Inventions are made by inventors to advance life or in some way make some changes in the world - may it be beneficial or harmful. Many of these inventions have been achieved and completed much to the delight and amusement of their inventions. Not all inventions are done perfectly, however, there are a few occurrences where the inventors make some fatal mistakes and die suddenly before they can complete or appreciate what they have achieved.
These are just some of the inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to the product, process, procedure, or other innovation they have invented or designed.
Automotive
Sylvester Roper with his steam velocipede
Sylvester H. Roper (1823 - 1896) - The Roper steam velocipede's creator passed away in 1896 after suffering a heart attack and then collapsing during a public speed trial. It is unclear if the heart attack precipitated the crash or the crash precipitated the heart attack.
William Nelson (c. 1879 - 1903) - An employee of General Electric came up with a novel approach to motorize bicycles. Then, during a test ride, he crashed off his prototype bike.
Francis Edgar Stanley (1849 - 1918) - While operating a Stanley Steamer car, Francis Edgar Stanley was killed. He was trying to dodge farm carts that were going side by side on the road when he crashed his automobile into a woodpile.
Fred Duesenberg (1876 - 1932) - In a Duesenberg car, Fred Duesenberg perished in a high-speed collision.
Aviation
Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (died c. 1003-1010) - A scholar of Kazakh Turkic descent from Farab made an attempt to soar with a rope and two wooden wings. He died after he fell off the roof of a mosque in Nishapur.
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754–1785) - was the first person to die in an aviation accident, having lost control of his Rozière balloon during an attempt to cross the English Channel with Pierre Romain on June 15, 1785.
Robert Cocking (1776–1837) - killed after the failure of his handmade parachute. Cocking failed to include the weight of the parachute in his calculations.
Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) lost his life due to injuries he received in a hang glider crash.
Percy Pilcher (1867–1899) was killed during a glider mishap; he was unable to demonstrate his powered aircraft.
Franz Reichelt (1879–1912), a tailor died in the first test of his designed coat parachute, falling from the top deck of the Eiffel Tower. While Reichelt had assured the authorities he would use a dummy, he made his leap in front of a video team, confidently strapping himself into the garment at the last minute.
Aurel Vlaicu (1882–1913) was killed while trying to traverse the Carpathian Mountains in his homemade aircraft, the Vlaicu II.
AVE Mizar Flying Car
Henry Smolinski (1933–1973) lost his life during an AVE Mizar test flight. The AVE Mizar was the company's only product and it was a flying automobile built on the Ford Pinto.
Ligeti Stratos aircraft
Charles Ligeti (d. 1987) was killed in a crash in 1987 while testing new closed-wing modifications for his Ligeti Stratos aircraft.
Michael Dacre (1956–2009) perished following a collision that happened during the testing of his flying taxi.
Chemistry
Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist who was recognized for discovering radioactive polonium and for her groundbreaking work in radiation. She passed away on July 4, 1934, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, Haute-Savoie, France. It is thought that she suffered from aplastic anemia as a result of prolonged radiation exposure, part of which came from the gadgets she invented.
Industrial
William Bullock (1813–1867) created the printing press with a rotary web. His foot was crushed during the installation of a new machine in Philadelphia, a few years after its creation. Bullock passed away during the amputation because of gangrene that developed in the crushed foot.
Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky (1883–1928) was the creator of the luminescent paint that, based on radioactive radium (which Pierre and Marie Curie had already found), was used for clocks in the early 20th century. He was one of the founders of the United States Radium Corporation, where radium poisoning claimed the lives of a few employees. It is said that his creation also claimed his life; aplastic anemia finally claimed his life.
Maritime
Offshore Lighthouse designed by Winstanley
Henry Winstanley (1644–1703) - Between 1696 and 1698, the world's first offshore lighthouse was designed and constructed by Winstanley on Devon, England's Eddystone Rocks. Claiming to have invented something safe, he said he would like to take refuge in it "during the greatest storm there ever was". Winstanley and the other five men were inside the lighthouse when it was totally devastated by the Great Storm of 1703. They were nowhere to be located.
John Day (c. 1740–1774) was a wheelwright and carpenter from England who passed away while testing his unique diving chamber.
