1996: A Most Productive Year

Rereading Webster’s Timeline History: John Smith, 1580–2007 (as I often do, despite its errors), I was heartened to remember just how busy and productive 1996 was for me. Early in the year, a compilation of my short films was published on VHS tape by London Electronic Arts. In late February, much to my surprise, a couple of colleagues and I secured a patent for a “packet voting server and associated method for performing voting services on multiple radio channels simultaneously.” The very next week, my dear friend Kathleen was informed out of the blue that our joint patent application for a low-paper-level sensing apparatus had also been successful. Soon afterward, yet another piece of good news on the patent front arrived when I became the sole patent holder on my “quick hitch assembly,” a project that had been very close to my heart for many years. I couldn’t believe my luck.

When I engage in academic writing, especially when it involves practical research, I am not usually partial to collaborations. But when summer turned to autumn and I finally saw Trace Element Concentrations in Soils from Rural and Urban Areas of Australia in print, I must admit I felt more than a little proud of our team’s diverse efforts, brought together by Heather’s exemplary editing. On the subject of editing, I was equally happy with my own editing work on the short film Rêves en Cage, which I also directed, released during the same month. Centered around the imagined dreams of caged animals in a French provincial zoo, the film incorporates fragments of a little-known but exquisite text by Jean Genet.

Although I really love making films, there’s not a lot of money in it; with Rêves en Cage, I even ended up with a sizeable debt. Fortunately, I always have my inventing work to fall back on when times get hard. As winter approached, I was relieved to discover that new patents had been simultaneously granted for a towing apparatus for golf cars, a cobalt glass composition for coatings, and a telecommunications access network. The golf car towing apparatus eventually turned out to be quite lucrative and enabled me to pay off all the debts I’d accrued filming dreaming animals at the zoo.

As the year drew to a close, a perfect Christmas present appeared in the bookshops—The King’s Adventurer: Captain John Smith and Pocahontas by Jean Plaidy. It contained a few factual errors but was, for the most part, accurate and very well written. Ms. Plaidy’s vivid descriptions really took me back to the idyllic days that Pocahontas and I spent together so many years ago. I’m eternally grateful to Pocahontas, the love of my life, without whom I could never have conceived of the female-molded underground storage tank.