6 Inventors Who Were Killed By Their Own Inventions

consider for a moment a lead line box in the Vault of the National Library in Paris inside you'll find a simple set of notebooks only a few people are allowed to handle these books and even they have to wear protective gear and can only handle them for a little bit at a time these measures might seem normal important documents are often subject to Extreme Measures keep them safe the difference here is that these rules aren't in place to protect the documents is to protect the people handling them that's because these notebooks belong to Mary Curie Mary Curie was of course the chemist who discovered radium and radioactivity in general while she was at it she was seriously one of the most impressive scientists in the modern age to this day she's the only person that's won a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines chemistry and physics and yet there's so much she didn't know like the dangers of the radioactivity she discovered she handled radium and other radioactive materials with her bare hands leading her to sadly develop aplastic anemia and died at the age of 66. and yeah her notebooks which she handled right alongside the radioactive material she was studying remained dangerously radioactive to this day it's a prime example of someone who got a little too close to their work and paid the ultimate price for it so today let's take a look at some other inventors who were killed by their own inventions [Music] compile this list I had to kind of create some ground rules to Define what exactly it means to be an inventor to be honest starting things off with Mary Curie might be a bit disingenuous because she didn't invent radium she just discovered it I mean that thing with the notebooks is crazy right so yeah I cut out people like stunt men Daredevils and other inventors that were so incredibly Reckless and overconfident their end was inevitable friends reichelt I'm looking at you some of these guys were genuinely trying to advance the human race others were just trying to one-up other people and some maybe got what they deserved I'll let you be the judge of that some might say that our first story uh falls into that category first up is Thomas Midgley Jr Thomas measley Jr might be the best example of a looking to make a buck inventor and he's possibly the least sympathetic character in this video and um it's also maybe the oddest most non-sequitur ending of them all um if you laugh I won't judge you I've talked about Midgley before in my video about the Montreal protocol he's the guy at General Motors who developed leaded gasoline that poisoned the air and then chlorofluorocarbons that you know put a giant hole in the sky well done you in fact it's been said that no single human being in history has caused more harm to the environment than Thomas measly Jr and you might say that's not fair because he couldn't have possibly foreseen the unintended consequences of these things but he probably knew at least the leaded gas was a bad idea um multiple workers died at his chemical plants and Midgley himself got lead poisoning so bad he had to take a leave of absence from his job to recover from it so I mean he knew but he pushed it anyway so in 1940 he was stricken with polio and the disease eventually progressed to the point that he couldn't get in and out of bed by himself anymore but you know being a resourceful clever guy and not wanting to have to rely on other people he kind of developed this pulley and swing system that allowed him to lift himself up and then swing himself over to the bed without needing somebody else's help and just like a lot of his other inventions he was smart enough to create it but maybe not smart enough to survive it one day in 1944 he managed to get twisted up in the harness one of the ropes got wrapped around his neck and he died of strangulation at the age of 55. at least that's the official story there is an argument that maybe he was lucky that he died before he was able to see the damage that he caused but um you know considering the reputation that he had and his ability to kind of compartmentalize the consequences of his inventions I'm not sure he ever would have seen it that way next up is John Francis de Rose before I get into this one I would like to extend an apology to the entire country of France the entire french-speaking world for my pronunciation during this segment just it's gonna be bad sorry so de Rosier was a chemist um kind of like Midgley but 200 years earlier he was also a physicist and a contemporary of the Mongolia brothers who were early Pioneers in balloon flight uh you might remember them from my airships video anyway in June of 1783 de Rosier watched an unpiloted test of a Mongolia hot air balloon and he was hooked in September of that year he helped the brothers impress King Louis XVI by sending up a sheep a duck and a rooster on a balloon flight then they all walked into a bar and a hilarious joke ensued too many jokes anyway de Rosier started stepping up his balloon game and started making his own flights on November 21st of 1783 he became the first person to Pilot a hot air balloon without a safety tether other balloonists followed and soon a race started to see who could be the first to cross the English Channel on a balloon derosier um didn't win it was actually a fellow Frenchman named John Pierre Juan saw Blanchard who got there in the first time in January of 1785. now there is an asterisk on Blanchard's flight though because he was piloting a hydrogen balloon which was lighter than a hot air version and even then he had to dump all of his extra weight to make it across including his food and his pants uh that makes for pretty awkward celebration at the Landing point so de Rosier wasn't