In 1998, South African inventor Charl Fourie created an outlandish self-defence device called the Blaster in response to the scourge of hijackings in the country that were becoming increasingly violent. The controversial flamethrower was capable of shooting flames two metres high when activated.
READ: Cressida City: The small town where everyone drives the same car
THE ANTI-HIJACKER FLAMETHROWER THAT FAILED TO CATCH FIRE
Fourie’s Blaster, also called the BMW Flamethrower, utilised liquefied petroleum gas. The device, installed under the vehicle’s doors, would unleash fire when the driver flipped a switch on the dashboard.
The gas was released from a bottle kept in the vehicle’s boot and would be ignited by a spark. Flames would shoot on both sides of the car regardless of which side the attack came from.
Fourie was adamant that the dramatic device would not kill attackers but could blind them.
“My personal feeling is that it would definitely blind a person. He will never see again,” he said to CNN.
“This is definitely non-lethal… A person is not going to stand there for a minute while you roast him. It will fend off the attacker, and that’s the end of it.”
The device was legal in South Africa due to the country’s self-defence laws. However, it failed to take off, and only a few hundred were sold by the time Fourie took it off the market in 2001.
CNN reported that the first person to purchase the Blaster was a policeman in a crime intelligence unit in Johannesburg. Police Superintendent David Walkley said he was satisfied the Blaster is legal if it is used correctly.
“It depends entirely on the circumstances and whether you can justify self-defence,” said Walkley
“Yes, there are certain risks in using it, but there are also risks in not having anything at all.”
The Blaster piqued the interest of media across the globe when it was released, and sometimes Fourie and his flamethrower received satirical coverage.
In 1999, he won the Ig Nobel Prize for Peace, which is a parody of the Nobel Prize, for “inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower.”
That year, the Mail and Guardian reported that Fourie was honoured to receive the prize but could not attend the awards ceremony at Harvard University.
The newspaper said, at the time, 200 Blaster devices had been sold, and no customers mentioned any “accounts of successful peacekeeping missions.”
“The Ig Nobel prizes, awarded annually once a year by genuine Nobel laureates, reward individuals whose achievements ‘cannot or should not be reproduced’,” wrote the newspaper of the awards.
The steep retail price of $655 (R3900 at the time) proved a challenge. The Automobile Association of South Africa (AA) also speculated the Blaster might cause hijackers to murder drivers as a precautionary measure before attempting to take the vehicle.
By 2001, the inventor removed the car flamethrower from the market after only a few hundred sold and poured his talents into creating a pocket-sized flamethrower to ward off potential attackers.
WATCH A VIDEO OF FOURIE DEMONSTRATING HOW HIS DEVICE WORKS BELOW:
