In this issue we look at a couple of smart new ideas, and you have to wonder if these are genuinely new? The concept of using thrusters to power a trawl through the water, almost turning the fishing gear into an undersea drone, looks like it could be a reality.
There are plenty of great ideas that have waited a long time to finally be ready to come into their own. I recall seeing something similar to the thruster concept a good few years ago in a book published half a century ago, when the authors of that particular paper foresaw an array of tiny nuclear reactors powering fishing gear through the sea.
It took developments in the offshore sector to make this a real possibility, and the technology around the fishing industry is littered with very smart ideas waiting to become workable, often borrowing existing technical advances from other industries.
Who would have thought that ceramics could be used to make your oilskins last longer?
The fishfinders everyone relies on today were originally military technology developed to hunt submarines.
Pelagic trawling was an idea that had long been foreseen, but needed developments in fibre and electronic technologies before it could work.
Is there genuinely anything new under the sun? The answer is that something truly new and innovative is a rarity that only comes along a few times in a generation.
The genius often lies in seeing the possibilities in something that can be adapted, or in the ideas that have been there on the shelf for years – just waiting for the technology to catch up with the inventor’s imagination and vision.