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Inventors killed by their own inventions
- thrower123 7y agoThe thought of a steam-powered bicycle made me do a bit of a double-take at first, but apparently it was actually quite a viable little contraption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roper_steam_velocipede https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roper_steam_velocipede
- MisterTea 7y agoI now want a steam powered bicycle. Ding Ding? Allow me to inform you of my presence via steam whistle. Gives new meaning to "loud pipes save lives". Jerk behind you? Time for a boiler blow down! Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuSLwE4IpnI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuSLwE4IpnI
- ncr100 7y agoNo software devs listed, yet.
- sieabahlpark 7y agodrone strike Good thing I'm thousands of miles away from where it would be deployed.
- whatshisface 7y agoRight up until the Second Civil War, or potentially one of the riots leading up to it; or maybe in one of the 2030s ICE drone incidents in which stray missiles accidentally struck American border towns, or that one time in 2049 where a terrorist obtained control of one... Or potentially one of the domestic terror security drones that were actually active in 2016, but whose existence wasn't publicly known until 2029.
- CleaveIt2Beaver 7y agoRemember that time the police crashed a drone into their own SWAT van? Pepperidge Farm remembers. https://gizmodo.com/police-drone-crashes-into-police-5890507 https://gizmodo.com/police-drone-crashes-into-police-5890507
- prepend 7y agoNeither is there a data category, fortunately.
- manojlds 7y agoInventor of Skynet kills humanity.
- bredren 7y agoThere were survivors of Judgement Day, and not to spoil T2 but inventor Miles Dyson was not killed by Skynet.
- dillonmckay 7y agoHe was killed by law enforcement, right?
- frou_dh 7y agoProbably already has happened to someone writing embedded code for some kind of powertool, lathe, etc.
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoBitcoin power consumption causes global warming, humanity went extinct from extreme climate change.
- jraph 7y agoThis made me smile. What could possibly go wrong with a money rewarding GHG emissions? When you think about it, if successful, Bitcoin will indeed achieve its goal of freeing us from central banks: no human being will be available to operate them. Very clever!
- at-fates-hands 7y agoI've always wondered if this was the initial point of Bitcoin (making miner harder and harder) how could Satoshi not have foreseen this was would be the inevitable result? I've read several articles about the power consumption of these mines and it's jaw dropping: Of course, by the end of 2017, the players who were pouring into the basin weren’t interested in building 5-megawatt mines. According to Carlson, mining has now reached the stage where the minimum size for a new commercial mine, given the high levels of difficulty, will soon be 50 megawatts, enough for around 22,000 homes and bigger than one of Amazon Web Services’ immense data centers. https://www.politico.eu/article/this-is-what-happens-when-bitcoin-miners-take-over-your-town/ https://www.politico.eu/article/this-is-what-happens-when-bi...
- boeing737max 7y agoBoeing 737 MAX engineer killed in a 737 MAX crash ?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoProbably because they forgot they wrote it or they didn't know someone else was using it too.
- amelius 7y agoBecause they would just hit Ctrl+Z and rollback their mistakes.
- benj111 7y agoWhat about the Segway guy, Jimi Heselden
- jcl 7y agoHe bought the company after the product had already been invented. (Now, if Dean Kamen somehow died to a segway...)
- benj111 7y agoStill fits with the theme though. Luis Jiménez didn't invent a sculpture or the Mustang, but still makes the list.
- jcl 7y agoJiménez certainly designed the thing that killed him. As far as I can tell, Heselden's involvement was just finanical. The deaths are both ironic, but in different ways. FWIW, it was enough to get him on a different list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths#2010s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths#2010s
- bredren 7y ago>Peng Fan, a chef in Foshan, China, was bitten by a cobra's severed head, which he had cut off 20 minutes earlier while preparing a soup. My, what a grisly list that is.
- bravura 7y ago"Sam Ballard, 29, died from angiostrongyliasis after eating a garden slug as a dare eight years earlier."
- bredren 7y agoI remember reading about this man but did not know he passed. This joke altered his and many people around him forever. Comedy with absolutely devastating consequences. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/11/05/young-rugby-player-ate-slug-mates-dare-now-hes-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/11/05/young-rugby...
