Was he a reckless thinker or prolific inventor?

Financial Standard

By Morris Aron

If his inventions had worked, we would be piping snow from Antarctica to irrigate the deserts of the world, and famine would be history.

In addition, airship masts would host a television tower, with a revolving restaurant for rich men to stay off the ground, while the world would never worry about countries nuking each other.

The United Nations would have three nuclear warheads strategically placed on earth-orbiting satellites to automatically counter any possible attacks.

These are the patented ideas of a prolific British inventor Arthur Paul Pedrick.

Having worked for years as a patent examiner, he decided to patent ideas that would have ‘revolutionised the world’ but that ended up being known for their complete lack of practicability.

Little is known about his early life. However, while living in Sussex, England in offices that he cherished with names like

Mr Arthur Paul Pedrick

"One-Man Photo-Electric Research Laboratories" or "One Man Think Tank Nuclear Fusion Research Laboratories," Pedrick embarked on a mission.

Between 1962 and 1976 he obtained 162 United Kingdom patents driven by worries as to where the laws of modern Physics would take the world building on insights from his cat, Ginger.

Among his most eccentric patent is an idea for the UN on keeping peace through a gadget —A 1000 Megaton Earth-Orbital Peace-Keeping Bomb".

The UN was to place three nuclear bombs on earth-orbiting satellites. These bombs were to be programmed in such a way that whenever they detected that one of the superpowers had been nuked by another, they are automatically drop on Washington,

Fire curtains

Moscow and Peking and ensure the mutual destruction of all three.

Unfortunately, nobody ever thought of even financing it.

Concerned with the safety of the fellow man, Pedrick patented an "Apparatus For Extinguishing Fires In High Rise Block Buildings Of Uniform Transverse Cross-Section Or Plan".

He suggested that fire curtains be secured on the roofs level of a high-rise buildings. When released, the curtains would envelope the burning building and suffocate it of oxygen.

Certain curtains were to be provided with holes that when they were released they would cover a specific room that had originally been designated for the occupants of the building in the eventuality of fire.

But perhaps the most famous idea was how to transfer fresh water from the poles of the earth to the deserts for purposes of irrigation. In this patent, Pedrick describes in detail — with pages of mathematical equations — how snow and ice could be passed along pipelines from the Antarctic to irrigate the dry Australian outback, creating a "granary of the East" that could feed the growing
population of the world.

Irrigate desert

Since the flow of water from one region to the other through such pipelines would not be practical, according to Pedrick, the suggestion was to instead compress the snow into hard balls that could be fired along the pipelines as projectiles.

The idea also described how possible it was to irrigate the Sahara desert by piping fresh water from the mouth of the Amazon.

Fredrick had something for golf lovers — a practice golf tee complete with photocells to monitor the path of the club head.

With this gadget, if photocells detected that the player was about to hook or slice the ball, a puff of compressed air would blow the ball off the tee, so the player misses it.

Some have considered him a lunatic while others within the patenting profession — have observed that Pedrick a hero for poking holes in the patent system and exposing its flaws.

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