the first one to cross but he thought maybe he could be the first one to make it across with his junk cupboard so he kept soldering on now he still wanted to make it across using hot air because of the buoyancy and control that it provides but seeing that somebody else could have done it in a hydrogen vehicle that it was already something that was proven to work he developed something of a compromise he invented a hybrid balloon where part of that lift was generated by hydrogen and powered by hot air hot air warmed with an open flame where could this be going now before I get into the um inevitable conclusion to this story I should point out that hybrid balloons are totally a thing and they still work to this day and they are named after him they're called Rosies and they're kind of awesome Rosie A's fly a lot further with a lot less fuel in fact the very first balloon to make it all the way around the world did so in a Rosier that would happen centuries after this story of course I should also point out that modern rosiers use helium instead of hydrogen and here's why so truth be told there are actually conflicting reports as to what happened exactly on rozier's Final flight some say it burst into flame some say it didn't but pretty much everybody agrees that it got blown off course but either way the balloon plunged to the ground killing Rozier and his co-pilot who also happened to be his brother so there is an artist's impression of the crash that shows an unburnt balloon so it might not have caught fire of course that artist might have just been trying to be kind there is one account that suggests that hydrogen leaked out because of a faulty valve a problem that has apparently never been solved however they died the wreck made John Francois that Rosier and his brother the first fatalities in the history of manned Aviation they were of course far from the last as our next Story shows allow me to introduce you to Harry smolinski the inventor of the flying Pinto the Ford Motor Company introduced the pinto in 1970. it was a cheap Sub-Compact car that some poor souls considered sporty later it would develop a reputation for exploding after a relatively minor impacts [Applause] foreign but to be fair in 1973 these problems hadn't quite cropped up yet so when Harry's malinski had the idea of converting a car into a Plane by attaching a wing and engines to it the pinto seemed like the perfect fit and to be more fair he was the right guy to do it he had a Degree in Aeronautical Engineering and he worked for nine years at Rocketdyne so I mean he knew his stuff so we started a company called Advanced vehicle Engineers hoping to sell modified pintos with detachable airframes for fifteen thousand dollars the equivalent of a hundred thousand dollars today the idea being you know you drive your Pinto around like a normal car but then if you say wanted to fly somewhere and just drive to the airport attach the airframe and in 30 minutes or so you're in the air I mean it's not the worst flying car idea your name is prototype the Ave Mazar after a double star in the Big Dipper and it lifted off for the first time on August 26 1973. it did get off the ground but it wasn't a perfect flight uh the right wing started wobbling and the pilot couldn't get the the thing to turn so he just kind of flew the car straight and then eventually just kind of landed in the field so they worked on the problem and a couple weeks later the Mazar was ready for another test the pilot wasn't available at the time so smilinski decided to just fly it himself this time he brought his business partner along a guy named Hal Blake so the air traffic controller watched the pinto take off but after taking a turn he said he saw the wing fail and pretty spectacularly apparently he said he saw parts scattering everywhere the car took a dive clipped a tree slammed into a pickup truck and exploded any kidding inside the crash did Kill Harry smolinski and Hal Blake and with them any dream there might have been of a flying Pinto the company folded and the flying cars remained just Out Of Reach ever since next up is Valerian avena Vincent bakowsky so Soviet inventor of valerian Nevada had a similar idea but instead of a flying car he tried to invent a flying train sort of 1920s Russia was a land of opportunity for young Engineers the Bolshevik government was eager to modernize the country and also show off their technological prowess plus it's a giant country so they were eager to improve their transportation infrastructure avakovsky was a chauffeur when he was in engineering so maybe he was just kind of chilling in his limo when he first wrote about a German attempt to create a high-speed locomotive with a propeller the idea didn't really go anywhere in Germany because the strict sanctions at the time after World War One made it hard to get parts but epikovsky realized he'd have no trouble with that in Russia so he pitched the idea got enthusiastic funding from the government for all the reasons I just mentioned and the arrow wagon was born and it really was kind of like a combination of a plane and a train and they actually got it up to 140 kilometers an hour in tests so in July of 1921 the arrow wagon set off on its first inaugural trip and actually got a huge vote of confidence from the Soviet state because they had several high-ranking party officials on board feel like it's worth mentioning that ebukovsky was only 24 years old at the time they set off in the morning of July 24th with 22 people on board including abekovsky and those hiring banking officials they made their way from Moscow to Tula the distance of 193 kilometers at an average speed of 40 to 45 kilometers an hour about the same as trains go today great success it was on the return trip when everything