My Inventions
and
Ideas For Future Devices
Listed below are a few but not all of my inventions and ideas, and a little about each. Although I have the patent (intellectual property) rights for these (or those that have not expired by now) I guess it’s part of my eccentricity that I have not approached industry with many of them, which makes me a bit of a stick-in-the-mud because by law nobody else can use them until my rights expire. The 3-D colour television now available works in a slightly different way to mine, my patent having been effectively circumvented, but it took them years to find a way around it. But look at the date on it! Believe it or not though, crude methods were thought of even before then.
Polarising Sunglasses With Variable Light Entry Control (UK Pat.App: P25760 Jun 17, 1975): These are quite straightforward. At the time there were some new sunglasses coming out which had light-reactive glass which darkened more as the sunlight became brighter. But the trouble was that they were both expensive and slow. In fact they could take upwards of 30 seconds to adjust to a change in light level. My invention basically consisted of 2 lenses covering each eye, (i.e. double lenses very close together), and over each eye was one horizontally plane-polarised clear (i.e not tinted) lens and one vertically plane-polarised clear lens. The outer lens over each eye could be manually rotated over the inner fixed lens, thereby varying the light passing through into the eye using the principle of a polarising filter. A single manual control could turn both outer lenses. (I also built a prototype of a pair which had a photocell connected to a small battery powered motor which would turn the outer lenses in response to changes in the light falling on the photocell. But the problem was bulk, even though most of the components could be located behind one ear). The advantages of this invention were relative cheapness, fast adjustment to a change in light levels, and that they could be used as clear spectacles too as nothing was tinted. Visually they were indistinguishable from normal clear glasses. However a drawback was that the lenses had to be circular, and although John Lennon might have bought a pair, the market was bound to be restricted. The large ones for females however were really quite attractive.
Champagne Cork For Home Winemakers (Pat. 2003): I made some home-made champagne once, and until then I never had an idea of just what the home winemaker has to go through to both gas up his wine and get rid of the yeast in the bottom of the bottle. Wine is basically made by adding sugar to a fruity liquid (choose a flavour), and then adding yeast. The little yeast bugs start eating the sugar, and break up the sugar molecule into 2 key pieces-- one piece is alcohol, the other is carbon dioxide. Well the alcohol is a liquid and just stays behind in the fermenting jar, mixed in with your fruity liquid. But the carbon dioxide is a gas, and therefore must be released or the pressure will build up and your fermenting jar will explode. That is why we have the little air locks in the top of the fermenting jars. Then, the little bugs run out of food and drop dead, their little bodies piling up on the bottom of your jar as sediment (poor things....kinda puts you off, dunnit). Then, when they're all dead, you normally syphon off the alcoholic liquid and leave the yeast sediment behind. That of course gives you a very clear, but flat, wine. But suppose you want a gassy (sparkling ) wine? That's where the problems start. You see, you can only have a sparkling wine by trapping some of the carbon dioxide in you wine bottles. This is normally done by putting a teaspoonful of sugar in the bottom each bottle when you are bottling the wine, and then corking the bottle straight away. One or two of the little yeast bugs will have survived (they're tenacious little buggers), and they'll start work on the sugar. But this time the carbon dioxide can't escape--- so your drink gasses up. Fine-- but the trouble is, that when you pop the cork, the bodies of the yeast are still in there (the sediment) ,and they cloud up the drink. And so, you can either have flat, clear wine, or gassy, cloudy wine, -- but you can't have gassy clear wine. So to get round that, somebody came up with a great idea---Make your gassy wine, with your little yeasty critters still in there making the gas, and then put the bottle upside down with a hollow cork in it. Then, when the yeast has all starved itself to death, their bodies will fall into the hollow cork. Next, freeze the bottle solid (!) and remove the cork, with the yeast sediment in it, and replace it with a new cork. Then just thaw the bottle out. Well, yeah....but....what a faff! So anyway, I just invented a durable plastic "cork" with a valve in it, so you can just make your clear, flat wine, then gas it up from an injector.
