Industry History | Axon — AIR TASER Written on 7 September

People treat Axon as the Scottsdale campus at 17800 North 85th that always sold a yellow energy weapon and a body camera from a Nasdaq-100 book.

The first book was a garage company named for compressed gas.

On 7 September 1993 Rick Smith and his brother Tom incorporated AIR TASER, Inc. Two high-school teammates, Todd Bogers and Cory Holmes, had been shot dead in a Scottsdale road-rage case in December 1991. Rick went to Jack Cover, the NASA engineer who had named the original TASER in the 1970s, and rebuilt the device so the ATF would not class it as a firearm.

The AIR TASER 34000 shipped in 1994. The name became TASER International in 1998. The ADVANCED TASER M26, shaped like a handgun and built to lock muscles rather than only cause pain, followed in 1999.

The mechanism is a nitrogen cartridge that throws two barbed darts on wires. Current on those wires is meant to stop a person without a bullet. The company later added cameras and Evidence.com so an agency could store what the officer saw.

The listing came in 2001. The name changed to Axon Enterprise in 2017. Headquarters sits in Scottsdale. The company still dates Founder's Day to 7 September.

The pin is Tucson, the city the founders name for the first garage, not the later 85th Street campus.

Photo: Tucson, Arizona, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.