Monday, August 13, 2007

Inventions week - Day 1

In honour of the well-known Simpsons episode where Homer attempts to emulate Thomas Edison, I have decided to spend the week developing my own inventions. Here's some ideas for starters:

  • Panty-pads for men. Why should women be the only people to have comfort and confidence all month long? Men want to go roller-blading in the park without any embarrassing stains as well.
  • Golf-course pulleys. Have you seen all the effort expended on golf courses to carry or pull a heavy bag of golf-clubs around the course? This is all quite needless. There should be a system of ropes criss-crossing each fairway. You simply hook your golf-bag onto one of the ropes, and, via a remote-control Bluetooth system, it is winched down the fairway alongside you. A bit like a ski-lift, but for golf-bags.
  • Dark bulbs. Thomas Edison famously didn't invent the light bulb, but he also failed to invent the dark bulb. There are many situations during the daylight hours when there is simply too much light. In such circumstances, it would be extremely helpful to simply switch on a dark bulb. These are made out of lithium flouride crystals with a negative coefficient of opacity. Such crystals are not merely opaque to the passage of light, they positively suck light out of the surrounding space.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

love your dark bulb, could you do something about this rain?

Gordon McCabe said...

All you need to do is raise the temperature of the atmosphere above the boiling point of water, all the way up to the stratosphere, and you simply can't have any rain.

Alternatively, we could stop the droplets of condensed water from dropping with a large-scale anti-graviton field.

Jo said...

How about a noise bulb? The world is way too bright and too noisy!

Gordon McCabe said...

A silence bulb, then? Someone else beat me to that one a few years back. You detect the incoming sound waves, and throw out a pattern of sound 180 degrees out of phase with the incoming signal, so that the two exactly cancel.