Kids be gone: ‘The Mosquito’ emits high-frequency sounds particularly irritating to congregations of teenagers.
American Airlines says it has barred a nearly four-year-old product called the Knee Defender that lets airline passengers keep the seats in front of them from reclining. To guard against products like the TV-B-Gone, some business owners have removed the infrared receivers from televisions in public spaces.
In some cases, however, businesses are embracing the technology: Regal Entertainment 8 announced this May that customers in 114 of its movie theatres can ask for wireless paging devices that allow them to summon ushers or managers if someone misbehaves by pressing a “disturbance” button.
More of these products are on the way. There’s an updated version of the TV-B-Gone in the works that will be powerful enough to shut off televisions from behind sheets of glass. A well-publicized British invention called “the Mosquito”, that emits high-frequency sounds particularly irritating to congregations of teenagers, is now being marketed in the US by a company called Kids Be Gone.
Several years ago, as an engineering graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Eric Paulos built a device called the “I-Bomb”which emits an electromagnetic pulse that disables all electronics in its range (a similar device was depicted in the movie Ocean’s Eleven). While Paulos says he has operated the I-Bomb only about half a dozen times in front of audiences—he considers it a work of performance art—he says he continues to get emails from would-be manufacturers and marketers and, more oddly, people who live nearby and just want to borrow it. One such message: “My neighbour is playing loud music, I just want it to stop."
Excessive honking
If Joseph Mauriello has his way, the entire island of Manhattan will soon be a quieter place, thanks to a gadget. For 20 years in New York City, the 55-year-old says he has been disgusted by all the honking. As a tour company operator who is on the street constantly, he says he often finds it hard to hear over the clamour.
Mauriello has spent three years and tens of thousands of dollars developing the “Automobile Horn Audit System”, a device that records honk stats such as time, date and duration and has a GPS component to determine where the honking occurred.
He envisions it being installed in all cars in New York so that when owners bring them in for a state inspection, the data will be sent to a central office that will be empowered to assess levies on anyone who has demonstrated a pattern of excessive honking.
After drawing up blueprints and hiring a lawyer, Mauriello is waiting for a final decision from the US patent office. He’s already looking for a corporate partner and lobbying legislators. “It’s not a matter of if this is going to be a reality,” Mauriello says, “it’s a matter of when.”
(Write to wsj@livemint.com)