If I can’t find a convenient way to do away entirely with mechanical keys (primitive, clanking, medieval relics in my pocket) then at least I can spare myself the problem of ‘which key should I use for this door?’
Rather than stick on coloured tabs etc, today’s invention is to make a set of plastic holsters to accommodate one’s keys. The purpose of each would be indicated by the shape of the holster into which it has been slid (as shown).
Certain long beaked shorebirds have been shown to be able to move water upwards into their mouths by ‘scissoring’ their beaks together. Opening and closing the beak causes food-filled droplets to ratchet upwards against gravity.
Today’s invention is to exploit this effect in a self-priming pump. One of the difficulties in designing such pumps, which have to draw eg water upwards without first being filled, is that they have to suck air for a long time, requiring high performance air seals. If you are raising dirty water, this sealing is even more difficult to maintain.
A pump might consist of an array of simulated beaks, each electrically driven to open and close and thus draw liquid (with the right surface tension) up into a plenum. This would allow liquid to be raised, as a sequence of small droplets, through an arbitrary height.
Once in the plenum, a simpler conventional pump could take over. If the liquid were to change in surface tension, the system could sense this (by the fall in flowrate) and automatically adjust the angle between the halves of the ‘beaks’.
Batteries are a source of constant joy and frustration. Joy that they power my mobile kit: frustration when they stop.
This is particularly true when I’m using my MP3 player…I can remove the earpieces to talk to someone, or just to get changed after a run, and routinely forget to switch the damn thing off. The result is a hugely reduced operational duration.
Today’s invention is to equip earbuds with a small microphone which can detect my heartbeat within my ears and automatically power down the system when it senses that they are no longer in contact. It might be useful also to embed a thermocouple in each earpiece to confirm that they have been removed.
Until somebody comes up with a car body material capable of repairing itself when dented by careless fellow motorists, surface damage to vehicles is going to remain a problem.
Today’s invention is one way to limit the pain caused by doors being opened into the sides of their neighbours in a carpark. Previous solutions have involved attaching lumps of high visibility rubber to the door edge. This is just too ugly, given the work that goes into the aesthetics of bodyshell design.
Instead, I propose a defence mechanism consisting of a discreetly modified door handle which, when the door is opened from inside, flips backwards to form a springy ‘wand’ which then prevents the door being bashed into any adjacent panels.
The world of Intellectual Property is changing faster than the legal processes which apply to it. If it’s true that inventors suffer from Peter Pan Complex (we never want to grow up) then surely lawyers suffer from Captain Hook Syndrome: they are always running away from the ticking clock of technology.
The Law Society of England and Wales announced confidently, only a few years ago, that it was “Against Email.” Since the Internet’s arrival in Neverland, certain legal specialities have, unsurprisingly, become endangered.
The global scope of markets available to companies now means that they are selling direct to customers in countries where no meaningful patent-based protection is available for their products.
In addition, the lifecycles of even their most complex offerings is now so brief that the costs and timescales associated with seeking monopolies are prohibitive. So many organisations are now adopting a strategy based on some combination of the following approaches:
The pressure to deliver new products faster is now so great that virtual organisations are being formed of teams from competing companies. Based on trust (and working with no written contracts), they can deal with tight timescales in a way that would be impossible if they had to wait for lawyers to argue about due diligence and the minutiae of termination clauses.
My vision for the future of invention is that the market will support a large but limited number of big brands, each of which will feed on a complex, flexible web of cooperating, and competing, suppliers. These development organisations will continue the trend of relying for new product ideas on outside sources, rather than supporting a costly internal research function.
One of their main sources will be individual inventors who, having developed a track record, will be signed up to work for a fixed period and be rewarded in proportion to the commercial success of their inventions.
These people (such as Mark Sheahan) will form a ˜premier league” of inventors and be in a position to command both massive payments and lucrative transfer deals.
How tragic that being an inventor is still associated with madness. You certainly have to be nonconformist, but that is really only a sign of mental illness to someone who has been to law school or its equivalents. Refreshing, therefore, that New Scientist offers this piece describing becoming an Inventor as a viable career choice.
I was searching the other day for some online information -a task I perform perhaps every hour of my working life, on average. What I got back was a series of results representing articles from 2005, 2006, 2002 etc…and then I realised there is no easy way, using any of the familiar engines, to order results by date of uploading (other than for those pages which define themselves as ‘news’).
