Jack Cover, the US physicist who invented the Taser stun gun, died on Feb. 7 in Mission Viejo, California. He was 88 and lived in San Clemente, California.
The cause was pneumonia brought on by Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Ginny.
Cover, who worked as an aerospace scientist and was affiliated with NASA’s Apollo moon landing program, came up with the idea for a nonlethal weapon for use in law enforcement in the 1960s as a response to emergencies in the news, including hijackings.
Cover’s scientific inspiration, his wife said, was a newspaper article about a man who had inadvertently walked into an electrified fence and survived, though he was temporarily immobilized.
“When he read that had happened, he knew an electric current could be used without danger,” Ginny Cover said.
Cover named his invention as a tribute to another inspiration, the Tom Swift science fiction novels he read as a child, one of which was Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. He created an acronym from “Thomas Swift Electric Rifle,” adding the “A,” he explained to the Washington Post in 1976, “because we got tired of answering the phone ‘T.S.E.R.’”
The Taser gun shoots electrified darts connected to the gun by insulated wires, and it works by flooding the target’s body with electric current, causing uncontrollable muscle contractions.
The proliferation of Tasers has made them controversial, as their frequent use has led to fears of overuse.
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