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List of inventors killed by their own inventions
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This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.
[edit] Direct casualties
- Thomas Andrews (1873 – 1912) died with 1,516 others when his innovative, "unsinkable" design for the RMS Titanic proved to be much more sinkable than he had anticipated.
- Alexander Bogdanov (1873 – 1928), a physician and scientist, conducted an experiment with a "rejuvenation" technique wherein he deliberately gave himself a transfusion of blood from a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis. He died shortly afterwards as those two diseases ravaged his unrejuvenated body.
- William Bullock (1813 – 1867) had his foot crushed by one of the rotary printing presses he had invented as he tried to repair the machine. The resulting infection later proved fatal.
- Cowper Phipps Coles (1819 – 1870), a Royal Navy officer, pressured the Admiralty into building his HMS Captain, a turret ship of revolutionary but deeply flawed design, over the objections of the Navy's Chief Constructor and others that the ship would be top-heavy and over-canvassed, and thus liable to capsize in high winds. A windy night in September 1870, less than five months after the Captain was commissioned, showed the ship's detractors to be quite correct and sent the ill-fated vessel, Captain Coles, and about 480 other officers and men to a watery grave.
- Marie Curie (1867 – 1934) invented the process to isolate radium after co-discovering the radioactive elements radium and polonium. She died of aplastic anemia as a result of prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation emanating from her research materials. Radiation's dangers were not yet well understood at the time.
- Ismail ibn Hammad al-Javhari (died ca. 1003–1010), a Turkic scholar from Farab, attempted to fly using two wooden wings and a rope. He leapt from the roof of a mosque in Nijabur and flew for some time before eventually falling to his death.[citation needed]
- Horace Lawson Hunley (1823 – 1863), a Confederate marine engineer during the American Civil War, drowned along with the rest of the crew of his experimental submarine when it failed to surface during an exercise.
- Otto Lilienthal (1848 – 1896), lingered for two days and then died from injuries sustained in a crash of one of his hang gliders.
- Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889 – 1944), the inventor of leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons, might well have died from the severe case of polio he had contracted, possibly in part due to his immune system having being weakened by lead poisoning and exposure to other chemicals in the course of his distinguished chemistry career. However, the pulley-operated system he designed to help move his debilitated body into and out of bed killed him first, entangling him in one of its cords and strangling him to death at the age of 55.
- William Nelson (ca. 1879 − 1903), a General Electric employee, invented a new way to motorize bicycles. He then fell off his prototype bike during a test run and died. [1]
- J. G. Parry-Thomas (1884-1927), Welsh engineer and race car driver, died while attempting to set the land speed record. He had designed his car, Babs, with exposed drive chains, and when one of them broke at 170 mph (270 km/h), it either decapitated or nearly decapitated Parry-Thomas, depending on the account.
- Franz Reichelt (1800s – 1912), a tailor, fell to his death off the first deck of the Eiffel Tower while testing his invention, the coat parachute. It was his first ever attempt with the parachute and he had told the authorities in advance he would test it first with a dummy. [2]
- Henry Smolinski (died 1973), engineer and entrepreneur, was killed along with pilot Harold Blake after the prototype of Smolinski's flying car, the Pinto-based AVE Mizar, suddenly lost its wings during a test flight, plummeted to the ground, and exploded into flames.
- Aurel Vlaicu (1882 – 1913) died when his self-constructed airplane, Vlaicu II, failed him during an attempt to cross the Carpathian Mountains by air.
- Henry Winstanley (1644 – 1703) was killed in a storm while sheltering inside a lighthouse of his own design, after expressing a wish to be inside it during "the greatest storm there ever was." The lighthouse was completely destroyed in the tempest, now known as the Great Storm of 1703, which was indeed one of the most severe storms ever to hit southern England, before or since.
[edit] Honorable mention
These inventors, though not directly killed by their inventions, still suffered ironic deaths as a result of their inventive activities.
- Perillos of Athens (died ca. 570 – 554 BC) was commissioned to build an execution/torture device by Phalaris, Tyrant of Agrigentum, called the Brazen Bull. The Brazen Bull was essentially a "human crucible" which burned the condemned alive. A complicated series of tubes made the screams of the dying man sound like the bellowing of a bull. To test the invention, Phalaris actually locked Perillos inside and set a fire under the bull. Although he removed the inventor before he could die, Phalaris killed him afterward by throwing him from the top of a hill. Phalaris himself is said to have been killed in the Brazen Bull when he was overthrown by Telemachus. Thus, although the inventor was not killed by his invention, he was killed as a result of his invention, and his employer was killed by it.
- Roland Garros (1888 – 1918), an aviator for France during World War I, collaborated with Morane-Saulnier to design armored deflector wedges for airplane propellers which would allow machine guns to be shot straight forward, through spinning propeller blades, without destroying the propellers in the process. Such a capability would allow pilots to kill one another much more efficiently than had theretofore been possible. In mid-April 1915, after experiencing a few weeks of combat success testing the prototype of his new design, Garros's experimental plane went down behind enemy lines, and both Garros and his aircraft were captured by the Germans.
An inspection of Garros's incompletely-destroyed plane inspired Anthony Fokker to improve on Garros's idea, an effort which culminated in Fokker's interrupter gear design, which allowed an airplane's guns to fire rounds through spinning propeller blades without hitting them at all. The interrupter gear soon became a ubiquitous feature on German fighters and was quickly adopted by other Central Powers air services and reverse-engineered by the Allies for their own planes. Meanwhile, after languishing as a prisoner of war for nearly three years, Garros managed to escape from captivity and rejoin his countrymen in early 1918. Garros elected to return to flight duty for the Aéronautique Militaire as the war neared its close, only to be shot down and killed a month before the war's end by a German pilot using Fokker's now-universal improvement on Garros's bright idea.
[edit] Popular myths
- Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738 – 1814), While he did not invent the guillotine, his name became an eponym for it. Rumors circulated that he died by the machine, but historical references show that he died of natural causes in 1814.[3]
- The Biblical Haman (ca. 5th Century BC) did not invent the gallows — he was simply hanged on the particular gallows he had built. Many translations and texts do not, in fact, mention a gallows at all, but impalement as the form of execution.
- Wan Hu (died ca. 1500), a minor officer in the Ming Dynasty, is said to have died while trying to launch himself into space using a rocket. The story is apocryphal.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] Further reading
- E. Cobham Brewer (1898). "Inventors Punished by their own inventions". Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Bartleby. pp. 657–658. http://www.bartleby.com/81/8916.html.
