#512: Targum

Chewing gum is pretty disgusting stuff. When the taste has disappeared, usually after about 30 seconds’ rumination, you can swallow it (yuck), wrap it and bin it, or spit it out (gack).

It seems the last strategy is widely favoured among those who are devotees of the cud. It’s pretty difficult to come up with a way to encourage people to wrap their chewings…if I could do that, I’d invent a way to recycle the damn stuff as road paint (it usually sticks to roads and pavements so hard it costs huge amounts to freeze off).

No, today’s invention is a stopgap. Realising that people will still spit gum out, I suggest supplying them with liquorice-coloured gum. When that hits the deck, it becomes largely invisible, saving councils all those cleaning up bills.

#511: Trouserseat

This being the era of the exoskeleton, today’s invention is an ultra-simple, unpowered version that acts purely as a seat.

For older people, who can get around but enjoy a short sit down on occasions, carrying a camp seat can be a pain and a shooting stick isn’t much use on smooth surfaces.

Enter the lightweight exopants shown. These consist of a double-hinged shell for each leg (probably held up by being clipped to a waist belt). When the wearer wants a rest, the act of adopting a sitting position causes the edges of the hinged sections to contact each other and form a stable, weight-bearing temporary structure.

IP-claim jumping?

I’m always discouraged by my friendly neighbourhood patent attorney from revealing details of any intellectual property I’ve created before the related patent has been granted in every major country.So I tell him, get real. The whole patents thing is a take-on, hence this website. Most people can’t afford to apply for a patent, still less to defend it in the courts, if it were ever granted. (To his credit, my patent attorney only became one when he came second in the It’s-A-Knock-Out to be Europe’s first astronaut, so he has a very different internal model of risk than his profession would approve of).There’s an argument that runs “if we don’t allow people a period of monopoly, a clear run at exploiting their idea, then why should anyone bother to invent anything?”. It seems to me that this misses the point about inventiveness entirely. People who can invent new things are pretty well compelled to do so. They will invent in any case. Even the threat of being humiliated for having “lost out on a vast fortune” wouldn’t be enough to stop them. The inventor is always going to be at least one stage ahead of any copyists.If anything is stifling invention, it’s the legal process surrounding it. The people who own and run the legal business don’t really have a clue about invention: it’s just not what they do. To suggest that inventors and small companies somehow benefit from patent protection is disingenuous nonsense: they can’t afford it and the scrabble to sign up big partner companies who can help with the costs, forces people into making bad deals. The current charge for a lawyer who knows anything about IP is way over £300 per hour. That’s for someone who can understand something which is carefully explained to him, not some super genius.

Even big companies often choose not to patent ideas in favour of selling know-how based products and avoiding publishing anything via the patent process.

I guess I’m saying that we need to apply some serious creativity to reform the system -it’s now just too feeble, costly and slow. Given that no law lords read this site, the chances of that happening are, however, slim : (

There have recently been moves towards using government prizes instead of patents to help promote innovation.

#510: Soundstrokes

I’ve been fascinated by shape just about forever. One reason, I suspect, for this is that I have mild synaesthesia (I don’t ‘suffer’ from it, mostly it’s a great benefit -when not trying to learn mathematical symbology).

Anyway, related to this is that fact that I had great difficulty, at 5 years old, in distinguishing between eg p,q and d,g etc.

Today’s invention is a font for apprentice writers and dyslexics.

Each letter could be typed and appear on the screen in the usual way but instead of being created instantaneously, it would be rendered in the same sequence in which the strokes would be made by a pencil. Sound effects would be used to reinforce this sequence and thus ‘2’ would sound like ‘zwishnnnsaaaa’ as opposed to ‘aaaannnnnsaaaa’, which is of course ‘Z.’ Similarly, the first part of a shape to be drawn might be red and the subsequent parts take on the colours of the rest of the spectrum*.

This would help the learner to appreciate the difference between making a 6 and a 9. The speed with which alphanumerics are created on the screen could be varied to accommodate the progress in an individual’s learning (and perhaps even vary per letter, given that some are much harder than others).

*For synaesthetes, who may already hear letterforms or see them in colours, these features might have to be individually suppressible.

#509: Comb-inations

For people whose hair grows fast, maintaining that gorgeous mane can become a chore. Just after a vigorous crewcut, a thinly-spaced, multi-prong, equine curry comb is appropriate. After a few weeks of unrestrained growth, it can be hard to pass a single slim comb through (shearing can then become an attractive option).

Today’s invention is for those of us hirsute types who would rather not cart about a range of brushing devices.

Take a number of identical combs and arrange them side by side. Pass an axle through all of them at one end so as to form a penknife-like device. Moving from comb to comb, remove increasing numbers of teeth from each one.

This allows different numbers and spacings of teeth to be used, corresponding to whether a sparse, dense, shallow or deep array of teeth is required (and is certainly no heavier than a normal hairbrush).

#508: Wind-up

Imagine how cool it would be if all light aircraft could develop vertical take off capability.

Today’s invention attempts to supply limited VTO and so greatly reduce the amount of space required for planes to get airborne (I’m not saying anything about landing). Aircraft carrier based planes, of course, use steam-driven launchers and arrestor hooks but I’m talking about achieving very much shorter take-offs. These have the added advantages that the noise footprint can be restricted and all that sickening take-off vibration, as engines and airframes are stressed, can be avoided.

Park your light aircraft facing away from the intakes of say two jet engines (located in a noise dampening enclosure, fixed on the ground). Fire both the jets up briefly, together with the plane’s propellor. The airspeed over the wings can be made high enough to levitate the aircraft whilst the groundspeed is still almost zero (just like on a very windy day). The plane’s engine is sufficiently powerful to sustain flight as it moves upstream to lower speed regions of the jets’ intake flowfield.

Thus a small plane can be launched with almost no runway.

#507: Spinscope

I found myself playing with the honey bottle at the breakfast table the other day (as you do). Inverting this caused an air bubble to form and rise through the body of the viscous liquid.

I then thought that if I were to rotate the honey bottle about a horizontal axis at the right rate, I could maintain the bubble at a fixed vertical position within it -each different bubble/liquid combination would have a characteristic spin rate required to hold the bubble steady.

Today’s invention is to set up such a rotating system, with optically suitable fluids, and then to spin the whole thing also about a vertical axis. The large bubble lens would thus be held steady and could have its curvature finely controlled by the rate of vertical axis rotation.

This would allow light, gathered by mirrors, to be fed into the system and focussed by this continuously focussable lens. It should be possible to compensate (perhaps computationally) for the complicated 3D interactions between the two axial fluid motions.

#506: Zeatz

Flexible seating in halls and auditoria is often pretty inelegant. It takes forever to arrange and then pack away again.

Today’s invention is a single-piece solution. A sigmoid-section length of sheet material is used as both the seat, backrest and support for this form of seating, as shown. Once joined together, using pegs through the holes provided, these seats can be linked into rows for greater stability.

The vertical supports can be ‘telescoped’ and pegged at varying heights so that seats at the back of a hall can be higher than those at the front.

For storage, all the components can be stacked, hung from the walls of the hall or, reconfigured, provide decorative, sound absorbing screens.

#505: Opencutters

I have used scissors for all sorts of inappropriate tasks, such as graunching my way through heavy electrical cables or even the woody stems of decorative indoor plants.

This has the effect of blunting, even snapping, scissors and it may also be dangerous as I apply the full force of my substantial two-handed grip to a workpiece never intended to be scissored.

Today’s invention is a pair of scissors which cuts when the ring handles are separated rather than brought together. This requires the user to cut using only the much less mechanically advantageous hand opening muscles.

The result is less frequently abused scissors and a lowered risk of injury due to employing much lower forces. Knowing I won’t be able to force my way through some cutting task will lessen my tendency to use scissors when I actually need a weightier tool.

#504: FlushFleet

Today’s invention is simply a range of small, pre-formed origami-esque ships which are made of lavatory paper.

These can be dropped into a toilet and used for recreational ‘target practice’ by urinating males of all ages.

Designed to be just buoyant, these might also release some vegetable dye and extra disinfectant when a direct hit was scored and a sinking achieved.