Today’s invention is an aid to those of us who need to lose some weight.
It consists of a fridge door handle which is held shut by a spring mechanism. pumping the handle for a certain number of times, against the spring resistance, is required to allow the door to open and the food inside to be accessed.
This principle might be extended to a number of separate compartments within a fridge or cupboard, each with a sprung-closed lid and an individual counter.
For people staying in shared, accommodation, door security can be difficult. Often individual internal doorlocks are not fitted in a rented flat.
Today’s invention provides a solution, which locks the door without having to attach any screws to anything (and thus lose one’s damage deposit).
The door handle spindle is replaced with one which is prevented from being removed by a circular plate on the inside and a padlock on the outside (yellow).
The padlocked side has a bar (grey) which can’t rotate on the spindle and which acts as a steering wheel lock, in that the bar runs into the corner of the doorframe, stopping the spindle rotating and the door from opening (inwards).
Today’s invention is an alternative use for an assault rifle-type weapon.
Load the firearm’s magazine with blanks (especially powerful blanks might be a good idea). Then slip onto the shoulder pad one of a range of impact tools…such as an axe head, a spade or a stone chisel. These would come with thumbscrew clamps to fit any rifle (together with various additional external handles, similarly attached).
Press the tool against a tree or a wall and pull the trigger. The automatic-fire recoil would be strong enough to act as an effective tree feller or rock drill etc -useful for building rather than as a way to kill people.
Washing dishes is so last century. Today’s invention is a dishwasher which handles only crockery consisting of three elements: a generic cup, plate and bowl (although similar approaches could be used for pans and cutlery too).
The crockery items are manufactured with protrusions on the underside, so that eg a number of bowls can be stacked very closely on top of each other (toploaded into the machine).
When closed, intensive jets blast water at the small gaps between items (which have been designed as flow channels in which the water speed will be very high).
If all the crockery were also made of reflective (or translucent) material, each could then be inspected by automatic camera, to check its cleanliness and if necessary, apply more focussed washing.
Such directed washing could make better use of heating and water resources and also save overall wash time.
Wave machines, in all their various designs, extract energy from the sea.
Today’s invention is a wave machine which also acts as a ship for transporting eg cargo.
As shown, the machine is equipped with propellers so that when it has extracted and stored enough energy, it can travel for some distance -without using any fossil fuel or creating any pollution.
If you can build a camera with an integrated projector, then the next step has to be a laptop version.
Today’s invention is a laptop without a conventional (heavy, fragile, costly) screen.
This would project onto any close-range, near-vertical surface and thus also do away with the issue of the screen acting as a divider between people -allowing them to view everything as a side-by-side show.
This would also project the cursor of course (enabling click location to be registered in the usual way).
Amazingly, this doesn’t seem to have been patented yet (although it’s probably just stuck somewhere in the broken works of the IP system). If you wanted to go the whole hog, the keyboard unit could also be replaced by a projected, virtual one, emitted from the same projector as the screen content.
This would obviously be inadequate for lecture-scale presentations, but the power required for screen-sized illumination on a nearby wall or partition would be just about feasible.
I’ve been chasing details of varifocal contact lenses and I’m sceptical that these work at all. According to this article, the lenses need to actually move on the eye’s surface, which is a dreadful idea.
Instead, today’s invention is contact lenses containing a fluid filled envelope.
As the eye looks ahead, the fluid does not get in the way of incoming rays. Look down, however, and the fluid has an extra refractive effect. This could be continuously attenuated by controlling the radial geometry of the envelope or even by having a fluid which is naturally stratified, providing variable optics.
Today’s invention is a new form of ringtone for domestic phones.
When a call is incoming, one handset begins to play one part in a round or an attractive harmony.
Until the phone is answered, other handsets chime in in order, increasing the volume of the resulting complex music which can be heard all over the house.
Much classier than the standard, uniform tinkling.
There is some kind of evolutionary process going on in the world of tent design.
You can choose from a hundred different sizes, shapes, support arrangements and materials but basically tents are still a tensioned, waterproof outer sheet supporting some kind of inner envelope which accommodates the occupants.
Today’s invention is an alternative for vehicle borne campers. These people usually have to stand about in the rain fighting with guyropes and looking confused by the instructions -well, no longer.
A transparent plastic sheet is supplied at a thickness of 2mm. This is placed on the roof of one’s vehicle and hot water splashed on so that it forms a loose-fitting, see-through skin.
On cooling, the skin is rigid enough to stand on its own. Tags can be glued on the inside (later to support the inner fabric). No more carrying enormous packed tents inside the vehicle.
This shell allows the vehicle to be driven to a campsite and used as a tent within seconds after arrival. If you need to open doors at some intermediate destination, the shell is light enough to be rotated upwards like a visor.
Big parts of that place called The Built Environment are equipped with electrical wall sockets.
Today’s invention is a portable laptop stand which consists of two electrical plugs, each of which is attached to a carbon fibre strut. The struts are entwined and attached at the other ends to a small plate which allows eg a laptop to rest securely on it.
One of the struts contains an electric cable which allows the laptop to be both supported mechanically (via the sockets) and provided with power in rooms which would otherwise be inhospitable work/entertainment environments without much spare floor space (eg hospital corridors).
