I’ve seen a lot of war movies, so I know what flamethrowers are used for, which is mostly to flush out the enemy from their caves, tunnels, and bunkers. I’ve watched a lot of news, so I know what flamethrowers are used for in non-military settings, and that’s to quell a wildfire. As in fight fire with fire.
And I suppose farmers could use flamethrowers to clear their fields of weeds.
When I was little, there was a field in back of my grandmother’s house (where we lived until I was six-and-a-half). Nanny’s next door neighbors were an ancient German immigrant couple – as far as I can tell, the only other Germans in Worcester other than my mother. Anyway, the Ladners had been in farmers back in the old country, and each spring, Grandpa Ladner – well into his nineties – would set the field on fire. It wasn’t his field, and it wasn’t planted with any crops, but Grandpa L was having some sort of flashback to his prior life and, so, set what he thought was his field on fire to clear it for his crop growth. Thankfully, Grandpa L didn’t have a flamethrower.
But I hadn’t really thought that any civilian (non-soldier or first responder), other than a farmer, would have any use for a flamethrower.
Elon Musk, however, apparently has 1,000 friends who dropped what they were doing and made their way to one of his outfits,The Boring Company HQ in California, to pay $500 for a Boring Company flamethrower.
Sure, we’ve all worked for boring companies at one point or another in our careers, but if you’re not familiar with The Boring Company:
To solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic, roads must go 3D, which means either flying cars or tunnels. Unlike flying cars, tunnels are weatherproof, out of sight and won't fall on your head. A large network of tunnels many levels deep would fix congestion in any city, no matter how large it grew (just keep adding levels). The key to making this work is increasing tunneling speed and dropping costs by a factor of 10 or more – this is the goal of The Boring Company. Fast to dig, low cost tunnels would also make Hyperloop adoption viable and enable rapid transit across densely populated regions, enabling travel from New York to Washington DC in less than 30 minutes.
Well, if The Boring Company can get someone from NY to DC in less than 30 minutes, that pretty much means they can get someone from Boston to NY in less than 30 minutes. So, let’s go, The Boring Company!
One of the ways that Musk engages his fans and helps fund The Boring Company is selling them stuff.
In this case, the first 1,000 who signed up for the latest sale paid $500 for a flamethrower. If my arithmetic is correct, that would amount to $500K, minus the cost of the flamethrowers. Boring had previously sold 50,000 ball caps for $20, which rolls up to $1M. And they’ve also sold another 20,000 flamethrowers. That’s a cool $10M.
So, the grand (gross – pre cost of goods sold) total seems to be $11.5M. Factor in the additional cost of the free churros that Musk fed to the 1,000 flamethrower buyers, this doesn’t seem like a lot of money to go towards funding a company that’s going to cut the time to get from NYC to DC to 30 minutes by boring – get it, boring – a tunnel. But I suspect that these sales are more about publicity than about raising money. And there’s always Kickstarter…
Anyway, Musk-ovites came from near and far to claim their flamethrowers.
“Imagine if you had the opportunity to get a kite and a key from Benjamin Franklin,” said [Dennis] Dohrman, 45, an environmental scientist who drove 39 hours from Hampstead, North Carolina, referencing the Revolutionary War-era inventor and statesman. (Source: Bloomberg)
I don’t know if this analogy quite holds up. I don’t believe that The Boring Company will be using flamethrowers to bore their tunnels. And I don’t know if Ben Franklin funded his experiment by selling souvenir kites and keys. But the mention of BF has, of course, set me off in a direction that my brain didn’t need to go in.
Imagine if you had the opportunity to get a phonograph needle from Thomas Edison? Imagine if you had the opportunity to get a slug of type from Gutenberg? An air sickness bag from the Wright Brothers?
The other direction my mind has been set off in is making a brain beeline to a ditty we sang in grammar school that included the words:
Benjamin Franklin, inventor was he.
Out in a storm with a kite and a key.
Found how electric that lightning could be…
Ah, but we’re hear to talk about flamethrowers, not Benjamin Franklin. And 1,000 folks lined up find how flaming a flamethrower can be:
At the front of the line, customers wielding demonstration flamethrowers roasted marshmallows as staff showed them how to power the flames…
While a few in line said they planned to resell th
e limited-edition $500 flamethrowers online, where they already fetch a premium, most said they plan to keep them.
I guess if you’re looking for something just slightly overkill-y to toast your marshmallows, The Boring Company flamethrower’s your man. As for other ideas:
Musk offered suggestions for those wondering how to use their new flamethrowers, such as lighting fireplaces and barbecues. "No more need to use a dainty ‘match’ to ignite!" he wrote on Twitter.
Forget three on a match. It’ll be three on a flamethrower. You could lose your eyebrows that way.
This all seems slightly dangerous to me, especially living as I do in a densely occupied urban environment where there are no fields to de-weed. A cap would always come in handy, but I missed the window of opportunity there. As for the flamethrower, I’m a bit sorry I missed 
I’ll have to keep my eye on the next merchandise offering their planning for this winter: an ice blaster. Now there’s something that a downtown Bostonian can absolutely use. Wonder how it will work on bricks.
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