The prolific Arthur Pedrick

What is a former Patent Office employee to do with all the free time suddenly on his hands when he retires? The late, great Arthur Pedrick of Sussex decided to put his extensive knowledge of patent application procedure to good practical use: he crossed over to the other side. Between 1962 and 1977, Pedrick patented 162 inventions, each one wackier than the last. He was undaunted by the fact that none of them were taken up commercially. It seemed almost beside the point.

The breadth of Mr Pedrick’s vision is well demonstrated by his radiation detector (UK Patent GB1426698, 1976). Depending on how the device was set up, it could either a) detect a nuclear explosion from an orbiting satellite and automatically dump a 1000 megaton atom bomb on the aggressor nation, or b) allow Arthur’s cat Ginger to pass through a cat flap while freezing out unwanted feline visitors. The machine worked by detecting the character of the light falling on it from a given source. When it registered the pre-selected wavelength, a release mechanism was triggered. History fails to reveal whether Ginger ever got his high-tec flap, but we do know that discussions he held with his master on the subject of nuclear physics made their way into the official patent documentation.

Other classic Pendrick inventions include an amphibious bicycle, a steerable golf ball and an apparatus allowing a car to be driven from the back seat. But his most ambitious project was a scheme to irrigate the world’s deserts. With admirable simplicity, he reasoned that some parts of the planet were much too dry while others had huge and redundant supplies of water. The solution was to fire a constant stream of snowballs from the polar icecaps into needy desert regions via a network of giant peashooters.

Eventually, running the ‘One-Man-Think-Tank Basic Research Laboratories of Sussex’ began to take its toll. Mrs Pendrick grew weary of the cost of her husband’s patent applications, not to mention the houseful of mechanical junk, and prevailed on him to curtail his inventive activities.