On Sat, 11 Sep 2004 20:53:11 GMT, "Calif Bill"
wrote:


"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
Look at the bright side: If we successfully convert the entire Arab
world
into American-hating terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, then they'll
be
no "innocent" civilians killed when we start killing Arabs by the
millions.

They let you practice medicine?


Doctors have been good at killing people. Guillotine was a doctor inventing
a more humane way of executions.

Who, interestingly enough, was executed by a guillotine.

Gatling was a doctor. Dentist I think.

Gatling was indeed a dentist. He developed and produced his gun in
Hartford Connecticut where it was eventually improved upon by a
gentleman named Hiram Maxim who acted upon an idea given to him by a
fellow American traveling to the Paris Electrical Exhibition in 1881.

To wit: "In 1881 the American inventor, Hiram Maxim, visited the
Paris Electrical Exhibition. While he was at the exhibition he met a
man who told him: "If you wanted to make a lot of money, invent
something that will enable these Europeans to cut each other's throats
with greater facility."

Thus, the machine gun. :)

On the other hand, Hiram Maxim was a great tinkerer with the
communications tool of the age - spark gap radio transmission - and
knew many of the scientists and inventors developing radio
transmission.

He was the founder of the American Radio Relay League.

Oddly, when visiting the ARRL in Newington, CT, there is no mention of
his inventing what was, for it's time, a Weapon of Mass Destruction.
:)

And to keep this in a boating thread, Maxim owned a stretch of the
Connecticut River along which he used a 70 foot steam "launch" to
cruise the river with freinds and family.

Aren't you glad you brought that up?

Later,

Tom