Inventor of the AK-47, Mikhail Kalashnikov died yesterday.

Mikhail Kalashnikov, chief designer of the ubiquitous Soviet AK_47 passed away yesterday at the age of 94. From MIT's Technology Review:

The AK-47 illustrates the power of incremental adaptation. As a tank sergeant in World War II, Mikhail Kalashnikov saw that most Soviet troops had only carbines against the superior range of the German Sturmgewehr. While recovering from battlefield wounds, he began to create a design for a new weapon, one that could be assembled with relatively loose tolerances by relatively inexperienced workers, avoiding the supply bottlenecks that often resulted from the German cult of fine craftsmanship. A tractor plant originally produced the gun. Not only was the AK-47 simple to manufacture, but it could withstand rough handling in harsh terrain and climates. ………… It is all too easy for non-Russians, including anti-Russian terrorists, to reuse, repair, and manufacture it.