Here is an idea from fellow Inventor Bill Steell.
An Emergency ‘Zorb‘ type ball, for those caught in an avalanche.
Scenario:- Avalanche warning (or see it coming), Deploy your personal Zorb (double layered skin, large ball), emergency inflate using canister and clamber inside.
Avalanche arrives and sweeps ball onwards like a beachball in the tide, due to the rush of air from the force of the avalanche.
Today’s invention was inspired by the amazing family Williamson.
Now that smartphones are getting voice interpretation abilities, wouldn’t it be great if you could set your cameraphone down and have it take pictures of you say 0.5 sec after yelling your codeword at it?
(Obviously, your word would need to be easily user-modifiable to stop pranksters photographing you at inopportune moments.)
How about having the system interpret wider instructions like: “shutter? fastshot, instagram sepia, delay one second, send to Patrick” ?
It might be fun to have your smartphone take a shot every time it heard some keyword in conversation (a modern-era swearbox perhaps?)
Today’s invention is symmetric Lego bricks which are made with either knobs or recesses back-to-back (as shown).
This would allow many more interesting combinations of structures to be created (as would a single brick design with both faces each containing male and female components).
One of the big issues about building a new, high-speed rail network is that compulsory purchase of the land required is electorally unpopular.
Today’s invention is therefore to build a railway within the central reservation of existing motorways.
The ground underneath has already been prepared for heavy road traffic and could easily support a light, ultra-fast railway.
Flyover supports and bridge columns would need to be repositioned but this could be done by inserting a standard sized pipe unit beneath these, big enough to accommodate two of the trains passing side by side.
I was inspired to create today’s invention by reading this story in New Scientist.
Imagine if a sportsground had microphones arrayed around the playing area. These detect the volume of sound from different sections of the crowd.
It would then be possible to
a) Replay on big screens automatically parts of the action which had just caused a crescendo
b) Extract those parts of the action which had excited the home end more than the away end and play those bits to the home fans watching on mobile devices
c) Compare the crowd’s integrated excitement level from game to game.
There is now a fashion for not wearing ties, even whilst sporting a suit. It’s clearly more comfortable to leave one’s top button undone.
This, I’ve noticed, causes men, especially those with lardy white necks, to look really untidy about the neck region -as their collars sag open limply.
Today’s invention aims to fix this -unobtrusively. A strip of velcro is attached inside the shirt, as indicated by the blue patch (bottom right). Note that the collar is comfortably open but still retains a smart appearance.
The top image shows the two edges of the shirt (blue) held in place by the velcro strips (red and green) below the level of the top, undone button (the black lines are the regions of adhesive backing, left in place).
The lower image illustrates that this comfortable solution can be easily undone to remove the shirt.
Supermarkets are keen to offer ‘loyalty’ programmes to their customers. Today’s invention is an additional scheme.
Customers wanting to be involved in the programme would be issued with a recycled mobile phone with a housing to attach it to their windscreen, facing out.
A section of the carpark near the front door would be reserved for those customers who had spent the most on their last visit (or series of visits).
Customers in search of a parking space (within a day’s walk of the shop) would cruise past this premium area. If eligible to park there, the phones on either side of a gap would suddenly flash their screens.
These privileged drivers could also request by text that their cars be filled with fuel, water etc whilst in the shop, via a mobile service station vehicle.
A more refined version of this idea might allocate spaces within the special section according to the spend history of individual drivers, so that really big spenders would end up right outside the entrance.
Anyone parking there without having been signalled to do so would be clamped.
Today’s invention is a double-whammy for those of us who have to do supermarket shopping.
1. The checkout system knows the identity of every item on the conveyor belt. This allows it to order these items for packing so that the most fragile* ones are always at the top of the shopping bags (a domestic error of gargantuan proportions is apparently to put the milk on top of the bread).
This ordering might be achieved by holding several bags open at once. A deliver chute would fire each item at a bag which was not yet full and whose last added item was less fragile than the current one in the chute.
Some bags would of course remain forever part-full -if eggs were added to a bag with a jar of pickles, for example.
2. To limit that problem and to save on the number of plastic bags used, these would appear as a cylinder on a roll. When a bag has something very fragile added, it is sealed with a seam across the top, so that bags may contain different volumes.
(*Every item in the supermarket could be pre-rated in terms of its vulnerability to damage by a panel of hyper-careful shoppers, so that product fragility would end up in inverse proportion to depth within a given bag).
People who have to work at heights above ground tend to spend a lot of their time roped to the exterior of buildings, ladders etc.
Today’s invention is an extra safety measure, based on how cats seem able to avoid killing themselves during falls.
It consists of a metal cylinder containing a rotating hub and a ratchet mechanism. To the hub are attached numerous radial steel bands -like several clock mainsprings.
The device allows these bands to be twisted tightly around the hub, using a detachable lever arm, into overlapping spirals.
When someone wearing one of these devices falls, the bands are suddenly released, forming a wide expanse of springy legs. The release order would be electronically controlled so that it would be self-orientating
These legs hit the ground milliseconds before the wearer and thus cushion the impact in a similar way to the legs of a cat.
Such a system might also provide parachutists, dropped from low altitude, an extra degree of safety.
I was helping to run a Scottish Crucible event last week in which we talked about smartphone app. business models.
Pricing apps. is a difficult thing to get right in general. Today’s invention is context-sensitive pricing for downloadable products.
The idea is that certain programs are worth a lot more, depending on the location of the consumer.
If, eg you want to entertain your children with a game during a car journey, then you’d have to supply your location and destination coordinates (verified by GPS).
Planning ahead would allow the game to be downloaded at home at low cost. Deciding to buy at the journey midpoint would, say, double the price.
Buying it five miles from your destination would see the cost fall again, due to the lessened utility.
