#704: Freefence

Properties which face onto the street are often troubled by having bicycles, motorcycles, dogs and even protesters chained to their railings. This makes the place untidy, especially as some of these cables and chains are ultra-resistant to cutting and removal.

Today’s invention offers a new railing design which consists of a set of tapering metal ‘blades’ with rounded tops (these would actually be each shaped like half a French stick, split longitudinally and then hollowed out). They would protect people from falling into the basement below, or banging into the windows behind, but would also allow anything chained around them to be lifted clear and removed.

The tapering profile used makes leaving anything attached to these rails obviously insecure and liable to be ‘liberated’ by the building’s owner or any passing thief.

#703: Ramp-up

In view of the fact that every homeowner within earshot of an airport is dead set against any additional runways or extensions being built, today’s invention offers a simple alternative.

If quite substantial aeroplanes can take off, using a steam catapult, from the deck of an aircraft carrier, then surely a similar arrangement could be used for civil airliners? This would allow runways to be made less than half current size. A ground-based catapult system, using a shallow ramp, could be made extremely powerful and might allow the aircraft’s engine load at take-off to be much reduced (cutting fuel mass to be carried and also the enormous noise of getting airborne).

An arrestor hook mechanism would be needed for landing, but at least the technology is well-established and surprisingly reliable.

#702: Sharedscreens

If you are inclined, you can now visit a disco in which the dancers all wear headphones tuned to receive the same music. This cuts the noise which might annoy the neighbours and enables uninhibited dancing into the small hours (this says nothing of course about the damage to hearing which may still be caused).

Today’s invention applies this approach to the cinema. Instead of having to use a great auditorium, projection equipment and a shared screen, an audience could each be equipped, on entry, with a set of electronic glasses -all of which would display the same movie within a normal-sized room.

The glasses might incorporate headphones too, but these would allow through some awareness of the audible reactions of the other viewers, so that the cinema experience could still be a shared, community event. People might be encouraged to sit facing the same direction, in order to accentuate this effect (even though it would be strictly unnecessary).

#701: Mobilemills

Wind farms are still by no means economically viable everywhere (and even economies of manufacturing scale may never make them so).

Nonetheless, in areas where they actually work, they are still unpopular because of the ‘NIMBY’ problem. People don’t want to have these large, noisy devices covering their scenic local countryside.

Today’s invention is a way to ensure that the windfarms can be seen as impermanent and also so that their activities can be shared around from place to place -rather than being dumped forever on a single community.

Take ten current-design, triblade wind turbines. Mount these at angles on an ex-military tracked vehicle which can be frequently repositioned using a farm tractor. This allows numerous vehicles of this design to be moved about in the countryside and even located so as to optimise their energy capture from say month to month.

#700: Fructoscrub

For institutions which consume a lot of fruit (such as school or hospital canteens or food processing factories), there is always an issue about ensuring that individual items of fruit, usually covered in pesticide residue, are adequately washed to ensure the longterm safety of consumers.

A quick swill under the tap won’t achieve anything like the required degree of washing.

Today’s invention in a device similar to a golfball scrubber, as used on courses all over the world. Items of fruit are fed from a hopper into an array of ‘cells’ -each of which has internal faces covered in toothbrush like material. As the cells are pushed backwards and forwards (manually) the brushes rub the fruit and clean off any wax and residues effectively. After a time, the cells can all be inverted, dropping the fruit gently into another large container ready for use.

#699: Contouredrive

Today’s invention is a simple reshaping of the thumbdrive or memory stick.

Rather than have these damn things poke out and constantly being in danger of snapping off when in contact with passing people, pets etc, the stick shown would simply be made to merge in gracefully with the body of one’s laptop.

This would allow eg backing up to occur automatically without necessarily ever having to remove the drive. It might even be possibly to house two drives in one such unit (both plugged in at the same time and possibly both writing to the same memory space).

#698: Strapstand

In the process of trying to run a course recently for some very bright University graduates and postdocs, it occurred to me that I needed to keep close track of the time.

Ever since school exams, I have set my wristwatch on the table in front of me, but when standing to talk to an audience, it always lies flat (and hard to see) or rolls over unexpectedly when I make it stand up on its strap.

Today’s invention is therefore a watchstrap with an asymmetrically-placed clasp. The clasp has a flat outer surface which can be used to act as a stand when the timepiece is tracking one of my interminable PowerPoint fests (but without snagging the wearer’s cuffs).

#697: Jamjets

Call me obsessive, but I get irascible if I find butter in the jampot. It’s not as if I eat a lot of jam, but somehow the whole process of spreading one semifluid on another, using the same implement, offends me.

Today’s invention is intended to allow the application of jam (or marmalade or smooth peanut butter, if you insist) onto a buttered piece of toast/bread, without ever getting one of these venerable spreads into the container of the other.

An ordinary jamjar has the lid removed and replaced by a nozzle device. This has a bellows pump in the neck and a removable grid of nozzles at the other end. Pumping the bellows eventually drives some jam through the nozzles in little spurts -which cover the buttered surface and coalesce there without needing to be spread. To extract the dregs and clean, the grid can be removed. (Obviously ‘whole fruit’ jam or lumpy peanut butter would present a problem).

#696: Discharger

My mobile phone always seems to need to be juiced up just when I’m getting ready to leave.

There is a tension between refueling a battery every time it gets connected to its charger (tends to be bad for the battery, which usually needs to discharge first) and the requirement to have devices ready when you are. This is particularly true for electronic kit which doesn’t allow its power source to be replaced … “Battery malfunction? Chuck the whole thing out”.

Today’s invention is a charging device which works out the health of any battery connected to it (by measuring the rate at which it will store charge) and which also allows the user to specify the time when it will be required.

The system will issue alerts about potential damage caused by having to charge at an unhealthy rate, together with the option to go ahead anyway. For low urgency systems, the system will actually try to discharge the battery before recharging at the best possible rate to preserve its health and still meet the deadline for use.

#695: Liverylights

Painting aeroplanes is a very costly business. Aircraft dope is surprisingly heavy and has a big effect on the cost of operating an aircraft over its service life. Also, the process of applying a corporate livery to one’s plane is expensive to start with.

Today’s invention is therefore a wing-mounted system which projects an airline’s branding onto a uniformly white fuselage, to be sported by all commercial aircraft. This might actually take the form of moving graphics and even adverts, perhaps.

If you want to rent your 747 to another company, flick the switch and its appearance is transformed. Similarly, if it makes a clumsy landing, the projectors on the pranged machine can be switched off, so as to avoid the bad PR.