Submarine Torpedo Boat H.L Hunley dated December 6, 1863, and painted by Conrad Wise Chapman in 1864
Horace Lawson Hunley (1823–1863) was a maritime engineer from Confederate America who constructed the H. L. Hunley submarine and died within it as one of the second crew members to sink while testing the prototype ship. Following Hunley's demise, the Confederates raised the ship again for an additional mission during the American Civil War that ultimately proved deadly for its own crew: the USS Housatonic was successfully sunk. The achievement made the H. The first submarine to sink an enemy warship during a war was L. Hunley.
Karl Flach and his son
Flach submarine
Karl Flach (1821–1866) was a German residing in Chile's Valparaiso. In reaction to Valparaíso's bombing, he built the submarine Flach (brother of the Peruvian "Toro"), which the Chilean Navy sank, refloated, and then vanished (these events occurred during the Saltpeter War). The Chilean government requested this build. Along with his kid and other sailors, he perished when the submarine failed to surface.
A wreck Sub Marine Explorer
Julius H. Kroehl (1820–1867), a German-American inventor and former contractor for the Union Navy, he is said to have passed away from decompression sickness following experimental dives with the Sub Marine Explorer, which he and his business partner Ariel Patterson co-designed and built.
Coles' design for double turret ship
HMS Captain
Cowper Phipps Coles (1819–1870) was a captain in the Royal Navy who perished in the sinking of HMS Captain, a masted turret ship he designed, along with about 480 other people.
William Pitt (1841–1909) was a Canadian ferryman who created the underwater cable ferry as an upgrade to the previous vessel that connected New Brunswick's Kennebecasis Valley and Kingston Peninsula. Pitt died in 1909 from injuries he received when he fell into the machinery of his ferries.
Thomas Andrews (1873–1912), the Titanic's naval architect, created his renowned ship while holding the positions of managing director and head of the drafting department at Belfast, Ireland's Harland & Wolff shipbuilding firm. He was a passenger on the Titanic when it sank on April 14, 1912, along with about 1,500 other people after hitting an iceberg. The remains of Andrews were never found.
Stockton Rush (1962–2023) was a businessman, engineer, and pilot who directed the building of the OceanGate submersible Titan, which sent people to see the Titanic wreck. Rush and four other passengers perished when the craft collapsed on June 18, 2023, during a dive into the Titanic. Rush had vehemently defended his uncontrolled design for years, saying that "at some point, safety is just pure waste. I mean, if you just want to be safe, don't get out of bed, don't get in your car, don't do anything."
Medical
Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was a pioneering haemotologist, polymath, and Bolshevik revolutionary from Russia who established the first Institute of Blood Transfusion in 1926. After performing an experimental reciprocal blood transfusion between himself and a 21-year-old student who had an inactive case of tuberculosis, he passed away from an acute hemolytic transfusion response. Bogdanov believed that the student's illness might be cured by his own blood, which he thought was immune to tuberculosis, and that the younger man's blood would revitalize his own aged body.
Thomas Midgley Jr. (1889–1944) was a 51-year-old American chemist and engineer who developed polio, severely crippling him. He came up with a complex system of pulleys and ropes to assist others in getting him out of bed. He was 55 years old when he died from strangulation after being tangled in the ropes. He is more well-known, though, for two other inventions: chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and the tetraethyl lead (TEL) addition for gasoline.
Publicity and Entertainment
Karel Soucek and his Shock-Absorbent Barrel
Karel Soucek (1947–1985) was a Canadian-based professional stuntman from the Czech Republic who invented the shock-absorbing barrel. He passed away after a stunt in which the barrel was dumped from the Houston Astrodome's roof. When his barrel struck the edge of the water tank intended to cushion his fall, he suffered mortal injuries.
Railway
Webster Wagner (1817–1882) was killed in a train accident, wedged between two of his inventions, the sleeper cars.
Henri Thuile (died 1900) - During a test drive between Chartres and Orléans, the creator of the massive, fast-moving Thuile steam locomotive, passed away. There are differing reports that state he was either flung from the derailing locomotive and struck a telegraph pole or that he leaned too far and smashed his head on a piece of bridge scaffolding, which resulted in his instant death.