- bogle 7y agoWow, Thomas Midgley, Jr. died from his own Heath Robinson contraption for lifting him out of bed but not before he put lead into petrol and created CFCs. Should have done those the other way around and saved us all a whole lot of grief.
- probably_wrong 7y agoFor those that didn't follow the link to Thomas Midgley Jr.'s Wikipedia page, the "Legacy" section is definitely worth a read: > Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny". Multiple sources seem to agree that the reason he chose to add lead to gasoline rather than ethanol (which was both greener and cheaper) was due to profit: his company could patent leaded gasoline, but not ethanol. That's an interesting lesson that we should learn any day now.
- shoo 7y ago> "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history" Interesting! Fritz Haber & Robert Le Rossignol (who are both out of the running for being killed by their own inventions) might have a reasonable competing claim to their shares in "most impact on the atmosphere" for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process > Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018. [...] Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process. Being responsible for removing a bottleneck that enabled +100% more biomass of tool-using fossil-fuel-burning* primates arguably may have been a much larger indirect impact on the atmosphere (and many other things, for better or worse), leaving aside the direct impact on the nitrogen cycle. * also, for various subsets of primates, perhaps add: airplane-flying, meat-eating, truck-driving, aircon-running, tree-planting, fish-catching, land-clearing, television-watching, hackernews-reading, list-enumerating, ...
- envolt 7y agoThis is also interesting - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- throwawayForMe2 7y agoKurt Godel starved himself to death after his wife was hospitalized because he would only eat food she cooked! Wow
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 7y agoI'm inclined to read between the lines on that one.
- Loughla 7y agoI don't understand your statement.
- tekkk 7y ago"Later in his life, Gödel suffered periods of mental instability and illness. He had an obsessive fear of being poisoned; he would eat only food that his wife, Adele, prepared for him." There's your between the lines. He was mentally ill later in his life, which caused his untimely death. I don't know what you were reading between the lines, but if it was making fun of an old man and his mental illness, please keep it to yourself.
- JasonFruit 7y agoThere were a lot of ways of reading the implications of their unclear post, but you assumed the worst and attacked. That doesn't contribute to a reasonable discussion.
- 7y ago
- danohuiginn 7y agoSome beautiful synchronicity going on with the headlines here: https://ohuiginn.net/tmp/hn_inventors.png https://ohuiginn.net/tmp/hn_inventors.png
- bubblewrap 7y agoThe list is much shorter than I would have expected.
- Hans_Dorn 7y agoYou can help by expanding it.
- bubblewrap 7y agoI'd like to invent things, but I'd like to avoid dying because of my own inventions.
- edoo 7y agoTalk about deja vu seeing that first picture of the guy trying to fly. I jumped out a tree when I was a kid with a plastic grocery bag at each foot, knee, wrist, elbow, and my neck. I didn't break anything but I never did it again.
- dillonmckay 7y agoAre you an aerospace engineer?
- edoo 7y agoNot yet, but it happened at my friend's house whose dad was an aerospace engineer.
- python_gt_r3 7y agoWomen inventors don't have work accidents cause they are risk aware geniuses
- shoo 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE_Mizar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVE_Mizar > The AVE Mizar (named after the star Mizar) was a roadable aircraft built between 1971 and 1973 by Advanced Vehicle Engineers [...] The prototypes of the Mizar were made by mating the rear portion of a Cessna Skymaster to a Ford Pinto. ...
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoThat one was my favorite. Creating an airplane from a Ford Pinto seems like an SNL skit.
- faissaloo 7y agoYou know this isn't a list I would mind being on
- chris_wot 7y agoSomething tells me you have a higher likelihood than most of attaining your goal...
- Iv 7y agoShould add Marie Curie
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- anoncake 7y agoShe didn't invent radioactivity or any elements.
- boudin 7y agoShe did invent a process to isolate radium. But if you want to put it this way, nobody never invented anything, even a plane is just about manipulating things that always existed in the environment.
- ChristopherCode 7y agoWhat about all of the inventors of the atom/hydrogen bombs? Feynman?
- anoncake 7y agoPlanes did not exist before humans built them. Radium did.
- elliekelly 7y ago
- gyaniv 7y agoI have to say I'm not I would call someone that creates something that doesn't work (and will never work) and inventor. If I just jump from a building and throw a bottle on the way down, saying that the bottle will 'throw me back up because physics', and then I die (obviously), I'm not an inventor, I'm just an idiot.
