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Kind: captions
Language: en-GB

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I'm on Marylebone Road in London. The building
behind me is now the Landmark Hotel, but for

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many years it was the headquarters of British
Rail, the government organisation that ran

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all of the country's railways.

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And apparently, in the 1970s, they also had
designs on space travel. Because they patented

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a flying saucer.

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I'm not kidding. This wasn't just one slightly
unhinged employee either. The patent mentions

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the inventor, the wonderfully-named Charles
Osmond Frederick, but it's registered to the

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company, at their office. They paid an agent
to file it for them. It took more than a year

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between the first filing and the final submission.

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And it's detailed. It goes on about how they'll
use lasers to ignite material for nuclear

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fusion, and then use magnetic fields to deflect
those particles to use them for thrust...

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I mean, the physics is questionable at best
and utterly unrealistic at worst. But...

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Every so often, this gets dug up and shown
off for being absolutely ridiculous, optimistic,

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but here's the thing: the patent was granted.
Patent offices are massively overworked, with

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years of backlog to examine: each application
requires a search through the catalogue to

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make sure no-one's filed anything like it
before. Examiners aren't experts in the fields

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they're looking at, they're just checking
for originality. It's quite interesting to

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look at the published patents: they're mostly
big corporations churning out minor variations

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on ideas, but occasionally you'll see a lone,
garden-shed inventor patenting a bizarre idea

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or an unrealistic dream.

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And although the official policy of both the
UK Patent Office and the US Patent Office

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is to reject something as ludicrous as, say,
a perpetual motion machine, you can patent

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something that isn't possible yet, but might
be in future. And at the height of the space

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race, after we'd gone from Sputnik to a man
on the moon in just over ten years, was it

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plausible that British Rail might have a fleet
of flying saucers in the far-off space years

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of the 1990s? Probably not, but that wasn't
for the patent examiner to decide.

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Assuming you renew your patent regularly,
you've got a maximum of twenty years to make

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it and profit from it, before it expires and
anyone can make your invention. Which is what

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happened to the flying saucer, so if any of
you would like to make a space vehicle powered

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by a laser-ignited fusion reactor, you are
entirely within your rights to. But let's

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be honest: that's never actually going--

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