Did you know that an entire lighthouse once disappeared with its creator inside? Henry
Winstanley was an inventor and engineer in 17th-century England who built a museum of
mechanical wonders and operated a “water theater” containing fireworks, amongst other
features. With the money he made from these attractions, Winstanley bought five ships,
two of which were promptly wrecked on the Eddystone rocks near Plymouth, England.
Rather than wait for the government to do something about this threat to shipping, in
1696 Winstanley designed a massive lighthouse to mark the dangerous rocks, and received
approval for his design. Over the next few years, he built the granite and wood structure,
anchored by iron stanchions to a bare rock several miles off the coast. It ultimately
stood 115 feet tall from base to weathervane, with 60 candles burning in the glass lantern
room to guide nearby ships.
All went well until the night of November 26th, 1703. A days-long storm, one of the
biggest in British history, was pummeling the English Channel coast. Gale-force winds
and waves carried away Winstanley’s lighthouse with Winstanley in it—and neither was ever
seen again.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of MentalFloss.com, and welcome to The List Show
from my living room. Henry Winstanley is just one of many inventors who were killed by their
own inventions that I’m going to share with you today.
Some of Thomas Midgley, Jr.’s discoveries found widespread use in the 20th century.
The American chemist figured out the compound tetraethyl lead could be added to gasoline
to prevent engine knocking in automobiles, and determined that a certain chlorofluorocarbon
made an excellent refrigerant. Though both of these applications ended up having a terrible
effect on the environment, he received numerous medals for his innovative work as a chemical
company executive and researcher.
But it wasn’t lead poisoning from his gasoline experiments that killed him. At age 51, Midgley
contracted polio and lost the use of his legs. He invented a pulley system over his bed so
he could lift himself into a sitting position. Sadly, on November 2, 1944, Midgley got caught
up in the system’s ropes and was strangled to death.
Thanks to Heads Tails and alarcon99 for pointing us towards Midgley’s sad story. Our next
episode is much more carefree—it’s all about the strange origins of popular songs.
If you know an unexpected story behind a hit song, let us know in the comments for a chance
to be featured in that episode.
Karel Soucek, a Czech-Canadian daredevil, shot to fame in 1984 when he became the first
stuntman in 23 years to survive going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The key was his
custom-designed, plastic and metal cylinder, which he counterweighted at one end so it
would remain upright as he plunged over the falls. After Soucek climbed into the barrel
and his assistants pushed him into the water, he sped downstream at 75 miles an hour. Just
3.2 seconds later, he was at the bottom of the falls, bruised but triumphant.
But things went horribly awry a few months later when, in a new barrel of his own design,
he arranged to be dropped from the roof of the Houston Astrodome into a vat of water.
As Soucek was released from the ceiling, the barrel began to spin off kilter and dropped
180 feet, landing away from the target. Soucek later died at the hospital.
Harry Smolinski also tried to invent a vehicle of sorts. The aeronautical engineer had a
successful career designing jet aircraft and rockets, and in the early 1970s, he became
obsessed with building a flying car. But instead of creating the whole thing from scratch,
Smolinski wanted to design lightweight wings and a tail that could be bolted on to customers’
existing cars for flight, and then removed for regular driving. His prototype was constructed
out of a Cessna twin-engine plane and a Ford Pinto. The team acknowledged that there were
problems with the idea, but proclaimed “… we feel we have the answers.”
Smolinski and a co-pilot took his Ford-Cessna combo out for a spin from California’s Ventura
County Airport on September 11, 1973. Moments after takeoff, the airport manager saw a column
of black smoke rising from the site of a crash. Bad welding and some loose parts were blamed
for the fatal accident.
A lot of inventors have tried to make bicycles, cars, or trains faster, with disastrous results.
Not much is known about William Nelson, who in 1903 was a 24-year-old employee at General
Electric in Schenectady, New York. He worked on inventing a motorized bicycle, and took
it for a test run on a hill opposite his father-in-law’s house in the village of Mapletown. He fell
off the machine and was killed instantly. The New York Times noted, “Nelson was regarded
as an inventor of much promise.”
A Latvia-born Soviet chauffeur named Valerian Ivanovich Abakovsky attempted to create a
high-speed railcar so the Soviet officials he worked for could travel around the vast
country faster. At the time, the Soviet Union was encouraging engineers to experiment with
putting aircraft propellers on trains to speed up land travel. The 25-year-old inventor designed
a streamlined, oval-shaped car fitted with an aircraft engine and a propeller on the
back to increase thrust. He dubbed it the Aerowagon. It could reach a speed of 87 miles
per hour.
On July 24, 1921, Abakovsky and around two dozen passengers boarded the Aerowagon and
traveled safely from Moscow to a city about 120 miles away. On the trip back, however,
the car jumped the track going 70 miles an hour, killing the inventor and five European
diplomats on board. All were buried in a place of honor in the Soviet Union—within the
Kremlin itself.
Max Valier went a step further. In the 1920s, the Austrian aviator became entranced with
the possibilities of space flight and developed a four-part plan for achieving rocket-powered
space travel: the first stage was engine tests, the second was building ground-based rocket-powered
vehicles, the third was developing rocket-powered aircraft, and the fourth step was turning
the aircraft into a spacecraft. Unfortunately, Valier never got past step three.
