· There’s
something ingrained in humans that cause us to take dangerous risks and try
things that might change the world. Over the course of civilization, thousands
upon thousands of inventions succeeded beyond their creator’s wildest dream.
But some were epic fails. Here’s a look at the top twenty inventors who were
killed by their own inventions.
20. Thomas
Andrews was the chief naval architect for the R.M.S.
Titanic and it was his honor to
accompany the ship on its maiden voyage. Andrews was aware of the Titanic’s
vulnerability in ice-laden waters and originally called for the Titanic to be
double-hulled and equipped with forty-six lifeboats, instead of the twenty it
actually carried. He was overruled due to cost constraints. When the Titanic
struck the iceberg on April 15, 1912, Andrews heroically helped many people
into the lifeboats. He was last seen in the first-class smoking lounge,
weeping. His body was never recovered.
19. William
Bullock invented the first modern printing press. While installing
a machine for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Bullock tried to kick a belt onto
a pulley and got his leg crushed in the moving mechanism. He quickly developed
gangrene and his leg needed amputating. During his surgery on April 12, 1867,
Bullock died of complications.
18. Francis
Edgar Stanley invented the photographic dry plate which he sold to
George Eastman of Eastman-Kodak fame. With the profits, he founded the Stanley
Motor Carriage Company and developed a line of steam-powered automobiles called
Stanley Steamers. On July 13, 1918, Francis Stanley was testing one of his Steamers
and swerved to miss some farm animals. He plowed into a wood pile and died.
17. Jean-Francoise
Pilatre de Rozier was a French chemistry and physics teacher as
well as being the true father of aviation. He made the first hot air balloon
flight in 1783. He was also the first to experiment with hydrogen as a
propellant, testing it by taking a mouthful and blowing it across an open
flame. After losing his hair and eyebrows, he dismissed hydrogen as being too
volatile — something the makers of the Hindenburg would later confirm. On July
15, 1785, de Rozier attempted to cross the English Channel in his balloon. It
crashed, killing de Rozier and his passenger.
16. Louis
Slotin was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the
Manhattan Project. After the war, Slotin continued to experiment with plutonium
and accidently set off a fission reaction which released a hard burst of
radiation. Realizing what he’d done, Slotin heroically covered the material
with his body while the others made a run for the hills. He died on May 30,
1946, two weeks after the exposure.
15. Karel
Soucek was a Czechoslovakian daredevil and inventor. He built a
specially-designed, shock-proof barrel and repeatedly flowed over Niagara
Falls. To top this feat, Soucek invented a new capsule which was dropped from
the roof of the Houston Astrodome on January 20, 1985. It missed its target,
which was a small water container, and Soucek was killed on impact.
World-renown stuntman, Evel Knievel, tried to talk Soucek out of it, saying “It
was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.”
14. Sylvester
H. Roper invented the world’s first motorcycle. He called it a
velocipede and it was actually a converted bicycle powered by a steam engine.
On June 01, 1896, Roper was testing the machine on a bicycle racing track and
was lapping the pedal-powered two-wheelers at over forty mph. Suddenly, he
wiped out and died. The autopsy showed the cause of death to be a heart attack,
but it’s not known if the attack caused the crash or if the crash caused the
attack. He was seventy-two.
13. Horace
Lawson Hunley invented the submarine. His first prototype trapped
seven sailors underwater and killed them all. Hunley went back to the drawing
board and came up with a new and improved sub, aptly named the H.L. Hunley, which he skippered himself. On October 15,
1863, Hunley was testing the Hunley off the coast of Charleston, South
Carolina, when it failed to surface and again killed the crew — including
Hunley himself.
12. Aurel Vlaicu was a Romanian inventor and test pilot of his own line of aircraft, called the Vlaicu WR I, II, and III. He achieved many notable firsts such as the highest, longest, and fastest flights. On Friday, September 13, 1913, Vlaicu’s luck ran out when he attempted the highest altitude flight ever — crossing the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. The cause of the crash was never determined.
12. Aurel Vlaicu was a Romanian inventor and test pilot of his own line of aircraft, called the Vlaicu WR I, II, and III. He achieved many notable firsts such as the highest, longest, and fastest flights. On Friday, September 13, 1913, Vlaicu’s luck ran out when he attempted the highest altitude flight ever — crossing the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. The cause of the crash was never determined.
11. Valerian
Abakovsky invented the Aerocar, also known as the Aerowagon, which
was a steam-powered, propeller-driven rail car intended to whisk railway
executives quickly across the vast lands of Siberia. On July 24, 1921, the
twenty-five-year-old Abakovsky was whirling a group of twenty-two big-shots
from Tula to Moscow when he approached a curve at over eighty mph. His Aerocar
went airborne and killed six, including the inventor.
