Jack Cover, an aerospace scientist who invented the Taser stun gun -- a device used by thousands of law enforcement agencies to subdue unruly offenders with electrical shocks -- has died. He was 88.
Cover had Alzheimer's disease and died of pneumonia Saturday at the Golden West Retirement Home in Mission Viejo, said his wife, Ginny.
Trained as a nuclear physicist, Cover spent most of his career working in aerospace and defense industries. He was a chief scientist for North American Aviation (later Rockwell International) and helped the firm become a primary NASA contractor on the Apollo moon landing program in the early 1960s.
He also was a born inventor who in the 1940s already was building gadgets, including cooked-food testers, voice-activated switches and an electric toothbrush. One of his last brainstorms was an alternative-energy generator.
But the Taser was his most successful invention, credited with preventing deadly police encounters and spurring improvements in the tactics used to take violent offenders into custody.
"Jack is an unsung hero. He did something great for the world, saved a lot of lives and prevented a lot of injuries," said Greg Meyer, a retired police captain who was heading the Los Angeles Police Department's nonlethal weapons research when he met Cover 30 years ago.
The Taser also has its share of critics, who have linked the device to scores of deaths in recent years, including two Orange County jail inmates last year. The American Civil Liberties Union is pressing to have Tasers classified as lethal weapons, but experts disagree on whether the stun guns directly caused the deaths.
Despite the continuing debate, the Taser has come into widespread use, adopted by more than 13,000 military and law enforcement agencies around the world, including the LAPD, which worked closely with Cover to test the device in the 1980s.
According to Meyer, Cover began to develop the Taser in the 1960s in response to a rash of airplane hijackings. Sky marshals carrying sidearms began riding on commercial airliners to discourage hijackers, but Cover saw the risk inherent in the situation. If a bullet missed the hijacker and pierced the fuselage instead, the plane could go down.
"He said, 'Let me figure out something better than shooting people that might crash the plane,' " Meyer said.