Aerowagon
Valerian Abakovsky (1895–1921) built the Aerowagon, a high-speed train prototype featuring a propeller traction system and an aviation engine designed to transport Soviet elites. It crashed hard on July 24, 1921, killing seven of the twenty-two people on board, including Abakovsky.
Rocketry
Max Valier (1895–1930) joined the German rocket society Verein für Raumschiffahrt in the 1920s and invented liquid-fueled rocket engines. He was instantaneously killed on May 17, 1930, on his test bench in Berlin when an alcohol-fueled engine burst.
Mike Hughes (1956–2020) was killed while operating his homemade steam-powered rocket during a crash landing when the parachute failed to release.
Popular Legends and Related Stories
According to Greek mythology, Daedalus constructed blankets and feathers for his son Icarus's wings so they might escape the labyrinth of Crete. Icarus perished after disobeying his father's warning not to "fly too close to the sun."
Perillos of Athens (c. 550 BCE), was the first, so the story goes, to be burned in the brazen bull he fashioned for Phalaris of Sicily, which he used to execute criminals.
Li Si (208 BCE), Prime Minister during the Qin dynasty, was carried out using the Five Pains technique, which some sources say he invented. But compared to Li Si, the history of the Five Pains may be traced back further.
Wan Hu, a possibly apocryphal 16th-century Chinese official, is reported to have tried launching himself into space on a chair equipped with 47 rockets. It is believed that when the rockets detonated, neither he nor the chair were ever seen again.
João Torto, a presumably fictional 16th-century Portuguese man donning an eagle-shaped helmet and a flying rig akin to that of a biplane who sprang from the top of Viseu Cathedral.
William Brodie, "Deacon Brodie" of 18th-century Edinburgh, is said to have been the first person to fall prey to a novel kind of gallows, of which he was both the creator and the builder, however, this seems unlikely.
"Was not the good Dr. Guillotin executed by his own neat invention?" is a question posed by William Makepeace Thackeray's narrator, Pendennis, in The Adventures of Philip. However, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was neither the creator of the guillotine nor the person who was executed by it.
Jimi Heselden (1948–2010) was killed while riding a Segway scooter. While he owned the company Segway Inc., he did not invent the Segway.
Source:
"Killed By Own Invention – While Trying Motor Bicycle He Had Made, Schenectady Man Meets Death". The New York Times. 4 October 1903. Retrieved 22 November 2014.
Boitani, Piero (2007). Winged words: flight in poetry and history. University of Chicago Press. p. 38. ISBN 978-0-226-06561-8. Retrieved 22 November 2014 – via Google Books.
Ralph S. Cooper, D.V.M. "Aurel Vlaicu at www.earlyaviators.com". Retrieved 22 November 2014.
"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". The New York Times. 1928-11-15. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-07-10.
"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". The New York Times. 1928-11-15. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-07-10.
"Sub Marine Explorer". Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 2010. Retrieved 2021-03-31.
Wright, Julia (12 October 2023). "Ferry tale: How cable ferries became a way of life in southern N.B." CBC News. Retrieved 11 December 2023.
McShane, Asher. ""Safety is just pure waste": Lost Titanic sub's creator made chilling comment in 2022 interview as search becomes "bleak"". LBC. Retrieved 3 July 2023.
Krementsov, Nikolai (2011). A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. pp. 99–100. ISBN 978-0-226-45412-2.
"35,000 Watch as Barrel Misses Water Tank: 180-Ft. Drop Ends in Stunt Man's Death". Los Angeles Times. Associated Press. 21 January 1985. Retrieved 18 August 2012.
"Meeting a Terrible Fate – Nine Persons Crushed and Burned in a Collision – A Train Crashing Into the Rear of the Atlantic Express – Nine, Perhaps Twelve, Victims Caught in the Burning Cars – State Senator Wagner Among the Dead – Narrow Escape of Many Others – Terrible Scene at the Wreck". New York Times. January 14, 1882. p. 1. Retrieved 16 October 2016.
Silverman, Hollie (February 23, 2020). "Daredevil 'Mad Mike' Hughes dies while attempting to launch a homemade rocket". CNN. Retrieved 23 February 2020.
Guisso, R. W. L., The first emperor of China, New York : Birch Lane Press, 1989. ISBN 1-55972-016-6. Cf. p.37