The Patent, And What Happened Next
Public Domain
Charles Frederick appears to have developed this project on his own time, away from the British taxpayer-funded lab he worked in, and only brought it to work when it was done because of British Rail’s rules about freelance inventing. Under the terms employees agreed to in the 1970s, any potentially patentable technology that British Rail engineers invented on their own could be submitted through the agency itself.
Because the design seemed like something that could have some practical application someday, and because British and American law allow patents on designs that aren’t practical yet, British Rail went ahead and hired an agent to file for protection — presumably in case some other mad scientist tried to make money off of a fusion-powered flying saucer first.
The Patent Office approved the request in 1973. Right after that, when Britain’s Cold War-era secret service heard the word “nuclear,” the government swept in and classified the design as “Hush, Most Secret.”
Under then-current British law, patents of this kind conferred exclusive rights to the inventor for 20 years, provided the patent was regularly renewed. Seemingly unwilling to invest in a functional flying saucer before 1993, British Rail let the patent lapse in 1976.
The Patent Office lists millions of entries (in what may be the least-functional database on the internet), and so a thing like this could easily have been forgotten.
Instead, a casual search seems to have turned up the patent for a Guardian reporter in 1978. Then it was forgotten again until 1982, when The Daily Telegraph ran a piece on it, which was also eventually forgotten. It surfaced again in 2006, when almost simultaneous articles ran in the online editions of BBC News, the Times of London, and the Telegraph.
The internet has certain tendencies, and it’s not hard to predict what it takes for an article to get traction online. A true story about nuclear-powered sci-fi technology being developed in Cold War Britain by a semi-unknown British Tesla, whose work was officially recognized and then classified for decades, has “share this story” written all over it.
For what it’s worth, Charles Frederick retired many years ago and has not — to our knowledge — designed any other technologies a thousand years ahead of their time, and the last word from the now-privatized British Rail on the subject came from a spokesman for the Department of Transportation in 2006: “We have no plans to introduce nuclear-powered flying saucers to the [British public transportation] network.”
The far-fetched inventions don’t stop there. Next, check out the most outlandish CIA programs of the Cold War.
