The Mosquito anti-teen device is a wonderful invention, that punishes those unruly creatures with shrill and unpleasant sounds while leaving people over twenty unscathed.
It is almost as good as the Invisible Teenager, a piece of technology dreamed up by R. A. Lafferty in one of his stories. Like the Mosquito, it is explicitly designed to target teenagers:
You remember that once there was a teenager problem? You remember when those little buggers used to be mean? Albert got enough of them. There was something ungainly about them that reminded him too much of himself. He made a teenager of his own. It was rough. To the others it looked like one of themselves, the ring in the left ear, the dangling side-locks, the brass knucks and the long knife, the guitar pluck to jab in the eye. But it was incomparably rougher than the human teenagers. It terrorized all in the neighborhood and made them behave, and dress like real people. There was one thing about the teenage machine that Albert made. It was made of such polarized metal and glass that it was invisible except to teenager eyes.
"Why is your neighborhood different?" the people asked him. "Why are there such good and polite teenagers in your neighborhood and such mean ones everywhere else? It's as though something had spooked all those right around here."
(R. A. Lafferty: Eurema's Dam)
"Invisible except to teenager eyes" may be a little harder to achieve than "inaudible except to teenager ears", but we should stay hopeful. Until then, the Mosquito will be a good enough substitute.
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