3-D Colour Television (UK Pat. P6989 Feb 23, 1976): This can be achieved by redesigning the cathode ray tube in the television so that it has 2 sets of 3 electron guns instead of the usual one set. The holes in the shadow mask on the front of the screen come in groups of 6, and not in groups of 3 as currently standard. 3 of the holes in each group (red, green, blue) point backwards to one set of electron guns, which we shall call set A, and the other 3 holes (red, green, blue) point backwards to the other set of electron guns, which we shall call set B. The object being filmed is then shot from 2 slightly different angles by 2 different cameras, and the picture from one camera goes to gun set A and the picture from the other camera goes to gun set B. There therefore appears on the screen 2 different pictures superimposed over each other, one from the one camera and one from the other. The shadow mask on the screen is constructed so that over each hole which points back to gun set A there is a tiny vertically plane-polarised colourless filter, and over each hole which points back to gun set B there is a tiny horizontally plane-polarised colorless filter. Therefore one of the 2 pictures which appears on the screen is horizontally plane-polarised and the other is vertically plane-polarised. A pair of spectacles is worn to view the screen, one lens of which is horizontally plane-polarised and the other lens of which is vertically plane-polarised. One eye of the viewer therefore receives the picture from one camera, and the other eye the picture from the other camera, thereby giving the viewer a 3-dimensional picture. In reality of course, the 2 studio cameras would be one, with 2 main lenses set at a slight angle.
Fuel-less Cigarette Lighter (UK Pat. P47355 Nov 18, 1975): This idea dates back to the early 1970s when the Arabs first started putting up the price of oil. It is a small cylindrical device which is clockwork driven and which, when a switch in the side is depressed, releases a series of powerful magnets which spin around over a solenoid and thereby generate a current in the solenoid. This current then goes to a heating element in the top of the device, like a car cigarette lighter. One complete winding of the device (by a folding-away handle in the base) is sufficient for 25 lightings.
Anti-bomb:A Simple Method Of Raising Wrecks Like The Titanic (Pat. 2000): Raising sunken ships from great depths is still a monumental task. The sea is at such an incredible pressure (very nearly 1 ton per square inch per mile of depth), that pumping out even a small wreck will require vast volumes of air. Also, the sealing up of the wreck prior to pumping her out will have to be a very thorough business, and given the state of some wrecks (notably the Bismarck and the Titanic), this would be vastly expensive. Suppose however that we were to construct a device which consists of a material with an incredibly high thermal capacity (the highest we can find), contained inside a large thermos bottle i.e. a double-walled container with a vacuum between the walls. Before encasing the material in the bottle we first dunk it in a reservoir of liquid gas (preferably helium as that is the coldest). Effectively, we now have the opposite of a bomb; when we crack it open, using a very small explosive charge, it will absorb vast amounts of heat from its immediate neighbourhood. Now it just so happens that at depths below only 300 feet the water temperature is almost freezing, as the sun never penetrates down that far. The Titanic, 2 and a half miles down, is always within a single degree C of freezing. If we were to drop one of my devices, from the surface, without any humans going anywhere near the wreck and without doing any work at all on it, then when cracked open the device would freeze the water in and around the wreck, encasing it in ice. But ice is 10% less dense than water, --and so up she would come. Further, the bottom of our artificial iceberg will be just as flat as the sea floor -- which in the abyss is very flat indeed-- and so the whole thing can then be towed into dry-dock and just set down to melt on the dry dock bottom, gently leaving the wreck just standing there. The neat thing about this idea is that it is a remotely operating, minimum effort method (no diving, no patching work, no pumping) and it is gentle. You just locate your wreck on sonar screens, and drop your devices. In principle, you could even raise a soggy, rotting, saturated old garden shed, and when the ice melted out, there it would be, just standing there in your dry dock. And your salvage men never dived an inch or even got wet. Frankly, raising ships won't get any better than this for another 300 years, until we get--if indeed we ever get--"Star Trek"- type beaming systems that can just beam them out of the water. (Further a great irony here in the case of the Titanic would be that an iceberg sank her, and an iceberg will have brought her back).
Implosion-Resistant Capacitor (Pat. 2012): A capacitor's main weakness is of course implosion. As the electrostatic charge increases between the cathode and the anode, the forces trying to move the two together are absolutely titanic. Also, to prevent the electrons accumulating on the cathode from jumping over to the anode, a highly efficient insulating material is needed. If this material is not efficient enough, then the electrons, as they gather on the cathode plate, will repel each other with such force that they will just go squidging through the insulating material to get to the anode. My invention does nothing towards solving this latter problem, but a great deal towards solving the first. Suppose we have a cake, and we slice it in the usual way, but with incredibly thin slices, all the way around until the whole cake is sliced. Then, suppose we replace every third slice with electrically insulating material, and every third slice on the clockwise side of that with a cathode plate, and every third slice on the anti-clockwise side of the insulating material with an anode plate. So we now have, as we count around the cake clockwise, anode, insulator, cathode, anode, insulator, cathode, etc...all the way around. Now let's drill a hole through the centre of the cake so that the cathodes and anodes are not touching. Then connect together all the anodes, and connect together all the cathodes. It should be possible to charge this arrangement to very high voltages indeed, because on each side of a cathode there is an anode, and on each side of an anode there is a cathode. So each cathode is pulled equally in both directions, thus neutralising the force upon it, and each anode is likewise pulled in both directions, again neutralising the force upon it. On this capacitor the only weakness now remaining is the strength of the insulating material. Regrettably however, I do not have a better one of these than anyone else.
Electric Rocket (Pat. pending 2023): You know, the problem with ordinary chemically propelled rockets is that the fuel, by nuclear standards or by the general physical standards of the ability of matter to contain energy, is very weak and wishy-washy. That's why the old Saturn-5 moon rocket was 90-odd percent fuel and was down to only 4 per cent of its launch weight before it had even reached earth orbit. But...that's next to nowhere. Wouldn't it be nice therefore if in the side of every moon rocket as it just stood there on the pad, there was a magic dial which you could use to turn up the energy of the fuel, without increasing the mass!! Let's imagine a tall rocket standing there on its launching pad. But the main cylindrical body of this rocket is just a huge example of one of my implosion resistant capacitors, charged to millions of volts, (there's a dial on the side, marked off in volts), and the fuel is a relatively small amount of liquid hydrogen and lox. To run the rocket, the capacitor is discharged through a large resistor and the current is corona-discharged through a spiky cathode pointing straight at a flat anode across the top of the combustion chamber. Down through this comes the gas, so that the exhaust of the rocket is very greatly energised by its being bombarded by the electron beam flowing from cathode to anode. Of course, this gas cannot now be allowed to touch the sides of the exhaust nozzle (this is another drawback to conventional rockets-- the exhaust velocity of the gas is a function of its temperature, but we are limited there by the melting point of the nozzle), and so a solenoid has to be wrapped around the nozzle and a powerful field applied to keep the gas away from the sides. The equations are very encouraging. One of my implosion-resistant capacitors charged to a million volts and with a capacitance of 200 farad (you can get 1 farad from about 40 square metres of conducting surface) would, if 100% efficient, propel a 100 ton ship in free space to 44 miles a second. But it doesn't end there-- if you were getting a bit short of fuel, you could land on the moon and use just about anything (some inert gas driven out of the rocks by heating) as fuel. It wouldn't have to chemically (exothermically) combust; just the kinetic energy of the gas particles by virtue of the bombardment by the electron beam would be enough to get you home. And if it was electrical charge you were running out of, you could recharge to a basic emergency level just from solar panels. The only drawback in building this rocket will be finding an insulator to go between the plates of the capacitor which is efficient enough to stop the current from the negative plates shooting straight through to the positive ones (see "Merlin's Implosion-resistant capacitor" above).
Solid-State Flying Machines With No Wings, Rotors Or Moving Parts (Except A Gyroscope) (Pat. 1988): The only reason aircraft have always had wings is because a lack of independent imagination led the first pioneers to blindly copy birds. At least Leonardo da Vinci didn't go for that; he designed the very first helicopter in the 1400's, but alas he never actually built it. I really don't buy it either. There are other ways of flying... Did you see the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"? In that movie, there were portrayed a number of luminous flying objects, of all manner of geometrical shapes, tumbling end over end as they flew around, and seemingly having no moving parts. Well...me being me... I kind of got to thinking. Imagine a rectangular block, and over the entire surface area of the block there are electron guns facing outwards. Now suppose we fire the guns on the upper surface only, of the block. What will happen? Well, if the guns are powerful enough, they will destroy the air just above the surface and thereby at least partially neutralise its ability to exert pressure. Meanwhile, underneath the block, we have 15 pounds of air pressure pressing on every square inch of the under surface. Oh wow-- it flies skywards like a Trident missile!! The sums are quite staggering actually-- if the block is only 2 metres by 1.5 metres by say 1 metre, and laying on its biggest side, the maximum upward force will be over 30 tons! And we don't need to streamline it either, as it is always moving into a vacuum. So we can build them whatever shape we like. Now, all we need is an internal gyroscope which always knows which way is up, and then we can also rotate the craft as it flies, or put it into any state of motion we like, telling the gyros to always fire the upward-facing guns only. Maybe mount a few bright lights on it too, just like in the movie. Magic? Nah--- just old Nutty up to his tricks again.
