I thought of this one after a boat I had fished with was lost at sea: A GPS-emergecy transmitter used to prevent an emergency rather than resolve it after it has happened. Each fishing vessel/aircraft would have a computer that would send a signal to a station(via satellite or by radio)once a minute(+/-) that would track the vessel’s position. So if the vessel is ever lost, rescuers know the precise location at which to find them or salvage the ship.
A wingnut drill attachment: I worked with crates that were fastened with 1/4-20 wingnuts. I made one out of aluminum and it would always get beat to hell and I would have to make another but it took seconds to make and saved alot of time. It was good for tightening down wingnuts before shipping or removing stubborn ones.
A remote-controlled rollerskate: I attempted it when I was six.
I don’t know anything about Krispy Kreme (it sounds un-Canadian anyway), but one highlight of the PNE every summer in Vancouver is Those Little Donuts. Donuts about the size of the circle you make with your thumb and finger popping hot out of a machine the size of your monitor.
You get to watch the batter plop into the oil, go floating down a little ramp, get flipped over when half done, it continues around the little conveyor belt, then scoots out when done.
Delicious!
And the intercoms exist for Motorcycle riders-- they fit just as well under a bike helmet.
Hey Yersinia Pestis I had almost the same idea, instead of going cross country I was thinking cross town would be so much more fun for the early morning commute.
Another idea (really stupid but fun) would be mock-vegitarian food. I’m not talking about tofu-beef I’m talking about mock-vegitables made of meat! Order a big-ole’ steak with a side of potatoes made out of pork, and a side of corn made of chicken…Yum Yum I think this resturant would last about 3 seconds in real life but I’d have fun.
With my amazingly cool microwave potato baker thing, I can bake a tater in the microwave in 3-4 minutes, all the way through, and with no annoying hard, flat spot on the bottom.
Sometimes, fooling around in the kitchen pays off.
How about vending machines that dispense peel and eat shrimp. They’d work sorta like a coffee machine - it would drop a paper cup and fill it to the top with shrimp.
Last week my dog tore a seven inch gash straight down my shin with her Claws from Hell, and trying to cover that up with band-aids was useless. So, I thought to myself, “Hey Self, how cool would band-aids on a roll be? You’d just tear off a band-aid the size of your ouchie!” My family didn’t go for it, but I’m still kinda trying to figure out a way to make it work. It seemed easy enough at first, but I have no idea how to go about making a prototype. sigh My first million-dollar idea bites the dust.
For my conculture Shrislyaria’s capital city Klesenja, much of whose public transit takes place on water, I invented a system that would permit the ferry’s loading docks to float up and down based on tides.
For my own city’s public transit, which is in desperate need of a wheelchair-accessible metro system, I made a list of which stations could be made accessible just by installing ramps; for the other ones, pending installation of more permanent facilities, I came up with a block-shaped apparatus which could be placed on an escalator to adapt it for use by a person in a wheelchair.
When I was in junior high, I participated in Invent America. My invention was the “Hydrotemp” (yeah, yeah, I know–I was only in 7th grade, though.) This was a device that would hook on to an existing faucet and flash the temperature of the water onto a digital display. This was so that you didn’t have to stick your fingers under the faucet and possibly accidentally burn yourself (I lived in an old house with unreliable water pressure at the time.) I really played up the safety angle of my product, and drew pictures and and made a display and everything. I lost to a girl who invented a game about the solar system. It was cool enough, but she forgot one of the planets on her game board! (I was told later that I was docked for not having a model, preferably working. Yeah, OK. That’s why the simpler ideas always seemed to win.) I was so bummed about that that I couldn’t come up with anything new for the next year. Later on, I heard about the shower-temperature setter, and I was bummed that I hadn’t taken my idea a little further and come up with that.
I don’t feel so bad about it now, though. I’d heard that Invent America ran into some sort of trouble and that most of the winners never received their prizes. They must have gotten things straightened out, though–a Google search revealed that the program still exists, and I couldn’t find any information on any past troubles.
It seemed that every year, some kid in my school would come up with “ethnic” band-aids in different skin tones. (We lived in about the whitest area imagineable, too. Maybe they actually sold them in other places and we’d just never seen them!) I think the clear ones solve that problem much better.
It’s worse than that shannybonanny, because Elastoplast already makes band-aids on a roll. If you can’t find it at your local pharmacy, talk to a doctor or emergency room.
I had thought of an automated cooking device, based on the principle of the bread machines. You put the raw materials into a hopper, slide a diskette into the machine, and it uses the instructions in the diskette to cook the dish inside the hopper. You could even have different kinds of hoppers with different functions: some would have stirring blades for sauteeing, some might have beaters for whipping, some would even have a mechanism for flipping a steak. I eventually dismissed this idea as being far too complex to manufacture, but I wonder whether there isn’t a market for such a device. After all, people are soooo busy these days, and the thought of freshly cooked meals with little effort is appealing.
The other idea I had was a foot scrubber. Imagine a small tub with a partition and two chambers, into which you can stick your feet (if you have more than two feet, this might not work ). Inside the chambers are sets of brushes and an alcohol-based solution (with some essential fragrances). Turn the machine on, and the brushes whirl, cleaning your feet all over and making them feel refreshed. I’d use an alcohol-based solution because the whirling would turn any soap-based solution into an unmanageable pile of suds. I do believe this is a marketable product, but I don’t have the mechanical know-how to create such an item. If anyone out there would like to try, I’d be willing to fund such an effort for a piece of the action…
I think this resturant would last about 3 seconds in real life but I’d have fun.