10. Marie Curie was
a Polish chemist/physicist who pioneered research into radioactivity and won
the Nobel Prize — twice. Besides proposing the theory of radiation and
discovering two elements, she is credited with inventing radiography or X-rays.
Curie died on July 14, 1934, in a French sanatorium from aplastic anemia due to
long-term exposure to radiation, probably from her habit of carrying test-tubes
of plutonium in her pockets.
9. James
Fuller “Jim” Fixx didn’t exactly invent running but he popularized
it through his mega-bestselling book Complete Book Of Running. Fixx took up the sport after a lifetime of
stress and bad habits. He became a world celebrity on fitness and healthy
living. On the morning of July 20, 1984, he was out for his daily running fix
and fell dead in his tracks on Route 15 in Hardwick, Vermont. His official
cause of death was a fulminant heart attack. The autopsy showed his heart
arteries were 70% blocked in the right anterior descending, 80% blocked in the
left anterior descending, and 95% blocked in the circumflex. Runner Jim Fixx
was fifty-two.
8. Max Valier was
an Austrian rocket scientist who invented solid and liquid fueled missiles.
Given his success with flight, Valier thought it’d be cool to make a
rocket-propelled car. It worked, too, and he got it up to 250 mph. Trying to
get even better, Valier experimented with alcohol as a combustible. That got
away on him and blew up on his workbench, killing Valier and burning his
workshop down.
7. Alexander
Bogdanov was a Russian physician, writer, politician, and inventor
of sorts. He was a major player in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and ended up
in jail. He talked his way out of death row and back into medicine where he
became obsessed with blood. Bogdanov founded the Institute
For Haematology and was convinced that blood transfusion was the ticket to the
fountain of youth. To back up his beliefs, he used himself as a crash-test
dummy and transfused blood from a patient suffering malaria and tuberculosis
into his own system. He died two days later on April 07, 1928, but the patient
slowly got better. It seems that the blood types were incompatible — something
little known in the day.
6. Otto
Lilienthal was known as The Glider King. A German pioneer in
aviation, Lilienthal made over 2,000 glider flights and is credited with
perfecting the gull-wing design and set the long-held record of soaring to 1820
feet. On August 10, 1896, Lilienthal experimented with “shifting weight” in a
glider at fifty feet. It lost lift, stalled, and he augered into the ground,
breaking his neck.
5. Li Si died
in 208 BC at age seventy-two of The
Five Pains. That was a form of
torture or “punishments” involving tattooing the face, cutting off the nose,
cutting off the feet, castration, and finally death by exposure. Li Si was
Prime Minister during China’s Qin Dynasty and fell out of favor with the
Emperor. It should be noted Li Si invented The Five Pains.
4. Henry
Smolinski held a degree in aeronautical engineering from the
Northrup Institute of Technology. Old Hank got the idea that a flying car was
necessary so he bastardized the boxed-wing rear section of a Cessna 337
Skymaster and welded it onto the top of a ‘71 Ford Pinto. He actually got the
thing to fly. On September 11, 1973, Hank took his buddy, Harold Blake, up for
a spin in the Pinto. At around three hundred feet, one of the wings snapped and
the pony-car bucked them off to a fiery death.
3. Abu Nasr
Ismail ibn Hammad a-Jawhari died around 1008 AD at Nishapur which
is in today’s Iraq. He was a Muslim cleric, scholar, and a bit of an inventor.
He was fascinated with flight so he built a pair of feather-covered, wooden
wings and strapped them to his back and arms. To impress the Iman, Mr.
a-Jawhari jumped off the roof of the mosque hoping they’d work. They didn’t,
but to commemorate the first known attempt at human flight, they built a mosaic
mural on the wall of the mosque. It’s actually quite pretty.
2. Wan-Hu may
or may not have been real. Some say he was apocryphal, or doubtful, but one
thing’s for sure, he’s a legend. Wan-Hu was reported to be a 16th-century
Chinese official who tried to shoot himself to the moon by attaching
forty-seven rockets to a chair and lighting them all at once. They say there
was this huge bang and, when the smoke cleared, Wan-Hu and his chair were
nowhere to be found. Today, there’s a crater on the moon named after
Wan-Hu, and I’m not making this up.
1 1. Franz
Reichelt was real, a real stupid sonofabitch if there ever was one.
He was known as The Flying Tailor and is credited with inventing the coat
parachute. To prove it worked, he conned the keepers of the Eiffel Tower to let
him demonstrate. On February 4, 1912, Franz held a major press venue so they
could witness his inaugural jump. He leaped from the first deck and gravity
took over. It was captured on film and today you can watch this moron splat
himself here on YouTube.
(Garry Rodgers/Huffington Post)
(Garry Rodgers/Huffington Post)