I'm on Marylebone Road in London. The building behind me is now the Landmark Hotel, but for
many years it was the headquarters of British Rail, the government organisation that ran
all of the country's railways.
And apparently, in the 1970s, they also had designs on space travel. Because they patented
a flying saucer.
I'm not kidding. This wasn't just one slightly unhinged employee either. The patent mentions
the inventor, the wonderfully-named Charles Osmond Frederick, but it's registered to the
company, at their office. They paid an agent to file it for them. It took more than a year
between the first filing and the final submission.
And it's detailed. It goes on about how they'll use lasers to ignite material for nuclear
fusion, and then use magnetic fields to deflect those particles to use them for thrust...
I mean, the physics is questionable at best and utterly unrealistic at worst. But...
Every so often, this gets dug up and shown off for being absolutely ridiculous, optimistic,
but here's the thing: the patent was granted. Patent offices are massively overworked, with
years of backlog to examine: each application requires a search through the catalogue to
make sure no-one's filed anything like it before. Examiners aren't experts in the fields
they're looking at, they're just checking for originality. It's quite interesting to
look at the published patents: they're mostly big corporations churning out minor variations
on ideas, but occasionally you'll see a lone, garden-shed inventor patenting a bizarre idea
or an unrealistic dream.
And although the official policy of both the UK Patent Office and the US Patent Office
is to reject something as ludicrous as, say, a perpetual motion machine, you can patent
something that isn't possible yet, but might be in future. And at the height of the space
race, after we'd gone from Sputnik to a man on the moon in just over ten years, was it
plausible that British Rail might have a fleet of flying saucers in the far-off space years
of the 1990s? Probably not, but that wasn't for the patent examiner to decide.
Assuming you renew your patent regularly, you've got a maximum of twenty years to make
it and profit from it, before it expires and anyone can make your invention. Which is what
happened to the flying saucer, so if any of you would like to make a space vehicle powered
by a laser-ignited fusion reactor, you are entirely within your rights to. But let's
be honest: that's never actually going--
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