List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_their_own_inventions

by Freebytes • 17 years ago

109 59 17 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

zandorg3• 17 years ago

Thomas Midgley, Jr. seems like the most unfortunate.

seldo• 17 years ago

I think in this discussion of the Titanic, the phrase "[the design] proved to be much more sinkable than he had anticipated" is probably against some sort of wikipedia guideline. You're not supposed to be laughing...

ZeroGravitas• 17 years ago

Wikipedia is amazing.

I was going to write "For all its faults..." but I suddenly realised that Wikipedia has never been anything less than fantastic in anything I've experienced. All the bad stuff has been related to me 3rd hand and the vast majority of it seemed to be coming from cranks with axes to grind.

I'm saddened that it isn't celebrated more, but take solace in the fact that it has, fairly quietly considering, become a fundamental part of the internet and our society.

yan• 17 years ago

I just wish more people realized this with donations to the Wikimedia foundation.

derwiki• 17 years ago

What are the total operating costs of Wikipedia? Not to bring politics into this, but with all the stuff the government funds, these seems like a prime example for bailout money.

andrewparker• 17 years ago

I just wish Wikipedia would find a self-sustaining model that didn't rely on perpetual annual donations. I'm not proposing a for-profit company, but I am proposing finding a non-compromising way to make just enough revenue to keep it going sustainably while remaining neutral.

PS I donated to Wikimedia last year, so I'm willing to contribute until the project finds a more sustainable model.

biohacker42• 17 years ago

cranks with axes to grind

Every wikipedia critic I know used to be a huge wikipedia fan until something they deeply cared about was either screwed up, vandalized, or deleted.

I bet one internet cookie that if/when this happens to you, you will be as passionately anti-wikipedia as you are now pro-wikipedia.

skolor• 17 years ago

This seems odd: I don't know any person who is a directly anti-wikipedia, but I do know several people who are against wikipedia. They don't active talk bad about it, but they're the type of people who say "You can believe anything written on there, it was just written by people". Due to the ease of editing, they feel that it means nothing is fact-checked.

On the other hand, I know one of the administrators there, and he has shown me several pages of the hate-mongering he gets, mostly for just being an admin. Some of it has merit (for example, a good chunk of it was because of one particular article he moderated, and the side that lost did not lose gracefully), but most of it is just people jumping on him because they feel they are being denied their right to, well, write.

I rarely see any well thought out, cohesive arguments for re-structuring wikipedia. Most of what I see is little more than "I hate that admin, he said I wasn't notable enough for a page. Lets go egg his house!"

cyunker• 17 years ago

I've gone the opposite route. At first, I was skeptical. But it has become an invaluable resource especially in areas not covered by traditional encyclopedias (e.g. popular culture).

quant18• 17 years ago

Coincidentally it's just past the three-year anniversary of the first attempt to delete the article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...

Back then it could still be saved by tons of people saying WP:ILIKEIT. But if it wasn't for the fact that some 19th-century writer had the idea of compiling the exact same kind of list, the thing would probably be deleted under today's standards.

yread• 17 years ago

Yes it truly is! On par with the whole GNU movement maybe even better.

I found some amazing quotes (linked to from the article):

It is cited that the Burmese king Nanda Bayin, in 1599 "laughed to death when informed by a visiting Italian merchant that Venice was a free state without a king

London Beer Flood, 9 people were killed when 323,000 imperial gallons (1 468 000 L) of beer in the Meux and Company Brewery burst out of their vats and gushed into the streets.

incent Smith II, an employee at the Cocoa Services Inc. chocolate factory in Camden, New Jersey, was loading chunks of raw chocolate when he slipped and fell into a large melting tank filled with 120oF (50oC) chocolate, and was knocked out by one of the mixing paddles. Smith was trapped in the melting tank for 10 minutes before rescuers were able to extract him. He was declared dead a short time later.

Hmmm beer, laughter or chocolate?

tel• 17 years ago

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.

Seems to be a little violation of NPOV, and a very sad one at that, but I can't help but grin.

edw519• 17 years ago

Happy to see no software inventors (yet).

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Nothing wrong with the software, it's the user who's at fault.

Tichy• 17 years ago

Phew, no computer scientists on the list.

zandorg3• 17 years ago

Maybe Turing was killed by a time travelling robot he later invented?

jacquesm2• 17 years ago

maybe you should go an read this thread ?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=795622

IsaacSchlueter2• 17 years ago

Well, he was killed by the government he helped save from Nazi conquest.

Not quite killed by his invention, though.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

"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."

He did.

n-named2• 17 years ago

I'm having a hard time up modding you for this comment on this site.

IsaacSchlueter2• 17 years ago

It's not that tricky. You just click the ^

vegashacker• 17 years ago

Reading this, I kept stumbling over typos and awkward sentence constructions. The content was interesting, but I feel like the writing was much worse than your average Wikipedia article. I wonder why.

varjag3• 17 years ago

It is peppered with sarcasm and smirks, which is generally not what you find in a good Wikipedia piece.

brfox2• 17 years ago

Also, many of those people were not inventors. Creative pioneers maybe, but not really inventors.

blogimus• 17 years ago

There are less than two dozen names. I expected the list to be longer, given the breadth of human creativity and propensity for risk taking.

tlb• 17 years ago

No robotics section yet...

dfranke• 17 years ago

There is one very important difference between what can be built as an experiment and the commercial Segway: The commercial one has a lot of safety features, redundancy and fool-proofing. Mine has none whatsoever (Well, it does have a kill switch so it doesn't go zooming away if I fall off, and it does shut down if it finds itself tipped more than 45 degrees.) Those details are kind of important, and you should think about them carefully before considering building such a thing yourself. With a scooter like this, if it stops working for any reason (software crash, hardware failure, low battery) you will fall, hard, and probably on your face. Imagine zipping along at 10 MPH, and suddenly the platform you're standing on stops dead. Oh, and there's a T-bar in front of you to trip you up if you start to run. So you really shouldn't try to replicate this experiment, and I can't be responsible for what happens if you read this and try to build something.

oz• 17 years ago

Hoisted by one's own petard...

varjag3• 17 years ago

Perillos of Athens and his brazen bull are prominently missing. Perhaps one of the oldest and creepiest stories of that kind.

vollmond• 17 years ago

According to Wikipedia (haha), he was tortured in his device, but it didn't actually kill him.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull

varjag3• 17 years ago

Oh, OK. It's been a while since I read that story.

callmeed• 17 years ago

Percy Pilcher, English aviation pioneer died flying a waterlogged glider when potential investors had been invited to watch.

Talk about a bad demo day ...

List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions

Related Stories