I only recently joined the American Shotcrete Association. But, in reading through the issues of Shotcrete and ASA™s excellent brochure, I was struck by how little seems to be known about Carl E. Akeley, the man to whom we all owe our livelihoods. What™s more, I™m told by the litera-ture that he invented the cement gun œto apply mortar over skeletal matrices to form the shapes of prehistoric animals (not true); that he was a Doctor (his schooling was limited to three or four years of grade school); and that the œdevelopment of the original cement gun started in 1895 (it actually started twelve years later).