Fast Fiction

When I was a kid I invented a few things.

One of them was noise cancelling technology. Okay, I never built a prototype or anything, but I made some pictures. This invention came in 9th grade after a science lab where we took long springs out into the hallway and created waveforms by having one student hold one end and wiggle it and another student hold the other end. Many of us quickly saw that you could cancel out your partners wave by creating an equal and opposite one.

I mulled it over and then told the teacher several days later that it would be possible to create a machine that would create equal and opposite sound waves to effectively dampen loud noises. These machines would be installed on cars, jackhammers and pile drivers.

My invention became noise cancelling headphones, of which I own a pair, and paid retail and received no royalties from Bose or Sony. I still think that masking the noise at the source is a better idea.

I didn’t get any extra credit for this. I don’t even think I got an A in the class.

Later in Advanced Bio in my senior year we studied bacteriophages, which are a kind of virus. They’re pretty cool, and the picture in our textbook showed that they looked like the Apollo Lunar Lander. A little module with some legs sticking off of it. The bacteriophage would land on a bacteria and then insert its genetic core and then take over the bacteria as an incubation unit until it would finally burst with new bacteriophages.

I suggested later in class that this could be used to fight diseases, since the bacteriophage was so specific to killing only bacteria (and not human cells) that we could just inject into people and let them keep us clean. It was pointed out that the bacteriophages are usually pretty targeted and not a broad-spectrum antibiotic like I hoped. Then I suggested that they could be used as a disinfectant, in tablet form for drinking water in places like Africa with chronic water contamination problems. But the teacher kind of moved on from there to the next class assignment. (Our textbook and the books in our library did not reveal to me the degree to which bacteriophages were being examined for these same purposes, so I can still say I got the idea in a vaccum. If nothing else, it might make a good basis for a SciFi movie.)

But here it is, 2006 and the FDA has actually approved the use of bacteriophages to fight listeria on lunchmeats.

Oh, my other invention was a low-sodium celery. My grandmother was on a low-sodium diet and couldn’t eat celery. So I came up with a way to use reverse osmosis to draw the excessive sodium out of the celery before market. I couldn’t guarantee that the taste would be the same though.

Of course I probably had some other wacky ideas which were not only no good, but probably so poorly conceived that I no longer remember them. Until they become practical and profitable, of course.