List of people killed by their own inventions

This is a list of the inventors whose demise was triggered or influenced by their inventions.

Franz Reichelt (died. 1912) jumped from the Eiffel Tower, expecting his coat to function as a parachute

Direct consequences of death

Road vehicles

• Sylvester H. Roper , creator of the Roper steam bike , died in 1896 of a heart attack while attempting to speed in public . It is unknown whether the heart attack caused the accident or vice versa
• William Nelson (1879–1903), an employee at General Electric , devised a new way of motorizing two-wheelers . During a test drive, he fell off his vehicle and died.
• Francis Edgar Stanley (1849–1918) died in an accident at the wheel of a Stanley Steamer car. While trying to avoid two farm wagons driving side by side, he collided with a pile of wood.
• Fred Duesenberg (1876–1932) died in a high-speed accident in a Duesenberg .

aviation

• Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (died 1003-1010), a Kazakh scholar from Farab , tried to fly with two wooden wings and a rope. He fell to his death jumping from a mosque in Nishapur .
• Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was the first person to be killed in aviation history on June 15, 1785, when he tried to cross the English Channel in a balloon of the type named after him and his balloon went up in flames.
• Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) died one day after an accident with his hang glider .
• Franz Reichelt (1879–1912), a tailor , fell to his death from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower during the first test of his jacket parachute . He had announced to authorities that he would first want to test with a life-size doll .
• Aurel Vlaicu (1882–1913) died when his self-made plane Vlaicu II crashed while attempting to cross the Carpathian Mountains
• Henry Smolinski (died 1973) was killed during a test flight with the AVE Mizar , a flying car based on a Ford Pinto . This was the only product from the company he founded.
• Michael Dacre (deceased in 2009, aged 53) died after testing his aircraft that he had designed to travel between cities quickly and cheaply.

chemistry

• Andrei Zheleznyakov , a Soviet scientist, developed chemical weapons . Due to the malfunction of a fume cupboard in his laboratory, he was exposed to traces of the neurotoxin Novitschok 5 in 1987 . As a result, he was in a coma for weeks , could not walk for months and had to struggle with the consequences for years until he died of the long-term effects in 1992/3.

Industry

• William Bullock (1813–1867) invented rotary printing . A few years later, while installing a new press in Philadelphia , his foot was crushed and developed gangrene . Bullock died during the amputation

seafaring

Hunley Submarine

• Henry Winstanley (1644–1703) built the first Eddystone lighthouse in Devon (England) between 1696 and 1698 . During the great storm of 1703 , he stayed inside with five other men. All of them died when the lighthouse was completely destroyed by the storm.
• Horace Lawson Hunley (deceased in 1863, aged 40), a Confederate inventor drowned with a crew of seven other members during a test drive with his invention, the first combat submarine in history, later renamed HL Hunley .
• Thomas Andrews, Jr. (1873-1912) was an Irish born businessman and shipbuilder . He was Managing Director and Head of Planning at Harland and Wolff Shipyard in Belfast , Ireland. As the ship technician responsible for planning , he was on board the RMS Titanic when it hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912 and sank on its maiden voyage. Andrews died along with 1,500 other passengers.

medicine

• Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was a Russian doctor, philosopher and revolutionary of Belarusian origin who experimented with blood transfusions with the aim of eternal youth or rejuvenation. He died of malaria and tuberculosis after receiving a blood transfusion from a student with these diseases, who may also have an incompatible blood type .
• Thomas Midgley, Jr. (1889–1944) was an American engineer and chemist who became infected with poliomyelitis at the age of 51 and was severely disabled afterwards. He developed a complex system of ropes and pulleys to make it easier for others to get him out of bed. He was accidentally entangled and strangled in these ropes . He is better known for inventing tetraethyl lead as a fuel additive and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs).

physics

• Sabin Arnold von Sochocky invented the first radium-based luminous paint and died in 1928 of aplastic anemia resulting from his exposure to radiation.

entertainment

• Karel Soucek (1947–1985) was a Canadian stuntman who developed an acceleration- absorbing barrel . When he let himself be thrown from the roof of the NRG Astrodome in it, the barrel hit the edge of the water basin below. He sustained fatal injuries.

railroad

• Valerian Abakovsky (1895–1921) designed the Aerowagon, a highly experimental rail vehicle with an aircraft turbine and propeller drive , which was supposed to transport officials in the Soviet Union . On July 24, 1921, the vehicle derailed at high speed, with 6 out of 22 people on board, including Abakovsky, dying.

Rocket technology

• Max Valier (1895–1930) invented liquid-propelled rockets for the Raumschiffahrt association in the 1920s , and on May 17, 1930, an engine that he had filled with paraffin for the Shell company exploded on his test bench in Berlin. He died instantly.
• "Mad" Mike Hughes (1956–2020) died when the parachute of the rocket with which he wanted to fly to 1,500 m to prove that the earth was flat, did not open and the rocket crashed on the ground.

Known Myths and Related Stories

Perilaos is pushed into the Sicilian bull

• Perilaos , was an ancient Greek ore caster from Athens . He lived around the middle of the 6th century BC. He became known for building the Sicilian bull for the Sicilian ruler Phalaris of Akragas . In this legendary torture tool, Phalaris is said to have roasted the creator Perilaos as the first victim.
• Jimi Heselden took over Segway Inc. , which manufactured the Segway Personal Transporter , in 2009 . He had a fatal accident with one of these scooters on September 26, 2010 at the age of 62 when he fell down a cliff.

