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So, the last entry I wrote up won my office's "WTF Patent of the month" contest. It would be more correctly call "WTF Patent of the tri-month" considering how often it usually happens. Much like this blog shouldn't be called "Updated Weekly". But amongst other entries, it won against this, US 2,731,808, entitled "Refrigerated Clothing" and that is stiff competition. Prize for winning was a Starbucks gift card so you can imagine it was one of the greatest days of my life. And to think my mom said "Don't get into engineering. It'll never pay."
More to the point is this suit of armor to the right. It's basically a heat exchanger powered by dry ice strapped on the back of a heavy jacket. The fabric is layered to conduct sublimating CO2 from dry ice down along the body (because cold air sinks). From here, it either falls out the bottom (shown to the right) or will be sufficiently warmed that it will naturally rise back out the outer layer (shown in the image below). Personally I have doubts that it would be warm enough to circulate by natural convection like that, but that's hardly the most important part.
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That part involves the helmet you can have (shown left) and if you click to enlarge the image it will open in the same window because I can't figure out how to make it open up in a new one thank you very much Google "Blogger" agh! Does anyone reading this happen to know?
...sorry about that. Where was I? You can add a helmet that needs a pressure relief valve on the top of it. The valve makes sense if you understand what dry ice does in a closed container and room temperature. But the consequences are so ridiculous that I can hardly believe it. He is suggesting that we strap on a jacket with multiple layers of heavy & stiff insulation, a backpack full of dry ice, and a helmet that every few minutes pops up to release a burst of fog. And it would probably be a decent cloud of fog. It sounds like something out of a Terry Gilliam movie, like Brazil or Time Bandits. Actually now that I think about it, it's more 12 Monkeys than anything.
But here's the most important thing: Enclosing someone's face, or even flowing modest amounts of CO2 past their face for an extended period of time is really obviously a bad idea. Like "it will kill you" level of bad ideas. Add a heavy pack to the strain of getting enough oxygen and you're setting yourself up for a party. That's of course assuming the backpack doesn't explode, or at least spring a violent leak if the pressure relief valve fails.
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There are some descriptions of the helmet and relief valve to the left along with a description of the drip pipe for condensation. I actually think I laughed out loud (or "lol'ed" for you hip kids out there in Internetland) when I read that.
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To the right is a description of the "apparatus" which is an exceedingly common word in patents. But it never seemed quite as appropriate as it does for this.
Simply hilarious.
