Eye spy... my perfect invention

Before going on to list my perfect invention, I should mention that I was so excited when I read this week's topic. My dad is a bit of an inventor, and many of my favourite childhood memories are of helping dad with his wacky inventions. The word "invention" conjures up so many hilarious family memories for me. My dad would always make a grand announcement over dinner that he had just come up with a new, amazing invention... and then a few weeks after that we'd always discover that his inventions had already been invented... and usually 10x less elaborate than his. But that never stopped him. My dad was, I think, the only person who was completely in his element during the 1998 Esso Longford gas explosion: he spent the entire two weeks coming up with new ways to heat water for our showers (like buying 50 m of black piping and leaving it on the roof filled with water, for some real "solar hot water"). I was always the guinea pig for his new shower inventions... and it resulted in me having many cold showers!

My dad loves to modify things too and he loves a good bargain. Recently he was after a paper shredder, but didn't want to spend $45 on an electric paper shredder when he could spend just $15 on a manual, hand crank one. Within 15 minutes of him manually shredding paper he was tired of turning the handle and was coming up ways to make it go faster. He made an elaborate attachment so he could fit his power drill (set to ~200 RPM) onto the handle pulled the trigger. It worked great... for about 20 seconds. And then the shredder cracked. And he ended up having to buy the $45 electric shredder.

So... anyway... being my father's daughter, I do like a bit of inventing too. I guess that's how I ended up in science. I have no trouble coming up with hundreds of new, cool and exciting medical inventions. However today as I sit here, just having come back from a weekend long karate training event with a big full of stinky clothes and no motivation, the idea that comes to mind for my perfect invention is a bit closer to home. It involves a device where I could put all of my clothes:

• It would automatically sorts between clean/'worn once but still ok' and dirty clothes (perhaps via some sort of chemical detection for armpit odours?)
• It would sort between white/coloured/dark coloured clothes (colour detection)
  
• It would puts them in the washing machine and selects the appropriate setting (cold for those clothes that shrink, like my karate uniform)
• It would then dry them appropriately (again, cooler settings for shrink-prone clothes)
  
• It would fold my clothes and place them neatly in a basket. Ultimately it would sort between the folded clothes into three piles: pants, tops and underwear.

This Whirlpool Ultimate Care washing machine is not ultimate enough!


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