Put Down That Phone and Focus on Driving Like a Maniac
When Edwin Cotswald saw a report on the evening news about how drivers distracted by talking on their cell phones added 10 percent to the length of everyone’s commute, he couldn’t wait to get into his laboratory and get to work.
“I saw it on the eleven o’clock news and I was in bed,” the noted Baltimore inventor and entrepreneur recalled. “I tossed and turned all night because I was seized with this idea and I just knew, really knew, it would be a home run.”
That restless night lead to the Babble Zapper, a device similar to a television remote control. Drivers caught in slow-moving traffic point the Babble Zap at a nearby car where the driver is talking on a cell phone. They press a button, just as if they were changing channels on a television.
The result is instantaneous: The offending driver is dealt a stinging electrical shock — similar to being hit by a cattle prod — and the cell phone is incapacitated.
“The first time I took the prototype for a test run was on the Spring Brook Parkway during morning rush hour,” Cotswald recalled. “Here was this guy in front of me yakking away and driving slower than everyone else. I pointed Babble Zap through my windshield and hit the button. “Wow! He just about jumped through the roof. Best of all, he dropped the phone.”
Cotswald said he trailed the chastened driver all the way to a parking garage in the Harbor district to see what happened.
“He didn’t pick up the phone during the rest of his commute, not once,” he said. “Best of all, he started driving faster, acting like any normal commuter. He was weaving in and out of traffic, honking his horn, driving over the speed limit whenever he could and really tailgating people. He’d become a maniac commuter and I thought, ‘Great!’”
Following that success, Cotswald recruited a dozen Spring Brook Parkway commuters and equipped them with Babble Zapper prototypes. The testers reported similar results — drivers slowing down the commute instantly become aggressive maniacs when they were babble-zapped.
Cotswald’s Babble Zapper is similar to the remote control devices that some people carry into bars and restaurants to turn off television sets that are adding to the noise clutter of the room.
Just as use of the television silencers have stirred controversy in bars and restaurants, Cotswald is cognizant that the Babble Zapper could create an angry hornets’ nest of commuters who either love the device or detest it.
“So far, I’m keeping a low profile and just testing Babble Zapper,” he said. “I’m studying how to get public officials to support Babble Zapper, things like that.”
The inventor likens the Babble Zapper to the intercontinental ballistic missiles equipped with a hydrogen bombs that the Soviet Union and the United States had aimed at one another during the cold war. “Both sides knew that if they launched a missile, the other side would retaliate in kind. Mutually assured destruction, they called it.”
Cotswald would like to see the Babble Zapper have the role of the ICBMs in the Cold War.
“Every driver would have one and know that any other driver could use it on them. The result would be that every driver would drive as aggressively as possible during the commute and spend a lot more time worrying about how they would zapped if they let a phone call distract them.”
And what if some other inventor sees an opportunity to develop a device that a commuter could use to neutralize the Babble Zapper?
“I’m way ahead of you on that one,” Cotswald said. “I have a working prototype for the Babble Zap Killer,and I’ve applied for a patents on both the Zapper and Killer. What I’m hoping for is a commuter cell phone zapper arms race with me supplying both sides with their weapons.”