Samuel O'Reilly was a tattoo artist and the inventor of the modern rotary tattoo gun, which he patented in 1891. O'Reilly's machine was based on the rotary technology of Thomas Edison's autographic printer, the first practical application of an electric motor. Modern tattoo machines use electromagnetic coils. He subsequently built up a business selling the machines. He was at the time a tattoo artist working in New York. In 2005, a Tattoo shop opened in Santa Cruz, … Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Samuel O'Reilly. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_O%27Reilly