Arthur Paul Pedrick - Personal Life

Personal Life

Very little is known about the mysterious Pedrick. It is widely reported that he worked for many years as a patent examiner at the United Kingdom Patent Office but that it was only after his retirement that he began filing patent applications for his inventions. The Patent Office has stringent restrictions on improbable gadgets, but Pedrick's familiarity with the process enabled him to satisfy the requirements and get his applications published.

During this period he was resident in Selsey, Sussex, England, according to his patents. Sometimes his residence would further be listed as "One-Man Photo-Electric Research Laboratories", or "One Man Think Tank Nuclear Fusion Research Laboratories", and so forth. These laboratories were staffed by himself and a ginger coloured cat, sometimes referred to as "Ginger" although it is not clear whether this was actually his name. Ginger was of great help to Pedrick in developing his inventions. Unfortunately, it is recounted in some of the patents how Ginger was unable to secure financing to put the inventions into practice.

His patent for laser induced fusion includes these autobiographical notes:

It is my personal experience based on a severe bout of Dive bombing by Stuka dive bombers in a light cruiser HMS "Dido", in 1941, evacuating mainly New Zealanders from Crete, who had been sent in by the late Sir Winston Churchill, but who, after the battle with the Nazi paratroops had made the island untenable, Admiral Cunningham, the Naval C in C in Alexandria, realised must be got out if possible, that the surface warships just cannot survive attacks by large numbers of aircraft, on their own, and it is only the chance of fate that I happened to be in After Engine Room of the ship, when a bomb came down on B turret and created a carnage of twisted steel and bodies forward, that I am writing this now, but the memory of the experience still gives me a "nightmare" at times.

I have suffered all my life even from a by product of the 1914-18 war even if I was born after it. It is a personal fact that my father was a Lieutenant (E) serving in the disastrous K class submarines, by which the Royal Navy tried to create a Submarine which could steam on the surface at 20 knots to keep up with the Fleet, and he died of a lung infection created by the appalling conditions in such submarines, even before I was born. If a women is in bad metal state when she is in pregnant, it is obvious that she can pass on her state of mind to the foetus. This has made me a nervous individual all my life, and there are many times in my life I wish I had never been born. There are endless arguments about the subject of abortion on the "rights of the foetus", and these could all be settled if, in some way, the future could be predicted for the foetus and it could decide whether it "wanted to be born".