- hutzlibu 7y agoYes, but the guy you are referring to, did invented a parachute, he was just an "idiot" of not using a dummy first.
- knicholes 7y agoFurthermore, in relation to the title of this article, I wouldn't say the invention of his parachute killed him. It was just the force of him hitting the ground once his invention failed to work. ;)
- jihadjihad 7y agoOne of the strangest articles I've come across on Wikipedia is about the brazen bull[0], whereby the inventor of said bull pitches the idea to the ruler of the land, only to be thrown in it himself after the ruler is repulsed that such a thing should exist. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazen_bull
- jgtrosh 7y agoThe legend adds that he was removed from the Bull and then thrown from a cliff ; I suppose the ruler did not want to be associated with using the device for its intended use.
- lqet 7y agoWell, the article states that > Some modern scholars question if the brazen bull ever really existed, attributing reports of the invention to early propaganda. However, it certainly wouldn't be the most barbaric form of execution humans have invented [0]. > Pendulum: A type of machine with an axe head for a weight that slices closer to the victim's torso over time. > Scaphism: An Ancient Persian method of execution in which the condemned was placed in between two boats, force fed a mixture of honey and milk, and left floating in a stagnant pond. The victim would then suffer from severe diarrhea, which would attract insects that would burrow, nest, and feed on the victim. > Blowing from a gun: Tied to the mouth of a cannon, which is then fired. > Blood Eagle: Cutting the skin of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled blood-stained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim's back. Used by the Vikings. > Flaying: The skin is removed from the body. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methods_of_capital_punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methods_of_capital_pun...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- wazoox 7y agoThere's the famous Afghan skin bag: cut the skin around the belly, pull it over the head of the victim and tie it like a bag ; then let the victim bake in the sun and slowly die of exposure, while being half-asphyxiated inside their own skin. Oh, of course the victim will try not to fall on the ground for a while, where dust, ants and insect will exacerbate their suffering. IIRC you can agonize this way a couple of days before dying of thirst.
- aitchnyu 7y agoI thought the idea of young people giving blood to rejuvenate old billionaires was modern. > Alexander Bogdanov (22 August 1873 – 7 April 1928)...After undergoing 11 blood transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. His fellow revolutionary Leonid Krasin wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation"... But a later transfusion cost him his life, when he took the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bogdanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Bogdanov
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoHow bizarre - how rich do you have to be to become a vampire?
- ryanmarsh 7y agoNot that rich apparently. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/young-blood-transfusions-open-accepting-paypal-payments-cities-ambrosia-2019-1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/young-b...
- nprz 7y agoThe FDA shut them down: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/young-blood-company-ambrosia-halts-patient-treatments-after-fda-warning-n973266 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/young-blood-company-amb...
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoNow how are the sorta-rich supposed to live out their ghoulish lifestyles? For shame.
- vanderZwan 7y agoWeren't vampires originally not-so-subtle symbol for aristocracy to begin with?
- baruchel 7y agoI can't believe that nobody has posted https://xkcd.com/2142/ https://xkcd.com/2142/ yet!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- chris_wot 7y agoYou know, I heard a story I could never track down. Apparently the Soviets were working on a rocket that would explode several miles from the ground, which they believed would cause maximum damage. I had heard that all development stopped because the entire team watched on its initial test. They had carefully built an altimeter into the device that triggered the explosion at the desired height. Like all good plans gone awry they completely forgot that a rocket must first go up before it can go down and at launch it hit it's desired altitude on the way up at which point it exploded and took out the entire rocket development team. Anyone know if this is a real thing?
- jandrese 7y agoThat sounds like an urban legend, but there might be a kernel of truth hidden in the story.
