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Gerald Bull

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Entrepreneur

The Resume

    (March 9, 1928-March 22, 1990)
    Born in North Bay, Ontario, Canada
    Engineer and arms merchant
    Designed long-range artillery
    Founded the Space Research Corporation (1967)
    Assassinated outside his apartment in Brussels

Why he might be annoying:

    He was described as 'a difficult man, prickly and quick to take offense.'
    To finance his dream of using artillery to launch satellites, he became indiscriminate about who he would do business with.
    He was jailed for six months for violating the arms embargo against South Africa (1980).
    At the time of his death, he was working on a 'supergun' for Saddam Hussein.
    He ticked off enough people that no one is sure who killed him, with suspects including Israel's Mossad, the CIA, Britain's MI6, and the governments of Iraq, Chile and South Africa.

Why he might not be annoying:

    He was admitted to the University of Toronto at age 16, and at age 23 became the youngest person to earn a PhD from the school. (A record that still stands as of 2013.)
    Using scrap parts and spending only $6,000 he built a wind tunnel capable of generating speeds up to Mach 4.
    By launching projectiles to a height of over 200,000 feet, he obtained some of the first data about conditions in the upper atmosphere.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 11 Votes: 81.82% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 7 Votes: 57.14% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 13 Votes: 53.85% Annoying
    In 2014, Out of 18 Votes: 55.56% Annoying
    In 2013, Out of 30 Votes: 60.0% Annoying