Invention Of The Day

#153: Gutter washer

You sometimes see people in city centres cleaning the windows of office blocks using a glorified fishing pole, The absurd length of the pole always makes the process look like a lawsuit in the making, as the pole flexes and threatens either to crown some passer by or smash a window and shower those below with high-speed shards.

A related problem exists for householders in that gutters get blocked (with leaves, slate dust, nests and other aerial crud). Usually, the worst blockages occur in places where it’s hard to get ladder access and you start looking at the terrifying costs of a roofing contractor and his scaffolding.

So today’s invention is a pair of extensible poles of the window cleaning type, long enough to reach roof gutterings of only domestic properties. These would be run in parallel with one pipe connected to a high pressure water hose; the outlet nozzle pointing downward into the gutter. The upper end of the second pipe would have a scoop into which the first would wash debris, before allowing it to become an immovable blockage.

This would avoid washing dirt into the normal downpipe and blocking it, whilst also monitoring the amount of crud dislodged.

Update: someone else’s solution to the problem is now available here.

#152: Email veto

Even though I try to keep email short, I often compose important messages gradually, building in a line or two at a time over a few days and trying to chop out stuff that’s less important. Usually the first thing I do is insert the recipient’s address -so that I can find it easily in the Drafts box – but that means I’m always in danger of accidentally clicking the ‘Send’ button prematurely. (When I decide to start a new message, without closing the current draft, it’s easy to accidentally click the wrong button: just a small interface issue which could easily be corrected).

My spelling is generally ok, but more than once the Thunderbird spellchecker has saved me from actually sending off a draft email by mistake. More than once, however, I’ve sent an embarrassing, half formed (but perfectly spelled) version.

Extending that logic a little, today’s invention is a mail program plugin which checks my messages for certain signs that they are complete -such as the terms “regards”, “yours sincerely” etc which I only ever add at the last minute to correspond with the final tone of what I’m trying to say. It would also detect if the word “attached” had been used and alert me if no attachment existed.

#151: Thought bubbling films

I’ve been talking lately to a science fiction writer about how more of the ‘interior life’ of her characters can be expressed when her latest story inevitably gets made into a ‘Major Motion Picture.’ The old voice over/narrator thing is so 23rd Century.

So I suggested thought bubbles…they are a mainstay of comics, of course but I’ve never seen them used in a film -even films of comic books seem to fight shy. Today’s invention is therefore to embed thought bubbles when editing/postprocessing a movie.

These would need to be multilingual of course but with digital filming taking off, that becomes fairly straightforward -speech to text conversion could even be used to fill the bubbles (as long as it wasn’t a George Lucas script played by a Marlon Brando avatar).

Come to think of it, why isn’t this done already for subtitled films? The thought bubbles themselves could be automatically located in patches of the screen where the texture was uniform, so as not to be too intrusive visually.

#150: Triple-barrelled tap

Having a big kitchen sink (albeit in a small kitchen) is great. You can sluice down all sorts of stuff with some chance of washing away the stains and splatters before they provoke a domestic contretemps.

The major difficulty is tap(s): even the ones which rotate around a central point can only direct the water flow onto a very limited arc of ceramic (and those coffee grounds are always lurking in the corners).

Today’s invention is therefore a universal-fit rubber manifold pipe.

The inlet stabs onto the mixer tap and the other three or four outlets are each equipped with a pinch-close valve and a moulded-in iron wire. This allows the user to direct exactly as much water flow to any part of the sink as is required. The soft iron wire ensures that each outlet stays pointing where you aimed it, even when the flowrate is turned up.

You can buy a version of this for garden use, but it’s just a rigid device for joining hoses: useless for directing flow in a consistent way.

#149: Precision etching

There are many industries that require localised erosive or etching processes; such as electronics fabrication, decorative glassware, engraving jewellery or even ‘stonewashing’ your favourite bluejeans.

What many of them need is a way to control exactly where and how much etching takes place. Well, every time I visit the dentist I’m told the salutary tale of how the surfaces of my teeth are being eroded by bugs that create acid from my food (I also get the spiel about the latest recommended new-and-improved brushing/flossing technique, but that’s another story),

Today’s invention therefore is to apply a precise concentration of sugar solution to a well-defined region and then to add some enamel eating bacteria. After a specified time (at a particular temperature), their acidic output will have etched a tightly controlled region of the surface.

It’s not going to be a fast process, but it seems pretty low-cost and there may be scope for recycling the bugs as well as the acids they produce.

#148: Mailbag bijoux

The Post Office staff get the mail through to every address at a reasonable price, mostly on time -but as a business it’s a total shambles.

When I go to my local Post Office (and I’ve remembered not to go on Wednesday, which unbelievably is half-day closing) I’m surrounded by a plethora of stuff for sale. It’s almost all junk.

So, I thought whilst standing in the inevitable queue, why don’t they make much more effective use of all that high street retail space they are currently trying so hard to shed by closing regional post offices? Answer: like many public sector organisations, that were expected to magically enter the private sector in the ’80s, they haven’t got the required decisionmaking structure or personnel to do the job.