I know that there’s no way to require that pages or their content items be tagged with this information, but I reckon it would be hugely useful to index even a subset of pages based on upload date. Those pages that contain the information, would make themselves more accessible via this tool and so the practice of date-tagging content would spread.
Today’s invention is a search engine enhancement whose robots would actively search upload date information and allow it to be used to order their results.
I’m a member of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and a Chartered Engineer. My views on membership are controversial, in that I believe there is a strong case to be made for strictly limiting access to use of the title Engineer, in order to boost fee rates…exactly what the sawbones and ambulance chasers have done forever (and teachers, for example, have failed to do).
It therefore isn’t surprising that lawyers and medics are highly paid, whilst Engineers generally aren’t (or at least not for practising Engineering). We need many fewer people at the highest level within the profession, rather than recruiting truckloads of mediocre students to do uncreative, low-level degrees -and then allowing anyone, including car mechanics and drain diggers, to use the title anyway.
It’s time for Engineers to stop thinking of themselves as employees and encourage them to be leaders.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
ETB report outlines crisis in UK engineering
Unemployment amongst engineering and technology graduates is persistently higher than the average for other subjects, reveals a report by the Engineering and Technology Board.
The report sums up recent trends in the science and engineering workforce. It warns that engineering graduates are regularly lost to city careers, women are still not being attracted to SET studies and that international visitors outnumber British students on postgraduate engineering courses. The crisis is particularly acute in electronic and electrical engineering, where UK-based enrolment has more than halved since the early part of the decade.
The board also warns that unless the UK is unlikely to reach it target of a 2.5 per cent R&D spend as part of the Lisbon strategy unless more public and private investment are attracted and productivity is increased.
Anyway, Mark Sheahan and I write this column for the IET Magazine. Sometimes he manages to turn my imaginings into practical products.
Using a public lavatory is always fraught with danger and discomfort. One of the most irritating aspects is that of the paper towel dispenser (There are still lots of public loos which lack the more sensible air driers).
Today’s invention attempts to make towel use less annoying. The aspect of performance which causes me particular grief is that when I need to dry my hands, they always seem to be wet…Have you tried grabbing a paper towel with a wet hand? The result is always the same, a fragment of moist cellulose mush in one hand and a bunch of towels which can’t then be extracted from the dispenser.
So instead, I propose that, at the end of the production line, the usual bundles of towels be riffled, like a book, whilst being sprayed on the bottom edge only with waterproofing agent (eg Nikwax).
When later grabbed by damp hands, these would stay intact long enough for whole towels to be extricated.
The only embarrassing problem, to which I can confess here anyway, is dandruff. Bathing my head frequently in benzenoic shampoo does actually limit the difficulty but it can’t be good for one, longterm.
What to do? None of this matters if you insist on wearing sand coloured clothing of course -in that case, dandruff may the least of your problems.
Today’s invention is a small fan which is located inside the collar of one’s jacket. This drives air into an envelope-shaped manifold on each shoulder which is perforated on the upper surface. The jacket itself would be unlined in the shoulder region, to allow a freer passage of air through the material.
The fan would be activated when the jacket is first put on and run (quietly) until it is removed. The airflow upwards through the material would be just enough to deflect any errant flakes of epidermis away from the shoulders before landing and forming a drift.
I wish we lived in a world where firearms could be dispensed with. Sadly, even the most civilised of societies rely on weapons (albeit tacitly) for their continuance.
Today’s invention attempts to ensure that any bullets that get fired do so more accurately and that every one is linked to the shell casing (as well as the barrel) from which it emerged.
In addition to using rifling in the barrel of a firearm to stabilise it in flight, new bullets would have a projectile with a thin-walled cylindrical tail section, extending back into the body of the shell casing and in contact with it. The casing itself would be rifled internally; effectively adding barrel length to the weapon in question as well as somewhat increased spin/stability. As the cylindrical tail moves out of the casing (locked in the weapon), it spins, perhaps 20% earlier than usual, due to the casing rifling with which it engages.
Rifling marks on the bullet would match the grooves on the casing interior (these could be given a very slight variation in geometry, unique to a given casing and would be hard to tamper with). Even if the gun is removed from a crimescene, people engaged in illegal activity will find it difficult to gather all their expended casings.
