Barney Girden was an American from Stonington, Connecticut, and he invented things. In 1929, he even patented a snorkel for swimmers, so they no longer had to turn their heads with each stroke to breathe. This had nothing to do with scuba diving, which, however, much later saw him engaged in the creation of various gadgets, often naive, justified only by the inexperience of the times.
One of these is a syringe gun from the early 50s called "Squidgun", that is, the squid gun. Inspired by the hunting system characteristic of squids, it consisted of a long tube with a piston inside. Pulling the handle turned it into a suction pump, capable of sucking in any fish clumsy enough to get within a few centimeters of the gun. At that point, the hunter pulled a trigger, unleashing a pair of claws (the squid's tentacles) that grabbed the unfortunate fish. The prey was caught with maximum safety, the inventor emphasized, avoiding all the risks to himself and anyone nearby that came with using common spearguns, capable of launching an arrow far away with a cruel harpoon at the tip. There remains some doubt about the results of such a hunt, given the probable scarcity even then of prey willing to be vacuumed up.
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