Musical Chord Transposer (UK Pat. 9300574.2 Jan 13 1993): You know, I couldn't sing to save my life. I yodel, intermittently like a radio with a dodgy ariel connection, even if I try to sing a constant tone. I play the guitar though, even though Mr. Spock might say, "Its music Jim, but not as we know it". And like all guitarists I am always coming up against the perennial problem of knowing the chord sequence for a particular song but not being able to sing in that key. So on goes the old capo, but my voice range is so crap that I'm too high with the capo on one fret and too low with it on the next fret. So I invented a device which takes one chord sequence for a song, and transposes it into another sequence for the same song, to give a much greater choice. (With a bit of luck there'll be one I can sing). It consists of a series of discs each threaded one above the other on a single spindle.Around the edge of each disc is marked the same musical scale (Aflat,A, Bflat, B, C, Dflat, D, Eflat,E, F, Gflat, and G). All you do is turn each disc relative to its neighbour until the chord sequence for the song reads down the column of discs parallel to the central axis. When this is so, then all around the device the vertical sequences will then read the same song, either in a higher key or a lower one. The whole device is made quite small, so that it can be attached to the guitar head. But of course it will work with any instrument.
Thermonuclear Fusion Reactor ( A New Type) (Pat. 2017): There exists in physics a particularly glittering prize. This is the realisation of the dream of fusing hydrogen into helium, just like in the sun, with a massive release of energy, using just plain ordinary seawater as the source of the hydrogen. It's quite a dream-- the reaction is "clean", not like the dirty reactions used in today's nuclear power stations, and just one gallon of seawater will provide the energy of a nuclear bomb, enough to power a whole city for decades. However, the problem over the last 40 years has been in raising the temperature of the hydrogen high enough for fusion to begin. The required temperature is over 100 million degrees C, --using apparatus with a melting point no higher than 3300 degrees C (the melting point of the most thermally resistant material we know of). Naturally it has proved essential to keep the hot hydrogen from making any contact with the apparatus, and this is achieved by holding the ionised hydrogen in a ring-shaped magnetic field which goes around the centre of a doughnut- shaped container called a torus. However this system can be very unstable and the plasma frequently touches the sides of the torus. The field is created a powerful electric current flowing through wires wrapped around the torus and the energy from the fusing gas would be absorbed into the walls and carried away by having a fluid flowing through hollow wires. However a problem with this arrangement is that the hydrogen atoms, all being positively charged, flow around the torus in the same direction. But for fusion to occur, they have to collide with each other at a high enough relative velocity to overcome the electrostatic repulsion between them. Imagine two buses speeding round a roundabout, and for some strange reason they need to collide with each other at 2mph (relative velocity) in order to stick together. If they both go the same way round the roundabout, and there is only the tiniest random percentage difference in their speeds, then they might have to travel at something like 1000 and 1002 mph respectively before the back one crashes into the front one at the required 2 mph. But suppose, just suppose, that they could be made to go round the roundabout in opposite directions. Then, each would only have to travel at not 1000 mph, but only 1 mph to achieve the necessary relative speed in a head-on collision-- a much smaller energy level. My apparatus does that. Instead of a torus, imagine a hollow, evacuated football-sized tungsten sphere. Now get a marker pen, and mark on the sphere the position of the "north" and "south" poles. Call them Y-Y' . Then, around the equator of the sphere, mark 2 places opposite each other so that a line joining them goes through the centre of the sphere. Call those 2 points X-X' . Next, still around the equator, mark 2 more opposing points, so that a line joining them goes through the centre of the sphere and is also at 90 degrees to the line joining X and X' . Call those points Z-Z'. Now, taking Y-Y' as the poles of the sphere, wrap a single insulated wire repeatedly around the sphere so that the wire traces every line of longitude around the sphere and repeatedly crosses itself at each pole. The sphere is now covered with wire, and there are many overlaps at each pole. Call that Solenoid Y. Now tilt the sphere so that X-X' are now the poles, and repeat the process with a second insulated wire. Call that Solenoid X. Then repeat a final time with Z-Z' as the poles, and thereby obtain Solenoid Z. You now have 3 seperate solenoids, whose central axes define the 3 cartesian dimensions X, Y and Z, all at right angles to each other. Now design an extremely high frequency oscillator, which pushes an immense current first through Solenoid X alone, then through Solenoid Y alone, then through Solenoid Z alone, before constantly repeating the process a million million times each second. If deuterium gas (an isotope of hydrogen with a relatively low fusion temperature) is introduced into the sphere, then the activation of the first solenoid will flatten the gas into a