Tag: fabby

Although we like to think that the world has shrunk, in fact many places are effectively off-limits to large sections of humanity. Today’s invention is a website designed to illustrate this to individuals.

A site visitor would be asked a series of questions, in the form of pulldown menus and tick boxes, -such as where they live, their age, their travel mode preferences, their medical history, any convictions, insurance status, contact with wildlife or farm animals, disposable income, party political allegiances, citizenship etc…

(Having eg deep-vein thrombosis, being under 18, having had a communist parent or requiring more medical cover than your wealth allows would all greatly limit the countries to which one could journey or be admitted).

This would then create a map of the world indicating those destinations to which the person could gain access.

It’s always interesting when a great idea gets stretched to the limits of applicability.

One such example is that of windscreen wipers. I was travelling in a bus the other day in which the wipers are over a metre in length. During heavy rain, these need to be flicked back and forth at a speed which is very much faster than is mechanically comfortable for them or effective.

Today’s invention is windscreen wipers for large screens. These move with non-uniform speed, wiping the central region, through which the driver looks most, for a large fraction of the time -only occasionally flicking over the distant corners of the driver’s field of view.

They might even repeatedly execute backwards and forwards oscillation over a central section of the window. This would, of course, require additional coordination between meshing pairs of wipers.

I have a friend who tends to shout into her phone…my hearing is not too acute and yet I can listen to her clearly with the phone held 0.5m from my ear.

Today’s invention is a software function built into phones which allows the volume setting to be adjusted according to the incoming number.

Once the volume is manually adjusted, the first time each person calls, this optimal listening level is stored with their number so that quiet speakers are boosted automatically (and vice versa).

I always have trouble carrying numerous glasses back from the bar when it’s my round: there are never any trays.

Rather than make several trips, or stick my fingers in the tops of each beverage, today’s invention is glasses which interlock.

These would have slots and protuberant ‘keys’ in the sides which would allow a collection of drinks to be held together and then easily detached when safely deposited on a table.

This array could serve as a kind of tray in itself, allowing eg plates of food to be carted back on the upper surface.

If you are using a ballpoint without a transparent barrel or which uses sealed refills, it’s possible to find yourself scribbling (or doodling) in a meeting and then suddenly run out of notetaking ability.

Today’s invention is to add a small blob of ink, in a contrasting colour to the reservoir in such pens. The ink is highly viscous and therefore largely immiscible. The life of such a pen is short and so serious colour bleeding by diffusion wouldn’t be a problem (at least in non-equatorial regions).

The user would notice that his or her blue ink e.g. had suddenly turned black (for say the final hour’s writing) and that it was therefore time to re-equip before the next lecture/meeting/oeuvre/opus.

Despite all the hoo-ha about whether bagged or bagless vacuum cleaners are better, there seems to have been comparatively little attention paid to what happens to dirt trapped in rugs and carpets. In the old days, people would simply take their rugs out and beat them on the washing line.

Today’s invention attempts a slightly more convenient version of this approach.

Each rug or fitted carpet would have a ferrous plate placed beneath it (yellow). The plate would be about the size of a vacuum cleaner head, coated in ptfe and be multiply perforated.

A vacuum cleaner brush head would be fitted with an electromagnetic ring (yellow). As the cleaner moves across the carpet, sliding the plate along with it, the magnet is switched on and off rapidly so that the plate beneath the carpet oscillates up and down and beats the dust into the airflow moving through the plate’s perforations.

The cleaner would work as normal on wooden floors, for example, and the plate would need to be returned to a known starting position after each usage.