Personal Security: The Story Of The Taser

Most people know that words like Laser and Taser are acronyms

, they're made up from the initial letters of a phrase. But while laser sounds terribly scientific (Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation) Taser has a different story. The letters stand for 'Thomas A Smith's Electric Rifle'. From this you might assume that the inventor of the Taser was Thomas A Smith, but you'd be wrong.

Every decade has it's fears. Once we were worried about World War III, then there was AIDS, Global Warming and of course Terrorism. But there was a time when the major fear was airplane hi-jack. In response, the airlines began to carry security officers (sky marshals) who were armed. As long as this worked as a deterrent it was fine, but the body of an aircraft is pressurized. If a bullet missed its target and pierced the fuselage this would cause decompression, and could easily cause the pilots to loose control of the aircraft resulting in a crash.

One who saw the problem straight away was Jack Cover. Born in New York in 1920, Cover studied Physics at the University of Chicago and obtained his Ph.D. working for famous physicist Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. During World War II he was a test pilot in the Army Air Force and afterwards worked in Naval ordnance before moving to North American Aviation (where he worked on the Apollo project) and then on to IBM and Hughes. With so much aircraft knowledge behind him, the problem of projectile weapons on airplanes worried Cover so he set himself to design a weapon which could immobilise an assailant without being able to pierce the aircraft shell. He had the idea for the Taser after reading about a man being incapacitated when a power line fell. His first design shot darts up to fifteen feet, but there were no bullets, instead the darts delivered an electric shock.

Convinced he had found the answer to a lot of problems, Cover set up his own company in the 1970's to manufacture the weapon he now called the Taser after a book he had read as a child. In the story the hero, Thomas Smith, invents a rifle which shoots electricity, and so with the addition of a middle initial not found in the books, the Taser was born.

Cover believed that everyone would want a gun that would incapacitate but not kill, but he was wrong. Because the weapon used gunpowder as it's propellant, it was classified as a firearm and the result was little interest from the police or the military. In 1979 a woman called Eula Love was shot and killed by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department in an argument with the gas company about her gas bill. Following this case the LAPD ran field tests with the Taser approving an 11 watt version for use, but the weapon never had the widespread appeal Cover had hoped for and eventually his business closed. But that was not the end.

In the 1990's two brothers contacted Cover to discuss rebuilding the Taser as a personal security device for the general public. The Air Taser was the result, a device similar to the original but with compressed air acting as the propellant instead of gunpowder. Jack Cover died in 2009 by which time his Taser design had been sold to more than 13,000 law enforcement or military agencies in 44 countries around the world. To date, the Taser is said to have saved more than 100,000 lives; an impressive legacy for one man.

by: Kirsty Hale

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