Great Inventions That Were Made In Garages

Okay, so it's not a Sidewinder missile, but it does have the power to mess you up, and it was (surprise!) invented in a garage. The modern stun gun arrived in 1999, and leaving aside the part where it totally sucks to get tased, you can think of it as a life-saving invention since it's

Okay, so it's not a Sidewinder missile, but it does have the power to mess you up, and it was (surprise!) invented in a garage. The modern stun gun arrived in 1999, and leaving aside the part where it totally sucks to get tased, you can think of it as a life-saving invention since it's allowed police to, in some situations replace lethal force with non-lethal force.

According to Reuters, the Taser was perfected by a guy named Rick Smith, but the idea came from Jack Cover, a retired NASA scientist who invented an early stun gun and also provided the garage for the project. What's kind of sketchy about the whole thing, though, is that 1999 wasn't really that long ago, and yet this was a device that was designed to incapacitate an adult human — potentially dangerous, especially in the development stages — and that it was designed and tested under kind of primitive circumstances. Smith and Cover's early test subjects consisted of a pig, five dogs, and actual human police officers who volunteered themselves in exchange for free beer. Sigh. At least it wasn't free doughnuts because the world couldn't handle that much stereotyping.

Tasers aren't entirely safe — early testing showed there were cardiac risks, though 1 million Tasers later and police say that there haven't been any confirmed cases of Taser-induced cardiac arrest. Lots of scientists and doctors say otherwise. Still, it beats an actual gun, at least.

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