went sideways and it happened for the same reason that a lot of things went wrong in the Soviet era the party officials wanted something and nobody had the power to say no reportedly the VIPs were tired and wanted to get home so they insisted that they go faster it's unknown how abakovsky felt about it but they doubled the speed to over 80 kilometers an hour and it was at this speed when the Aero wagon derailed six of the 22 passengers died at the scene including abekovsky himself when man died later and this would go down as the worst train plane hybrid accident until Star Screen through Megatron from Astro train in the Transformers movie [Applause] in all seriousness though it was a devastating blow the Russians abandoned the arrow wagon as a concept until 1970 and no model ever left the lab after that now in abachovsky's defense there are some that think that this wasn't his fault in fact some think that this whole thing was sabotaged there was a guy named artem federovich Serge who was the son of one of the VIPs that died and he claimed that the train was intentionally derailed to get rid of some of these high-ranking officials yeah he was actually taken in by Stalin after his father died so he might have had access to information that others wouldn't and it certainly wouldn't be the first or last time that some high-ranking Russian officials you know had an accident go back another 60 years or so and you get the story of Horus Lawson Hundley the inventor of the first submarine the time was the American Civil War and the Confederates are being crippled by Union blockades of their ports which prevented weapons and supplies from reaching the troops yeah the situation got so desperate they began offering bounties on Union warships a single ship could bring a bounty of 50 000 Confederate dollars which would be worth like a million or so today if you know Confederate dollars are worth anything but that was enough money to get Hunley to partner with an engineer and former steamship Captain James McClintock to build a submarine now it should be noted that attempts to build a battle sub go all the way back to like 1775 but at this point none had managed to sink a ship Hundley and McClintock decided that the time had come for a for a battle submarine so they built a sub named Pioneer but they had to destroy it when the city where they were testing it fell to the enemy and the second attempt produced a sub that had to be discontinued because of design flaws but the third time they got it right uh Hundley financed this one himself so he got to name it and he named it after himself so the HL Hundley as it came to be called went into service and it proved to be really good at killing people those people being its crew five Sailors died during a test in August 1863 when one of the sailors accidentally stepped on a lever that opened hatches during a dive oops another test on October 15th killed eight people when they attempted to dive under a ship that was at anchor and they basically angled too Steep and got stuck in the mud all the sailors on board drowned one of these eight Sailors was Hundley himself now normally this would be the end of the story because the inventor who invented the thing wound up dying but this story actually continues because they did Resurrect The Hundley and they put it back into service this time under the command of Lieutenant George Dixon and this time it did actually work early the next year the H.L Hunley attacked and sank a union ship called the Housatonic becoming the first submersible to sink an enemy ship in human history and then it sank itself for a third time ironically this took place in only 25 feet of water so the union Sailors were able to just climb up the rigging and all of them Survived The Sinking of their ship but meanwhile all eight of the Hunley crew drowned so yes technically the HL Hundley was the first successful military submarine if by success you mean it kills 21 of your guys and none of the enemy but by the way when the hunley's sink it kind of disappeared this became like this huge mystery nobody knew what happened to it until 1995 when it was finally found off the coast of South Carolina it was raised in the year 2000 and today you can go see it for yourself at the Warren lash Conservation Center in Charleston South Carolina um I don't recommend trying to sail away in it though [Music] William Bullock was an inventor who created the rotary press for newspaper printing though you could argue that he's more of an innovator than an inventor the rotary press was invented a decade beforehand but his improvements were so substantial that he tends to get credit for it before Bullock's Press paper sheets had to be fed by hand Bullock created a way for the press to draw its paper continuously from a large role he also added mechanisms for cutting and folding the paper afterwards the patent for bull Express was granted in 1863 and this massively improved the speed and efficiency of newspaper printing in fact a similar process is still used in Printers today unfortunately he didn't get to enjoy the fruits of his labor for very long four years after the patent was granted he suffered a horrifying accident under his own invention apparently he found a belt that it was becoming dislodged from a pulley and tried to just kind of kick it back on the problem is he didn't actually stop the machine first you know he probably thought he could just give it a little quick tap and it would just pop on there while it was still moving in fact he probably had already done that dozens of times by that point but this one particular time his foot got caught in the belt and the Machine crushed his leg I mean fortunately for him it didn't suck his entire body under there you know the damage was just