disc, the activation of the second solenoid will flatten the disc into a diameter-line, and the activation of the third solenoid will push the line in from both ends to become just a point at the centre of the sphere. Of course, each time a particular solenoid is switched off, (there is only one switched on at any time) the gas will try to move back again to where that solenoid pushed it from,-- but the oscillator frequency will be so high that the gas will hardly be able to move at all before that solenoid switches on again. The gas will therefore be contained in a small point at the centre of the sphere. But within that point, chaos theory will have taken over to the extent that the atoms will be moving in all directions, much like the balls in a National Lottery machine, ---and may collide head on. Very much smaller overall energy levels will therefore suffice to effect fusion, and also there will be no destabilising effects within the magnetic field as there are inside a torus, as with my arrangement we have all 3 dimensions (=degrees of freedom) covered with stabilising fields, so that the plasma gets battened back down whichever direction it tries to escape in. I first thought of this 35 years ago while making a snowball when I was 14. Patting the snow in my hands, first top-bottom, then side-side, then front-back, thinking how fusion would begin in the centre if only I could ever pat hard enough, and if when you pat at the top it bulges out at the side,--then pat fast!! The model is also of course a miniature sun, magnetic forces taking the place of the sun's inwardly applied gravity to contain the hydrogen. Though I say it myself, the more you think about this neat little idea, the more the conventional torus seems a bit dodgy stability-wise.
Possible drawback: If we want a ball of burning hydrogen 1 centimetre across in the centre of our sphere, (and at that temperature believe me you won't want one much bigger than that) then the oscillator frequency will need to be about 3 gigahertz. This is routine in electronics, but there may be some problems with the frequency response of some of the heavy duty hardware notably the current amplifiers and the large capacitors. A solution would be to immerse these in large volumes of liquid helium, but a large supporting liquefaction plant would be necessary to re-liquefy this gas at the same rate that it was being evaporated.
Recovering voices trapped in paintings, and ancient sound and images absorbed into walls. This idea is already covered on one of my Richard III pages, in my essay there entitled "When Walls have Ears And Paintings Talk".
Raising
the dead (out of ordinary graves; not necessarily from liquid-nitrogen-preserved
remains): Even if a corpse is in a particularly
dilapidated condition, it should be possible to design a (very large) family of
molecules each of which serves a threefold function: (1) To locate a particular
sequence of DNA in any broken strand in the corpse and repair it by means of
patch attachments, (2) to replicate its own self thereby creating more molecules
to do the same job, and (3) to self-destruct after a certain period. This large
family of molecules will consist of one molecule for each possible
breach-combination for the broken human DNA bases. The molecules will also
contain iron atoms so that powerful electro magnets, one at the head of the
corpse and one at the foot, can draw the molecules slowly from one end of the
corpse to the other as they do their work. The architectural genes may be
assisted in doing their reconstruction work by also immersing the corpse in a
suitable amniotic-type fluid while all this is going on, and this may be
regulated by mitochondritic DNA from a close relative of the corpse in its
female line of descent. Raw materials must be injected into the corpse for the
molecules to draw upon. When the body is repaired to a workable standard, and
the chest-electrodes are then used to revive the person, we know that the person
must wake up (i.e. there is no immortal soul whose absence precludes this-- see "Why
Christianity Is Wrong-- And How Souls Can't Exist"). However, if the
person's memory storage mechanism (this is a physical mechanism with parallels
in computer memory technology and it survives freezing very well) has not
survived the decay process then the revived person will have no memories and
will not know who s/he is. In this event the whole exercise will be effectively
pointless; after all, if one wishes to create a new human being with a
"clean slate" then they might as well go upstairs with their partner
and do this in the time-honoured manner. Once again though, living as you are in
this particular period in history, (with technology on an increasing hyperbola),
rather than at some point in the remote past, it does appeal to the common sense
to keep yourself (both before and after death) in as good a physical condition
as possible. For example in the next two centuries countless thousands or even
millions of whole new earth-type planets will be discovered, each with a surface
area the size of our entire world's, and there will be a very desperate shortage
of human beings-- at the very time that technology will be able to do the above.
There will not be time to wait for new babies to grow up if the ability to
occupy these places (before rival nations or companies do) is to keep pace with
their rate of discovery. If at that stage the above process can be carried out,
then someone is bound to do it if it constitutes an advantage to them.
(When? Not very soon).
Sleep well !!