Today’s invention is an emergency crutch for wounded soldiers, based on their existing rifle.
In the event of a legwound, a soldier could detach the barrel of his rifle from the breech mechanism and allow it to slide out of the stock until it could be secured in place, as shown, using a thumbwheel.
Removal of part of the shoulder stock would then form a crutch and allow the individual to move away from the conflict more rapidly to a place of comparative safety.
Today’s invention is a way to deal with domestic broken glass.
Rather than fill the kitchen with a pile of fragments waiting to be wrapped in cardboard and dumped in the regular bin, there is a better way.
A glass jar is made just small enough to fit through the hole in a bottle bank. This jar has a glass, screw-on lid…no other materials are involved.
When anything glass is broken, the bits are gathered and placed in this jar. When the jar is full, it is transported to the bottle bank and the whole thing dumped in to be recycled.
Today’s invention is a waterslide made with articulating sections and at the bottom end of which is an inflatable boat.
Water is directed into the top end and diverted to either side of the tube periodically. This deflects the slide and diverts the boat, accommodating the slide’s bottom end, around the pool. The boat, being rubber, presents no danger to people swimming in the larger pool.
Users jump in and experience some surprise when they eventually emerge safely into the water-filled inflatable boat which has since changed its location.
Today’s invention is a set of light, transparent, hollow panels corresponding to the body panels of a particular car.
To the narrow space within each is attached an inlet pipe at the front edge and an outlet pipe from the rear edge. These are used to pump smoke through the narrow space from a central reservoir.
The smoke can be made to change colour rapidly (as happens with eg a distress flare or firework). This provides something close to programmable colouration for the vehicle.
Streaklines in the smoke flow can also create the illusion that the vehicle is travelling faster than it really is, thus adding drama to driving slowly and perhaps reducing accidents.
A friend of mine recently had a minor bike accident in which the small passenger in the child seat at the rear might have been hurt.
Fortunately, everyone was fine, but even when wearing a helmet and properly strapped in, there remains the danger that a child will automatically extend its hand(s) as the bike is toppling onto the ground.
Today’s invention is a springsteel band which is normally compressed at the back of a bike seat, as shown.
When a tilt switch is activated by the machine toppling, the band is released and forms a round spring, restrained at two points. This cushions the impact with the road and prevents any damage to extended hands.
I have wrenched my back several times getting a child into a childseat from outside a car.
Today’s invention is a childseat attachment which allows the seat to hang securely on the window frame of a car door. This lets a parent place their child in the seat without stooping and stretching.
The child is then belted into the seat and the door closed, allowing the seat to be detached, through the open window, through the very small distance onto the car seat.
The car door can then be reopened and the childseat attached to the car seat via the main belt in the usual way.
I am paranoid about the safety performance of commercial airlines (despite their being statistically safer to travel with than driving to the airport).
If there is some kind of an emergency landing required, I’d really rather not have to rely on the pilot peering out the window in the hope of making a splashdown on a calm Hudson River.
Today’s invention is to provide pilots in an emergency situation with a visual display (based eg on Google Earth) which shows the real-time best landing site (taking into account fuel load, engine conditions, terrain flatness, population density and control systems integrity).
Flying over land, this would provide a moment-to-moment visualisation of where to put down.
In a real emergency, where flight crew were unconscious, this map could talk to the autopilot landing program and increase the chances of getting down in one piece. In a real disaster, it might help the plane to crash with minimal damage on the ground.
Today’s invention is a collapsible bicycle helmet.
It consists of an outer bag with hemispherical bulges moulded into it of different sizes.
Each bulge contains an aluminium boss bonded to a rubbery base. The bosses are of slightly different sizes so that they nest conveniently together when removed from the bag and fit into it for ease of carrying eg in a pocket.
The bosses’ rubber bases make contact with the wearer’s head and are held in place by a drawstring around the base of the bag.
In an accident, the bosses sustain damage and dissipate any impact loading across a wide area of the skull.
Military vehicles often need to carry various electronic self-identification technologies on board to ensure that they are not accidentally attacked by their own side’s missiles.
Today’s invention is a simpler, less costly version of this approach, applicable to every vehicle, in which a 2-D barcode (eg QR code) is carried on a pull-out, printed panel (as flags are traditionally used).
This ensures that optically guided missiles will not engage with friendly vehicles marked in this way and it also allows the code to be almost indistinguishable (to human eyes) from the background camouflage pattern applied to the vehicle in question.
This makes it hard for enemy spies to copy the code and use it to protect their own tanks (especially since a new code panel could be printed out daily).
Modern snipers can kill people who are up to two miles away. To do this, they use some very advanced calculations to adjust their aim according to the anticipated effects of wind, humidity, altitude etc.
These influences are so great that snipers may have to aim at a point 2m to one side of their actual target.
Today’s invention is a defence mechanism against such attacks. The blue force roll out a camouflaged line of sensors B, using eg a radio controlled robot vehicle. These lie on two parallel tracks, so that the passage overhead of the shock wave of a high-velocity bullet can be detected and its direction estimated.
This information is sent wirelessly to a line of air blowers A (faster than the bullet can travel). A few of these can issue an upwards jet of air in a random direction, from underneath the passing round.
This deflection can be more than enough to cause the shot to miss with very high probability; alerting the blue force to red’s position and undermining the sniper’s confidence.