limited to his leg but unfortunately for him penicillin wouldn't be invented for another 60 years so the leg became gangrenous the doctors amputated his leg but it was too little too late he died 10 days later from surgical complications in a sad twist the bank that had financed the Press folded after Bullock died and in the Fallout the bank's former president wound up kind of owning Bullock's company and it continued selling presses but none of that money went to Mrs Bullock or her children for 97 years William Bullock rested in an unmarked grave in Uniondale Cemetery in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1964 a magazine article raised enough interest to fund a marker in a headstone and one of the attendance of the ceremony was bullet's great grandson Bullock's death wasn't the most Sensational but I saved it for last because it kind of I don't know feels the most human you know like I mean who hasn't just kicked the machine out of frustration a time or two foreign and I'd like to say that all these guys died for a reason you know pushing the human race forward and all that but I mean Midge Lee and Hundley were on the wrong side of history and smolinski and abokovsky's inventions died with them the Roseate might be the exception he helped kick off an industry that's changed the world and a version of his invention is still flying today so kind of can't help but wonder what he could have done if he'd survived going back to the beginning of course is Mary Curie who put her body on the line and changed the whole world in the process of course cue the comments telling me she wasn't an inventor though there are of course a lot of ways to change the world without putting your body on the line so that's a goal of yours to make a positive impact in the world allow me a minute to tell you about today's sponsor 80 000 hours okay so here's the deal a modern average career lasts about 40 years at 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year that comes out to about 80 000 hours and you can spend those 80 000 hours just working a job keeping a roof over your head and doing all the good stuff to better the world in your spare time or you could spend all those hours doing the good stuff and getting paid for it and then go home and be lazy that's you time that's what sets 80 000 hours apart from other career advisors their goal is to align people's career goals with their life goals they do this by Consulting with experts on the top problems in the world and which careers most effectively tackle those problems then they offer tons of research and advice aim to help you find the one that best fits your skills and interests and gets you on your way on their website you can find all their Research into these issues through blog posts and podcasts for example this video is about technology that went wrong well some new technology that people are worried about are things like Ai and bioengineering well they've got some great articles on those topics and then what careers might help shape those Technologies they have job boards if you already know what you want to do so you can just find a way forward right there and they even offer one-on-one counseling with experts which you can apply for if you already have some ideas for what you want to focus and all of this costs nothing they want zero dollars from you in fact they're a non-profit their only goal is to help people find meaningful careers that help solve important problems so whether you're just getting started in your career or if you've already worked 40 000 hours of yours you don't have to work week into weekend you can do something that you love that pays well and makes a real difference in the world just go to eighty thousand hours dot org slash Joe Scott and see for yourself on a quick personal note um do you have any idea how many subscribers I had when I left my job of 12 Years to do this full-time fifteen thousand that's it that that that's how much I hated my job I I totally know how what it's like to be you know stuck in a pointless hamster wheel it's the worst and that's why I love 80 000 hours they're they're helping people to break out of that and have a life of purpose you can have that it's out there let 80 000 hours help you find it again it's 80 000 hours dot org slash Joe Scott it's absolutely free and it just might change your life Link's down in the description big thanks to 80 000 hours for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon and the channel members who are helping to support this channel forming an awesome community and just being overall really cool people I got some people I need to shout out real quick we've got Lane wood Justin Ross Nino lover uh Jacob Corey azinski Aaron Jones Care Bear uh Bruce McKean chard Louden Olivia Rhiannon uh randable Iris Tech geek Jacob Irby Graham Jenkins and Tesla drools thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos get access to exclusive live streams and get a nice little uh thing next to your name down in the comments uh it makes you stand out a little bit just hit the join button down below please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here um here's a video that I think you will also like or you can just check out any of them around the sidebar down here any of the thumbnails I have my little face on them uh click them give them a look and if you like what you see I do invite you to subscribe I'll come back with videos every Monday cool guys thanks a lot for watching go on out there now have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and I'll see you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 809,938

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: utJ54odBPWA

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 03 2022