Donāt worry, itās a little know fact that Tom Swift suffers an horrible destiny while exploring the Mountains of Madness in the Antarctic region in 1925
He should not have underestimated that Nemo girl.
Iām sure if Jack had just named it the Equal Opportunity Defibrillator we could have avoided all the breakdowns in LE/community relations.
Donāt most words come from old racist sources?
Voltage level is everythingā¦
ā¦Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle, a 1911 YA science fiction novel by Victor Appletonā¦
āVictor Appletonā is the collective nom de plume of the army of Stratemeyer writers that churned out these books, not an actual person.
Just one problem. If you follow the link to Project Gutenberg and search the text for ātaserā then you donāt find anything.
Which doesnāt really surprise me all that much - taser is a word playing on ālaserā and they didnāt appear until the early 1960s.
So perhaps the concept stems from the book, though Iād not be especially surprised if there were other electric weapons out there in early science fiction, the word is new, and the backformation linking it to the novel seems spurious.
Donāt go confusing facts with a good manufactured outrage.
After all, if police and prisons are going to be the de-facto frontline of psychiatric care, why not expand the range of services offered?
If you read the linked article:
The word Taser, though, didnāt start with the company: itās actually a loose acronym of the book Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.
ā¦and the NY Times obituary linked from the linked article:
He created an acronym from āThomas Swift Electric Rifle,ā adding the āA,ā he explained to The Washington Post in 1976, ābecause we got tired of answering the phone āT.S.E.R.ā ā
old racist science fiction novel
Isnāt that the rule rather than the exception?
Iāve been thinking about this much lately. Why have I never heard the phrase āelectric rifleā on the news? I think it would help relate how dangerous tasers can be.
Not to be confused with āVictor Appleton II,ā the purported author of a series of 1950ās and 60ās juvenile SF novels which featured the cold war, atomic age adventures of the child of the original seriesās protagonist, āTom Swift, Jr.ā
I had an almost complete set of the āJrā books when I was young, and loved them and re-read them until I got old enough to realize that they werenāt actually very good. They avoided being racist by the usual 50ās method of presenting a totally whitewashed, class-washed world, in which the only people who werenāt white and middle class were foreigners, usually up to no good and in the employ of the Russians (although for reasons that still make no sense to me, it was a nonexistent country with a made up name that stood in for the Soviet Union).
My father had a handful of the original, non-āJrā books that heād gotten from his father. I tried to read one once, and put it down only a chapter or so in, when the characters encountered a dialect-speaking ādarky.ā
Calling the original non-Jr books āracistā is completely true, but not very informative ā they were mass market, turn-the-crank books, designed to be as bland and mainstream as possible. The racism in them tells us very little about the author or the editor of the series, but a great deal about American culture in the 10ās and 20ās.
There are other electric weapons in early sci-fi(if memory serves, Captain Nemo used some sort of electrically-charged rounds to compensate for the very low muzzle velocities attainable underwater; which are actually conceptually much closer to how tasers work, though his were designed to be lethal); but the purported origin of the ātaserā name is not the story itself; but the acronym āThomas A Smithās Electric Rifleā.
Whether this is true, or a just-so story made up after the fact, I cannot say; but the claim is not, and has never been, that the device was named after the one in the story, or even particularly closely inspired by it; just that the inventor chose the name in homage to it.
Nooooooo! How could Tom Swift be racist? I loved him when I was nine!
Also, while the Taser may be named for this book, I donāt think the books were all that technical. āElectricā in this context means a combination of modern and magic. I would have assumed it was a railgun - does the book describe elephants falling to their knees and convulsing?
Didnāt Captain Nemoās crew use electric rifles, underwater? OKā¦ here they are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_ball
ETA - @fuzzyfungus beat me to it.
The story of naming the TASER after the acronym of the bookās title has pretty long legs. Thereās not much else in the origin of the device to explain the name.
Oh, Tom Swift suffers a horrible destiny at the Mountains of Madness, all right.
But he is not āexploringā.
He is a power-hungry mad scientist, willfully yielding himself to Evil.
He makes this perfectly plain in Tom Swift and His Elder Gods Communicizer.
For the love of all that is human and holy ā what kind of man builds an Elder Gods Communicizer?
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