- chris_wot 7y agoPerhaps a corruption of the Nedelin catastrophe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe
- jbay808 7y agoThat sounds very unlikely to me
- angusb 7y agothe skin in the game here is incredible
- sridca 7y agoThe Cone Nebula is an H II region in the constellation of Monoceros. It was discovered by William Herschel on December 26, 1785, at which time he designated it H V.27. The nebula is located about 830 parsecs or 2,700 light-years away from Earth. The Cone Nebula forms part of the nebulosity surrounding the Christmas Tree Cluster. The designation of NGC 2264 in the New General Catalogue refers to both objects and not the nebula alone. The diffuse Cone Nebula, so named because of its apparent shape, lies in the southern part of NGC 2264, the northern part being the magnitude-3.9 Christmas Tree Cluster. It is in the northern part of Monoceros, just north of the midpoint of a line from Procyon to Betelgeuse.
- dontbenebby 7y agoThanks for sharing OP! Here's my personal favorite Wikipedia list: List of lists of lists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
- HNLurker2 7y agoNow that's meta-meta article
- JasonFruit 7y ago> Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier was the first known fatality in an air crash when his Rozière balloon crashed on 15 June 1785 while he and Pierre Romain attempted to cross the English Channel. Let's be very clear about how bad an idea this was: it was a balloon filled with hydrogen, with a chamber beneath it filled with hot air warmed by an open fire. An open fire. Beneath a container of hydrogen. Later ones filled with helium were more successful, as they allow the balloonist to control buoyancy without dropping ballast or carrying enough fuel to maintain lift sufficient for the entire craft. But who sticks a hydrogen balloon over an open fire and expects good things?
- trhway 7y agoi think your comment isn't just toward the guy. Lets put that into perspective >they allow the balloonist to control buoyancy without dropping ballast or carrying enough fuel to maintain lift sufficient for the entire craft. 1. Rozier invented that 2 chamber balloon. 2. helium was discovered only more than half a century later. If anything, i think the guy deserve the respect for what he did directly risking his life in the face of the known and unknown dangers and limited knowledge and technology of the time.
- JasonFruit 7y agoThe combustibility of hydrogen was no secret; de Rozier was a chemist, and in fact famously demonstrated that feature of hydrogen by inhaling it and blowing it out across an open flame. There are risks to be bravely taken, and then there's foolhardy disregard for the dangers one knows. I think de Rozier fell into the second class of risk-takers. The first class? Try Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, Geoffrey de Havilland, the X-15 pilot whose name I can't recall — all these died testing something they couldn't have known would kill them, and the world gained from their sacrifice. De Rozier had an idea that he knew he couldn't safely implement, but went ahead and did it anyway, and died. What did we learn from it? We knew hydrogen was flammable — de Rozier himself demonstrated it safely, except for his eyebrows. The balloon was only flown the once, and there's no evidence he grasped its potential, having little understanding of piloting a balloon. Useless sacrifice, in my opinion.
- PhasmaFelis 7y ago> Andrei Zheleznyakov, a Soviet scientist, was developing chemical weapons in 1987 when a hood malfunction exposed him to traces of the nerve agent Novichok 5. He spent weeks in a coma, months unable to walk, and years suffering failing health before dying from its effects in 1992/3. Hard to feel sorry for that guy.
- make3 7y agoSpecial mention for the owner of Segway who rode himself off a cliff to his death, even if he didn't invent them http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39377851/ns/world_news-europe/t/segway-company-owner-rides-scooter-cliff-dies/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39377851/ns/world_news-europe/t/se...
- MagicPropmaker 7y agoThere's also this Segway incident, though he was a company executive and not an "inventor" http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39377851/ns/world_news-europe/t/segway-company-owner-rides-scooter-cliff-dies/ http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39377851/ns/world_news-europe/t/se...
- adgezaza 7y agoCame here to post this
- ourmandave 7y ago"What do we say to the God of Death?" "Okay, start it up."
- gerbilly 7y agoFor ’tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petard¹ 1: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard)
- ericfrederich 7y agoSo... kinda like the Darwin Awards, but not really?
- basementcat 7y agoJack Parsons, cofounder of NASA JPL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)
- jct3u 7y agoClarence Dally was an assistant to Edison who helped create the X-ray focus tube. He died from carcinoma caused by radiation exposure. Should be in here? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Madison_Dally https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Madison_Dally
- ozten 7y agoIronically, this list is a great example of survivorship bias. We only know about inventors killed by their own inventions where the scene was understood well enough to be reported and the incident notable enough to survive into Wikipedia. It would be easy enough for someone way ahead of their time to have an unexplained death with a bunch of weird artifacts surrounding them.