The Three Inventions I Wish Existed

(Or existed at an affordable price)

Do you ever go about your day, thinking up inventions that would be really cool to have? Or would save you a lot of time?

Here are the three inventions I wish existed (or existed at a more affordable price).

The Exercise Bike Generator

I most definitely did not come up with the idea of an exercise bike generator; instead, it came from watching the news as a kid and hearing about a gym similar to this one that is powered by your workouts.

It made so much sense to me. As a kid, we got one of those tiny crank-powered flashlights and I always thought about how dumb it was to need to use your arm strength to crank it, when cycling with your legs is a much more natural motion.

The exercise bike generator is not a new concept either. Upon searching, I found that you can buy one outright for the price of $300ish CAD; this guy also wrote a blog post on how to make your own. If I had more space, I’d definitely want to create one.

Why?

It’s because it makes no sense to me to have exercise bikes that take energy but go nowhere. Sure, I’m still “producing” an outcome, namely bettering my heart health, when cycling, but something in me feels like that energy should go somewhere, y’know? And if it doesn’t take me to a destination, at least that expended energy should power my phone, or something small.

Then I could pay just under an exorbitant amount for electricity and also be incentivized to exercise on the bike. I’m just so much more engaged in exercise when I feel like it’s doing something or getting somewhere. So far, I’ve been using numbers (e.g., tracking steps), or tracking the number of days in a row I’ve done yoga, but it’s not the same.

DIY project sometime in the future? Stay tuned!

The Home Paper Recycler

I use a lot of paper at home, but keep virtually none of it. This means that a lot of it goes directly into recycling. My problem with recycling though, is that I no longer live in an apartment where I can empty my recycling bin at any point.

We have specific recycling days where we set the recycling on the curb, and it seems that it only precipitates profusely on those days. The feeling of wet recycling bins with a piece of leaf or singular remnant sticky note that didn’t make it onto the garbage truck — it makes my skin crawl.

In a parallel process, I’ve also been enamored by Etsy shops that sell handmade paper. The texture of the handmade paper is so incredible. It reminds me of being at a science fair seeing the process of papermaking take mushy pulp and turn it into the very stationery that makes my heart beat ❤

It’s actually relatively easy to make your own paper given the right tools, and I’ve always wanted to try it at home. But imagine: a machine that will do it for you.

After some searching, it seems like such a machine already exists, designed for the office landscape. Read: the machine is huge and room-sized. It would be really cool if someday, like computers, they could shrink this and we can have portable paper recyclers that fit into our homes.

The Piano Aquarium

If you think I’ve thought way too hard about the previous two inventions and how they might ideally fit into my life, wait until you hear about the hundreds of hours I’ve thought about the piano aquarium.

Luckily, I’m not the only person who has thought of the piano aquarium, and it’s often illustrated by artists who take the ordinary and bring it to live with imagination.

I “came up” with the piano aquarium in the many hours of piano I used to practice. I used to practice at least an hour each day, and up to two hours on the weekend. You can imagine that once I had the songs memorized, it could get quite boring.

As a kid, I would fill that idle brain time with imagining my keyboard as being hooked to complex steampunk machines or an aquarium, where each key that I pressed would release something. In the case of the aquarium, I imagined different kinds of exotic and imaginary fish that fed on different kinds of feed. My pressing on those buttons meant that one piece of feed would be released and those fish, in particular, would excitedly swim over to have their meal.

I’ve given this one a lot of thought. Think about it. I played piano for 9 hours a week, and wasn’t allowed to take holidays off, so that’s 468 hours a year. I played piano for 14 years before quitting. That’s almost 6552 hours!

Hi I’m Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她) and I now realize that I have a lot of idle in which I spend thinking up new inventions. I remember reading fiction as a kid that described adults losing this touch after growing up, but for some reason, it still lives within me. That’s something I’m truly grateful of, because I think this imagination bit combines practicality with creativity in a refreshing coping mechanism kind of way. ❤ 🍳 Ps, tweet me an egg gif!

Hop down the rabbit hole? 🐰🕳

^ by Julia Appa