Inventions in Everything: The Greenhouse Helmet

Air pollution. If you enjoy breathing and live in a place where airborne particulates can harm your health, you have some pretty limited options.

You could, for instance, always stay inside, counting on whatever air filtration system you have at home, your work, or your car to scrub those particulate matter from the air you breathe. If you’d like or need to be more mobile, you could wear respirators that pushes filtered air into a face mask you wear. Or you could go full astronaut or deep water diver, wearing an enclosed suit and carrying the pressurized air tanks that provide the clean air you want to breathe everywhere you go.

Frankly, few of those options can be considered fun outside of the very specific places where they are intended by their inventors to be used. Worse, probably none of them are all that good for the environment, because unless you have access to green power from fully renewable power generating resources to charge the batteries you’ll also need to carry around with you, the power you need to operate them will likely put more of the pollution you’re trying not to breathe into the air.

But what if you could use fully renewable resources that could naturally clean the air you breathe without using any power at all? Is that an invention that would be worth your while?

If you answered yes to both of these questions, inventor Waldemar Anguita has the innovation you need. Better still, he was awarded U.S. Patent 4,605,000 for his innovative Greenhouse Helmet! Here are Figures 1 through 3 of the patent so you can see his vision:

If it’s not clear from the figures, the patent’s background section explains simply what Anguita’s invention is and describes how previously patented inventions fell short of delivering what it does.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

The instant invention relates generally to enclosure devices and more specifically it relates to a greenhouse helmet that incorporates small plants into a sealed helmet to be worn over the head of a person.

Numerous enclosure devices have been provided in prior art. For example U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,903,642 and 3,995,396 are terrariums adapted to just hold plants and not designed to be worn over the head of a person, while U.S. Pat. No. 4,331,141 contains a variety of devices for protection of organs of respiration that are worn to cover the nose and mouth of a person but are not designed to contain plants within.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to find any products that deliver on Anguita’s vision, the closest being full face respirators or respiratory hard hats that are most often used in industrial applications. Meanwhile, Internet searches for terms like “helmet with plant inside” turns up helmets that have been converted into planters or the perhaps equally notable innovation of a biodegradable bike helmet that has been grown from fungi.

On the other hand, Anguita’s 1982 patent has long since expired, so what’s to stop you from making your own greenhouse helmet using the information in the patent as your guide? If you care about breathing clean air and the environment, you can make it your next DIY project!

From the Inventions in Everything Archives

The IIE team has previously covered the following innovations for providing clean air to where you can breathe it. Here’s the short list:

• Inventions in Everything: Has the Time of the Isolator Arrived?
• Inventions in Everything: PAPR Made With Truck Parts
• Inventions in Everything: The Toilet Snorkel