forthcoming bombardments, etc.

sanja_gjenero_paper

Well, personally I think this kind of practice is ok if it helps stop fighting, but there has to be a better way.

Today’s invention is a glorified printer which is installed in an aircraft and ‘clocked’ to pump out paper sheets at a faster-than-normal rate. This might even be placed in a UAV, with paper in the form of a roll filling the fuselage.

As each printed page emerges, it is pressed lightly by a small piston into a cylindrical mould, several times -crumpling the sheet into a 3-D object without tearing it. The resulting pellets can then be jettisoned, falling separately from a safer, increased height in a predictable way onto a targeted area -without posing any danger to those below.

#1045: EsCape

When a crowd of people tries to escape from eg a crashed aircraft, all sorts of counterintuitive things take place. An obstacle placed near the exit actually splits an escaping throng and can speed up everyone’s departure.

Today’s invention is suggested as an approach to helping individuals in a crowd get away from eg a crash landing. It’s based on the idea that people are less than optimally guided when frightened and confused by their view of what’s going on.

Christer_Rønning_Austad_escape

Passenger seats would each be equipped with an opaque fabric hood (this would still allow breathing but limit smoke ingress somewhat). The hood would have the equivalent of a mobile phone inside driving a number of circumferential buzzers.

A fireproofed system on the plane would know the seat layout and pressure sensors on the floor would form a map of the locations of people and potential obstacles.

Passengers in a crash landing would have been trained to don the hood and move in the direction of the active buzzer from moment to moment -even stopping briefly as directed.

The buzzer behaviour would be determined, for any individual, by an algorithm determining how to channel and time people’s movements based on the locations and movements of other passengers.

(This might work best for highly trained people, such as naval personnel, inside a burning ship).

#1044: BrickFlick

Big tools and equipment for building work are now widely available for rent. This means that an ever wider variety of dangerous kit is in the hands of amateurs in the construction trade -each of whom may have undertaken only a few weekend classes in bricklaying.

Today’s invention is therefore an instruction movie which takes the form of a helical tape of individual, stamp-sized images stuck on the outside of a cement mixer.

Marcus_Rhoads_mixer

As the mixer rotates, a zoetrope-like silent movie, illustrating eg some of the finer points of pointing, is played. There would be a range of such movies in support of different aspects of self-build projects.

#1042: Stube

In olden times, when I was growing up, making do and mending was a common approach. Now it’s coming back into style, perforce.

People may even begin using pencils again and perhaps not throwing them out when they become tiny stubs -as mine used to.

pencil

Today’s invention is a tube into which such stubs can be inserted and which retains the front one using a small screw.

This device maintains as usable lengths of pencil which would be impractically small. This also allows the front pencil stub to be sharpened in situ repeatedly and eventually extracted and thrown away.

#1041: Cucoon

I was talking with an inventive friend recently and she mentioned the issue of cucumbers not being naturally resealable (thanks Muriel).

Today’s invention is a way to seal up any longish fruit or vegetable in the kitchen which is likely to get dehydrated.

cucoon

It consists of two forms of plastic ring element (light and dark grey). These can be screwed together to forms tubes of variable length so that, as a cucumber is shortened, the container can also shrink. This means that the air in contact with the fruit or veg is minimised and dehydration greatly limited.

The rings seal together in the same way as a contact lens case, and so it would be possible to store things with a liquid surrounding them (water, vinegar) if you wanted.