So today’s invention is one thing I’d do if they were to allow me: the post-to-anywhere integrated gift.

I’d equip each post office with a display case containing say twenty postable gift items (which would be the kinds of high quality British-branded things people would want to give to friends and family, at home and overseas).

Each of these would come with a padded envelope, a notelet and a pen. This would enable people to complete the whole gift-giving thing in a last minute or impulsive way: write note -> bag up -> seal -> address ->drop in postbox.

The postage would be prepaid -the gimmic being that it would cover delivery to anywhere on the planet. Naturally, these gifts would be priced at a premium to ensure a healthy profit, but at least they’d be of high quality and there are deals to be made with prestige manufacturers of such bijoux.

I’d also make these available online and in airports as last-minute departure items, to be handed to cabin staff, if necessary.

#147: Sidebike

Motorcycle sidecars were invented for people who couldn’t afford a car, not because they were dynamically graceful or elegant in design.

Given the amount of tinkering that bike enthusiasts do (trikes, truck engines, trailers, etc ) I’m slightly surprised that I can’t find anyone who has developed today’s invention.

It’s simply to attach two motorcycles together in parallel, linking their steering, gearchange and throttle mechanisms so as to create a dual-control machine. The linkage would be a parallelogram in section, allowing the bikes to lean over to the same extent in bends.

Why? Well, first you get lots of the benefits of a small car (eg stability, especially if there are frost patches) but most importantly it provides a way for one experienced rider to teach a less experienced one how to take corners etc safely at speed (something which most riders either never learn -or crash while attempting to discover).

This would require two identical machines to start and there’s not much point in using ‘boxers’, since the cylinder heads are going to be in perpetual conflict. It would, however, be useful to motorcycle training schools, or even as promotional vehicles -Tom Cruise could appear to do more of his own pointless stunts, without having to stick to a straight line.

#146: Live lure

I’m no great fan of inflicting suffering on animals of any sort (with the possible exception of some football hooligans). I do however understand that fishing is a massive sport (or perhaps pastime would be a better description, if you break sweat when fishing, it’s time to talk to a cardiologist).

Anyway, today’s invention is a more effective than normal way to catch big fish.

Take a live, brightly coloured bait fish and place it inside a small transparent box full of water. Attach the box to the end of a fishing line and immerse in your body of water. The box would be hydrodynamically shaped (like a teardrop) so as to align itself fairly stably in the water current.

The movement of the bait fish would attract predators stupid enough to bite at the box and in so doing snag themselves on the nearby hook.

Naturally, I’d expect any fish not caught for food by hungry people to be thrown back (together with the somewhat perturbed, but otherwise unscathed, bait). A refinement of this system might be to have some holes in the top of the box to allow the smell of the bait to escape (as well as any vibrations given off).

If this is all thought too cruel, I’d suggest wrapping an old mobile phone in two condoms (navy seal style), whilst playing a bait fish movie in brilliant colour on the screen (most mobiles already have a piscine form factor).

#145: Hygiene logic

Even the cleanest public washroom is used by people who fail to wash their hands….it’s a fact that occurs to me when I’m just about to push the main door open as I leave. Not much point having disinfected my own hands if I’m then going to make contact with the skin fauna of 1000 insanitary males -let’s not even mention the peanuts-on-the-bar-story.

You could always have an automatic body-sensing, proximity-detecting sliding door but that is apparently not acceptable for public toilets (to say nothing of the cost associated with installing all this kit or the effects of halfwits playing chicken with it).

So, today’s invention is a way to use public toilets without getting an infection. The solution is to have a heavy conventional slamming door on the mensroom, but only to house lavatories and urinals in there. Have all the washhandbasins in an antechamber –with no external door. Then, even if you get covered in bugs from contact with the throneroom door itself, you get to sluice down properly afterwards.

The huge numbers of people who don’t wash can continue on their merry way to hepatitis, as usual.

#144: Cutification

Grown-ups are strongly affected by the cuteness of children’s shoes. Stand outside any shoe shop with tiny trainers or slippers in the window and you’ll hear people of both sexes cooing about how they wish that they could buy stuff that was as cute for themselves. Baby toy manufacturers have always known that they need to exploit this, since their buyers are exclusively adults.

Partly, it’s the aspect ratio (kids’ shoes are essentially blobs) and partly it’s the feature density (I think a similar thing is going on when you notice you have just bought that £300 mountain fleece jacket -it is covered in a dense network of contrast-coloured ‘features’ -zips, tags, flaps, buttons, catches, patches, labels, seams etc.)

The attraction of cute products is also, of course, an effect of small size: think how the Japanese interest in miniaturisation has affected a huge range of markets.

Today’s invention is therefore a cutification programme to be applied to lots of future products aimed at adults. Adult versions would be blobby, miniaturised, colourful and feature-rich. It might even be possible to apply a distortion program to help visualise the transformation of an adult product design into a new cutified version.

What else can explain the Nissan Micra?