Don't laugh here, who invented potato guns?

A place for general potato gun questions and discussions.
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paaiyan
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 12:28 am

I've searched and can't figure it out. But serously, we should pay homage to whoever invented the first one or something. I bet it was an American, cause we're cool like that. Just like the way we invented fish.
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Insomniac
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 12:31 am

I think the first potato gun was made of a pringles can, lighter fluid, a tennis ball and matches. Really, there was no one person who invented potato guns, they just evolved from the basic pringles can gun.
I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
Right now I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before.

Add me on msn!!! insomniac-55@hotmail.com
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trae08
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 12:32 am

yes it was an american.. an if it wasnt lets just say it was. as for who it was i dunno but they sure created a great hobby

actually a year or 2 ago a friend of mine told me how they use to make them out of old cans like vegitable cans u know what i mean?
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paaiyan
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 12:37 am

Yea, but those were tennis ball cannons. I'm talking actual spudgun. And by the way, I was joking about Americans inventing fish. we really didn't do that. We just discovered them.

But we did invent computers. So if you're not American, consider yourself owned by the mightyness of the PC.
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CS
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 1:54 am

You guys so blantly believe it was a American that constructed a 'potato gun'. While if the question could be answered correctly it would be a interesting tid bit of information, but beyond that I don't really care.

There is a lake on the back side of the moon.

How about some supporting details?
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 2:56 am

As far as we know it was a group of drunk guys that taped together beer cans (Beer cans used to fit tennis balls before they changed the size of them). They put some flamable fluid we dont know exactly what then put a tennis ball in it and Presumably the drunkest ignited it thorough a hole in the bottom of the cans.

Now for anyone who wants to argue this was not a spudgun then techniquely most guns on this forum are not spud guns at all. But launchers for other things.
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MrCrowley
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 3:56 am

Remember paaiyan America isn't the only country that gets drunk. So far its un-confirmed reports of drunks with beer cans and balls(tennis balls) :P

As for who invented the first PVC/ABS spudgun...God Knows.....
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FiveseveN
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 6:38 am

This topic is useless without numbers :D
Seriously now, to find the origin(s) of spudguns we need to compare facts that we can positively and precisely place in the course of history.

It would actually be nice if we can gather some useful information on the topic and add it to the wiki.

We all know that cannons were developed in China in the early 12th century. The question is when homemade cannons started being used for the purpose of entertainment and when people figured out that potatoes make good ammo.
The practice most likely was developed independently by more than one group of people, the main factor being material availability.

I've already told you the story about simple acetylene cannons made from scrap PVC pipe in Romania, chiefly around the winter holidays (local tradition includes "shooting the past year" at New Year's Eve).
I can remember witnessing the manufacture and usage of such a device as early as the mid 90's, and I doubt PVC was available in Romania before the '90s, but similar cannons could have just as well been made out of metal.
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jrrdw
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 6:51 am

pimpmann22 wrote:You guys so blantly believe it was a American that constructed a 'potato gun'. While if the question could be answered correctly it would be a interesting tid bit of information, but beyond that I don't really care.

There is a lake on the back side of the moon.

How about some supporting details?
How does the moon have sides, it's round.
Far as that lake goes --

The moon was hit by a meteor, i think the size of Texas.
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 7:39 am

jrrdw wrote:
pimpmann22 wrote:You guys so blantly believe it was a American that constructed a 'potato gun'. While if the question could be answered correctly it would be a interesting tid bit of information, but beyond that I don't really care.

There is a lake on the back side of the moon.

How about some supporting details?
How does the moon have sides, it's round.
Far as that lake goes --

The moon was hit by a meteor, i think the size of Texas.
umm if it was hit by a meteor that big from what I know it would have been smashed to pieces.
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paaiyan
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 9:30 am

Wwwoooowwww. It's crazy how fast a joke can turn into an argument. Gosh guys. I don't really care about who invented it. Just so that we can say hey, that's where it originated. I'll concede, it was probably drunk guys though.

Oh, and a meteor the size of Texas would pretty much obliterate the Earth, much less the Moon. Anyone ever wonder why our moon is the only one without a name? It's just, "The Moon."
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Hotwired
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 9:56 am

Its called THE moon because its the bigass one right next to us and theres no possibility of mistaking it for something else.
Brooner115
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 11:56 am

It was probably us the Americans because we're just so frikin cool like that, and we have every other cool thing u could think of like canned meat for the guys in ww2 I think it was but all well we probably made it though, GO USA
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mark.f
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 5:08 pm

It doesn't really matter where the hell the spud-gun came from, but I do have this. Go to Google and do some serious searching. Not like five minutes and then come running back, but actually LOOK. You will find many physics experiments for High School and College professors, (they actually do have teacher blogs), involving different forms of cannons. They like to measure recoil to determine velocity and things like that, and apparently they've been doing it for a while.
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paaiyan
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Thu Feb 15, 2007 5:16 pm

Yea I will later. I posted this cause I didn't have much time on my hands at that time and wanted to see if anyone knew. Plus it gave me the chance to see how many people I could piss off by arrogantly claiming that the Americans did it.
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