In 1928, having settled on an engine design, Valier and two colleagues built a rocket car
powered by solid propellant rockets. It reached a speed of 145 miles an hour in test drives.
But to go faster and eventually lift off the ground, Valier experimented with liquid fuels
in his aircraft prototypes. On May 17, 1930, one of them exploded, making Valier the first
casualty of the proto-space age.
When Francis Edgar Stanley was trying to make his own speedy vehicle, he turned to steam
power. With his twin brother Freelan, he began developing a steam-powered car in 1897. By
1899, after establishing the Stanley Motor Carriage Company, the brothers had sold more
than 200 “Stanley Steamers,” making them the most successful automakers in the U.S.
Fueled by water vapor, the open-topped cars were faster than other early vehicles: one
set a speed record for a steam-powered car of nearly 128 miles per hour.
The New York Herald noted, “Mr. Stanley and his brother always drove cars which embodied
the latest handiwork of their plant.” But that handiwork turned lethal on July 31, 1918,
when Francis Stanley’s personal Steamer overturned on Massachusetts’s Newburyport
Turnpike, killing its maker.
It’s not just land-based vehicles that can be deadly. During the Civil War, the Union
navy blockaded southern ports, and the Confederate government offered a $50,000 bounty to anyone
who could sink one of the Union ships. A Confederate engineer named Horace Lawson Hunley accepted
the challenge. In Mobile, Alabama, Hunley worked on two early submarines that failed,
but his third attempt, the H.L. Hunley, proved its worth by sinking an old vessel in a demonstration.
In a later test, however, five men died when the sub filled with water and sank.
Hunley was not deterred. After bringing the sub to Charleston, South Carolina, he mustered
a new crew and continued the trials. During a standard exercise on October 15, 1863, the
Hunley went down with all hands—and this time, its namesake was aboard. But that wasn’t
the end of the sub’s story. Soon after, the submarine was raised from the harbor and
brought into operation in the Confederate fleet.The Hunley did actually become the first
submarine to sink a Union warship, but in doing so, it sank once more, and again the
whole crew died.
If Hunley’s sub sounds cursed, it can’t compare to the mythology of our next invention.
Thomas Andrews was the managing director at Belfast’s Harland & Wolff shipyard and one
of the naval architects of its most luxurious creation, the RMS Titanic.
Andrews went on the maiden voyage of the ship to supervise its performance at sea. The first
three days of the voyage were uneventful, but … you know what happened next. After
the ship hit an iceberg on the night of April 14, 1912, Andrews is said to have observed
the damage with Captain Edward Smith and determined that the vessel had two hours left, at most.
Of course, verifying that account is basically impossible, given the ultimate fate of the
two men, but the mythic overtones of the story have proven tempting to generations of storytellers.
Fact very well may have blended with fiction over the years, but some details of the tragedy
are undeniable. Andrews supposedly searched staterooms to urge skeptical passengers into
lifeboats, knowing full well that there were too few seats for all of them. In the end,
he went down with the Titanic, and his body was never recovered.
Jean François Pilâtre de Rozier, a French chemist, made the first human-powered, untethered
balloon flight in 1783. Designed by the famed Montgolfier brothers, the balloon was fueled
by a fire that heated the air inside the balloon, forcing it aloft.
The downside to the Montgolfiers’ design was the large amount of combustible fuel,
such as hay, that had to be taken aboard. But hay wouldn’t provide enough power to
achieve Rozier’s next goal of flying across the English Channel. He built upon the hot-air
design and added a second balloon filled with hydrogen, a gas that’s lighter than air.
Rozier believed the extra buoyancy could take him across the Channel.
Despite his background in chemistry, Rozier apparently forgot that hydrogen is also extremely
flammable. As he soared across the French countryside on June 15, 1785, something went
terribly wrong. The hydrogen balloon caught fire in mid-air and plummeted to the ground,
making Rozier and his traveling companion the world’s first fatalities in a flight
accident.
Otto Lilienthal was a 19th-century aviation pioneer who was inspired to study wing aerodynamics
after observing birds’ movement. He invented a number of gliders and flying machines at
his workshop near Berlin. One of them, dubbed the “normal glider,” had a 23-foot wingspan;
the person operating the glider held on to supports underneath in a sitting position.
To publicize his inventions, Lilienthal commissioned photographs showing the gliders in action.
But the photos hid one problem: the normal glider was hard to steer.
During a test flight on August 9, 1896, Lilienthal’s glider suddenly stalled and pitched head-first
toward the ground. Lilienthal was unable to regain control, and he crash-landed from a
height of about 50 feet, breaking his neck. He died the next day, though his research
into the mechanics of flight went on to influence the Wright brothers.
Our final inventor in this regrettable category, William Bullock, made some key technological
advances to the printing press. As a newspaper editor in the mid-19th century, Bullock sought
to cut down on the labor required to print the news. He developed a rotary press that
could be continually fed with paper, eliminating the need for constant manual feeding and increasing
output to around 11,000 sheets per hour.
As with many new inventions, though, Bullock’s press could be wonky. On April 2nd, 1867,
he was making adjustments with his foot to a press being installed at another newspaper’s
offices. His leg became tangled in a moving belt and was crushed. A few days later, he
developed gangrene and underwent amputation of his leg. Things got worse from there: he
died from surgical complications.
Hopefully this video was more interesting than it was grisly. Don’t forget to leave
those origins of pop songs in the comments below.
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