See also

• Darwin Award - Award for people who have removed themselves from the human gene pool through their own " stupidity"

Further reading

• Ebenezer Cobham Brewer: Inventors Punished by their own inventions. In: Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Bartleby, 1898, pp. 657-658 , accessed July 11, 2020 . 

Web links

• John Redford's "Doomed Engineers" page

Individual evidence

1. ^ Died in the Saddle . In: Boston Daily Globe . June 2, 1896, p. 1 .
2. ^ Killed By Own Invention - While Trying Motor Bicycle He Had Made, Schenectady Man Meets Death . In: New York Times . October 4, 1903 ( online [accessed April 3, 2020]).
3. ↑ Maine: A Guide "Down East" . In: Doris A. Isaacson (Ed.): Maine League of Historical Societies and Museums . Courier-Gazette, Inc., Rockland, Maine 1970, pp. 386 ( online [accessed April 3, 2020]).
4. ↑ F. S½. Duesenberg Dies of Auto Injury . In: New York Times . July 27, 1923, p. 17 .
5. ↑ Piero Boitani: Winged words: flight in poetry and history . University of Chicago Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-226-06561-8 , pp. 500 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
6. ^ Short Biography of Otto Lilienthal , Otto Lilienthal Museum
7. ↑ Inventions resulting in death , on tagesspiegel.de, accessed on April 3, 2020
8. ↑ 2003 Personal Accounts , Darwin Awards
9. ↑ GB191026658A An Improved Flying Machine. , at worldwide.espacenet.com, accessed April 4, 2020
10. ↑ Mihai Radu: Aurel Vlaicu. earlyaviators.com, accessed November 22, 2014 . 
11. ^ Neil Morris: From Fail to Win, Learning from Bad Ideas: Transportation . Raintree, 2010, ISBN 978-1-4109-3911-1 , pp. 56 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
12. ↑ British inventor dies in crash on test flight of his flying taxi. The Evening Standard, accessed April 4, 2020 . 
13. ↑ 'It's got me': the lonely death of the Soviet scientist poisoned by novichok. The Guardian, accessed March 2, 2018 . 
14. ↑ United States Patent 61996. Retrieved November 22, 2014 . 
15. ↑ United States Patent 100,367. Retrieved November 22, 2014 . 
16. ↑ Inventors killed by their own inventions. In: Discovery . Retrieved October 30, 2010 . 
17. ^ Eddystone Lighthouse History. (No longer available online.) Eddystone Tatler Ltd, archived from the original on May 2, 2006 ; Retrieved September 7, 2006 . 
18. ^ John Whipple: The Birth of Undersea Warfare - HL Hunley. (No longer available online.) In: Undersea Warfare: The Official Magazine of the US Submarine Force. United States Navy September 17, 2011, archived from the original on October 16, 2012 ; accessed on July 11, 2020 . 
19. ^ Transfusion Medical Reviews . 2007, p. 337-340 .
20. ↑ Huestis DW: Alexander Bogdanov: the forgotten pioneer of blood transfusion . In: Transfus Med Rev . tape 21 , no. 4 , 2007, p. 337-340 , doi : 10.1016 / j.tmrv.2007.05.008 , PMID 17900494 .
21. ↑ Bryson, Bill . A Short History of Nearly Everything . (2003) Broadway Books, US. ISBN 0-385-66004-9
22. ^ Alan Bellows: The Ethyl-Poisoned Earth. In: Damn Interesting. December 8, 2007, accessed July 11, 2020 . 
23. ↑ Milestones, Nov. 13, 1944. (No longer available online.) In: Time . November 13, 1944, archived from the original on December 14, 2008 ; accessed on July 11, 2020 . 
24. ^ Radium paint takes its inventor's life; Dr. Sabin A. von Sochocky Ill a Long Time, Poisoned by Watch Dial Luminant. 13 Blood Transfusions. Death Due to Aplastic Anemia - Women Workers Who Were Stricken Sued Company . In: The New York Times . November 15, 1928.
25. ↑ 35,000 Watch as Barrel Misses Water Tank: 180-Ft. Drop Ends in Stunt Man's Death . In: Los Angeles Times . January 21, 1985 ( online [accessed August 18, 2012]).
26. ↑ Alexey Abramov / Алексей Абрамов By the Kremlin Wall / У кремлёвской стены Moscow / М., Politizdat / Политиздат 1978 pp./стр. 399 (Russian)
27. ↑ American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 26, 2011 ; Retrieved November 22, 2014 . 
28. ↑ Hollie Silverman: Daredevil 'Mad Mike' Hughes dies while attempting to launch a homemade rocket. In: CNN. February 23, 2020, accessed February 23, 2020 . 
29. ↑ "Mad Mike" dies in a self-made rocket. Retrieved April 3, 2020 . 
30. ↑ Perillos of the Brazen Bull. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on December 16, 2012 ; Retrieved July 25, 2010 . 
31. ^ The Brazen Bull. Retrieved October 1, 2011 . 
32. ↑ Peter Martos: Jimi Heselden: The man who bought Segway. April 23, 2010, accessed April 3, 2020 . 
33. ↑ Fatal scooter accident: Segway boss falls down a cliff. In: Der Spiegel. Retrieved April 3, 2020 .