We were so delighted and surprised to get this birthday greeting from VISIER magazine (Europe's leading gun magazine) to Robert which they most unexpectedly broadcast to the world on 23 March 2002 on the VISIER, Das internationale Waffenmagazine (Gunsight- the international gun magazine) website:
Happy Birthday!
(Corrected translation)
Dr. Robert Beeman, known throughout the world as the authority on the technology of airguns celebrated his 70^th birthday on March 23 (2002).
This Californian (see his biography in VISIER 12/2001) has sought long-lost theories traveling with his wife Toshiko to many countries—discovering prototypes of airguns—from the jungles of Borneo to the Indian subcontinent.

His first career as a Marine Biologist and specialist in electron microscopy and exotic marine mollusks brought Beeman to San Francisco as a Professor at San Francisco State University.  At the beginning of the 70’s he developed his first sideline “Beeman Precision Airguns”.  His mail-order trade of adult airguns brought the American to the world of powerful, high quality, expensive European airguns (virtually unknown by them until this time).  As an author he wrote, (among other things) the standard reference work “Airgun Digest.” He also made a name for himself as a developer of newer models.  For example, the Beeman R1 air rifle (versions of which are marketed in the rest of the world as the Weihrauch Model HW80) and likewise the Beeman P1 (marketed in the rest of the world as the HW45)  air pistol are based on his ideas.

In 1993 he sold the firm to S/R Industries, to which among other things “Marksman” belongs.  Since then he cares for a comprehensive collection of over 1000 examples of modern and historical airguns. In the meantime he has found time to construct his private website, www.beemans.net where you can learn more about him and his collection.

Photo Caption:  This wonderfully beautiful Bate air rifle (Windbüchse) with a false flintlock is almost 200 years old.  Dr. Beeman (left) to whom it belongs— his first 70 [!].  On the right in the picture is Editor Ulrich Eichstädt (VISIER-online) taken on the occasion of an editorial visit to the Beeman’s ranch in northern California.