Category:
Inventions
From
Popular Science,
March 1940:
Slipped over the head, a bag of cellulose tissue designed for use in skiing and other outdoor sports offers protection for the face without interfering with vision. The transparent mask can also be used as a shower cap, an apron, a tray cover, and a turban, the makers say.
Maybe it didn't interfere with vision, but the interfering with breathing probably posed a problem.
Hugmachine.org offers complete instructions on how to build your very own, low-cost hug machine. For those times when you need to feel the comforting press of two mattresses around you.
The Hug Machine was invented by Temple Grandin as a way to treat her autism. From
Wikipedia:
The idea for the hug machine was devised during a visit to her aunt's Colorado ranch, where she noted the way cattle were vaccinated while confined in a squeeze chute, and how some of the cattle immediately calmed down after pressure was administered. She realized the deep pressure from the chute had a calming effect, and decided that might well settle down her own hypersensitivity. Whereas psychologists at her high school sought to confiscate her prototype hug machine, her science teacher encouraged her to determine just why it helped resolve her anxiety and sensory issues.
It's not a bad idea, though it has no chance of ever becoming widely adopted. Inventor Paolo Bizziocchi proposes that it would be easier to read text if it were sloped downhill from left to right, so that each new line would be at the same height as the line just finished. This would allow "a quick-reading without mistakes and delays whatsoever."
Bizziocchi
filed a patent that includes this helpful illustration:
What I don't understand is how this was patentable. People have been writing with lines at all kinds of crazy angles ever since writing was invented.
A Belgian company has
filed a patent for an invention designed to detect sick travelers in airports. They call it a device for the "RECOGNITION AND LOCALISATION OF PATHOLOGIC ANIMAL AND HUMAN SOUNDS."
The idea is to place microphones around airports that will zero in on the sound of people coughing. The people hacking their lungs out can then be prevented from boarding a plane. A less controversial use of the technology is to detect sick pigs in pig pens.
Can people be stopped from traveling because they have a cold? I've never seen that done, but I'd like it (despite the inconvenience to the sick people) 'cause otherwise they infect everyone else on the plane. Though of course, if I were the one kicked off a plane I'd be seeing red. (via
New Scientist)
The Burp Gas Filtering Device:
Patent No. 7070638, issued July 4, 2006. It serves two functions in one. You can deodorize your burp, and if your dinner companion needs a pen to sign the check, you'll have one to offer.
Burp or eructation odors have been a source of annoyance or concern in polite society for hundreds of years. Far too often, the foods that we love most cause us to belch. To the person who is belching, the odor may be a trifling annoyance, especially if the burp was the result of an enjoyable meal. However, for persons in the close vicinity of the burp, the burp is simply an unpleasant odor of someone else's partially digested food. Many people wish to eliminate the burp odor so as to avoid offending others...
The burp filtering device has the body of a writing pen, with an intake port at the upper end of the body, a plurality of exhaust ports adjacent the writing tip and a filter disposed within the body. The filter may be made of activated charcoal or other media for filtering and adsorbing or absorbing eructation odors. In use, the user holds the upper end of the pny body to his lips, releases the suppressed burp and the filtered, deodorized gas is exhausted through the ports at the writing tip...
Still another object of the invention is to provide a device for eliminating burp odors that also serves as a writing instrument.
Patent No. 1265580, issued May 1918:
Be it known that I, Michael Zofchak, a citizen of the United States, residing at Pittsburg, in the county of Allegheny and State of Pennsylvania, have invented new and useful Improvements in Animal Life-Preservers, of which the following is a specification.
This invention relates to life preservers, and more especially it is intended for quick application to a draft horse, pack mule, or other animal which is carrying war supplies and which may possibly be a cavalry horse, so that when a stream or river is reached the animal can swim across with his load and possibly with his driver and the necessity for building a bridge is avoided.
Let's take a moment to remember Thor Bjørklund, the Norwegian inventor of the cheese slicer. From
Wikipedia:
He was annoyed that he could not get slices as thin as he wanted when he sliced cheese with a knife. Therefore in Lillehammer he began to experiment with a plane in the hope that he could create something similar for use in the kitchen. He succeeded.
And on this day, in 1925, he received a patent for the cheese slicer. According to
blather.net, "27 February ever since has been celebrated as
osteskorperdagen, 'cheese-parings day', the biggest holiday in the Norwegian calendar, when everyone gorges themselves on thin slices of cheese in the cold, icy streets."
Sounds to me like a good way to spend the day.
Image from
modernmechanix.com. Text from the
Salt Lake Tribune, Dec 10, 1939:
A Machine to Cure Headaches
Sufferers from chronic headaches may be interested in the contrivance pictured herewith. The inventor calls it a mechanical chiropractor and he says that through its use it is possible to find relief from headaches, poor circulation and indigestion.
The machine is somewhat complicated but it is said to put a patient through a course of exercises as vigorous as those employed by a skilled chiropractor. It is said to also correct curvature of the spine, weakness and many other ailments in the treatment of which the average chiropractor specializes.
In 1916 Albert Bacon Pratt of Lyndon, Vermont was issued
patent No. 1183492 for a "gun adapted to be mounted on and fired from the head of the marksman." The wearer fired the gun by blowing into a tube. Most of Pratt's patent application is fairly dry and technical, but here he offers his thoughts on some of the advantages of his invention:
The weapon described has many advantages. The gun is automatically aimed unconsciously and incidentally to the turning of the head of the marksman in the direction of the target. In self-protection, one immediately, instinctively turns the head in the direction of attack to see the enemy, or, in hunting, toward any sound made by nearby game. Thus the gun is automatically directed toward the mark in the course of the first instinctive movement. With the gun thus aimed, the only further operation necessary to fire the same is to blow through the tube and thereby expand the bulb and operate the trigger. This is accomplished entirely from the head of the marksman, leaving his hands and feet free further to defend himself or for other purposes as desired. Under some circumstances the gun can be fired not only without the use of the hands and feet, but also without the use of the eyes of the marksman. For example, in hunting at night if an animal made a sound in underbrush, the head of the marksman would be instinctively turned in the direction of the sound and then the gun would be fired, without the use of the eyes of the marksman.
Pratt then points out that his invention is useful not only in combat, but also in the kitchen:
The crown section of the helmet when detached from the base of the helmet may be inverted and used as a cooking utensil, the elongated hood projecting therefrom for protecting the barrel of the gun serving as the handle therefor.
Pratt claimed he had solved the problem of recoil:
The "blow-back" causes the breech-bolt to retreat and automatically cock the hammer, but the strong spring back of the breech-bolt forces the same so quickly forward again following the recoil, that the two movements naturalize one another so promptly that no discomfort to the wearer results from the recoil.
But I suspect he didn't have all the bugs ironed out, which must be why such a useful invention never caught on.
Remember that picture of a "hands-free cell phone" that circulated around for years?
I couldn't help but think of it when I saw the
"Cell-Mate" hands-free device being sold by Laser Products Industries. Seriously, why not just use a rubber band? It would be a lot cheaper.