From Michael Berkson
Rather than pumping fresh water across the ocean, perhaps we should consider the ideas of a former Patent Office examiner named Arthur Pedrick (3 January, p 34). He filed covering a wide variety of far-fetched inventions. With today’s technology perhaps we should consider his patent , which describes an arrangement for irrigating desert areas, such as those in central Australia, by rolling snowballs from the polar ice caps down a pipeline.
A partial vacuum in the pipe supplements the initial gravitational impetus, and allegedly so does the Coriolis effect as the pipe passes from high to low latitudes.
Great Shelford, Cambridge, UK
