INVENTORS KILLED BY THEIR OWN INVENTIONS

Marie Curie

Bad luck, extreme courage, underestimation of danger: inventors’ life is not always paid back with success. There have been a few who we’ll always be remembered for their inventions, but there are some other we’ll remember because of their tragic deaths related to their own work.  Let’s see some.

 

1. Valerian Abakovsky

We could consider him “the grandfather of high-speed trains”. He designed the Aerowagon, a train which could travel on rails but had a propeller and a plane engine. According to his project, it was supposed to travel at a speed (higher than 140 km/h) higher than any other train.

But in July 1921, Abakosvky tested his plane-train from Moscow to Tula, on a route of about 190 km. On that train there also were twenty-two passengers, including some exponents of the Russian Communist party and Stalin’s counselor. The round trip was a success, but the return journey has some troubles: the train derailed. Seven of the twenty-two passengers died, Abakovski included.

All the bodies were buried in the Kremlin’s cemetery.

 

2. Franz Reichelt

Known as “The flying tailor”, he was a French tailor fond of flight. He designed the “vêtement-parachute" (clothes-parachute), a sort of a wingsuit. To test it, he took some mannequins and let them glide from 3 or 4 meters-high buildings.

He got permission to conduct the test again, this time it was HE who was jumping off of the first level of the Eiffel Tower! But things went wrong… Reichelt wore the suit and jumped, but the weird parachute didn’t open and he crashed at the ground. A literal suicide mission.

There’s also a video of his tragic flight on YouTube.

 

3. Henry Smolinski

He was an American aerospace engineer who founded the Advanced Vehicle Engineering (AVE) and designed a prototype of a flying car. What he did was taking a car, a Ford Pinto, and attaching wings to its top: it was the Ave Mizar, half car and half plane. Thanks to the wings, it was able to travel both in the air and on the ground, as the wings were detachable.

During a test run, right after the take-off, the structure that supported the wings detached and the car crashed on the ground. Smolinski died.

 

4. Thomas Andrews

Fond of ships, he was an Irish architect and shipbuilder. When he was young, everybody used to call him with the nickname of “admiral” for his love for ships.

Growing up, he became chief naval architect and projected the Titanic transatlantic, the famous sank dream-ship.

He was aware of the vulnerability of his ship so he had twenty-four more lifeboats embarked, instead of the twenty that the Titanic was already carrying.

According to some reconstructions, when the Titanic was sinking, Andrew heroically helped many people survive, advising them to wear life jackets and go to the lifeboats.

He was last seen by a waiter in the smoking room and perhaps he even left the ship at the very last minute. However, he didn’t survive and his body was never found.

 

5. Aleksandr Bogdanov

He cofounded the Bolshevik party with Lenin but then, in 1909, he was kicked out before the Russian Revolution. He shifted gears to science, physics, medicine and psychiatry…he even created his own discipline, tektology, an attempt to unify all the sciences. 

Later on, he became interested in blood transfusions and started experimenting with it. He believed there was a theory according to which there was a way to “achieve eternal youth or at least partial rejuvenation”. After 11 blood transfusions, Bogdanov said his eyesight improved and his balding was suspended. But when he got transfused blood from a patient suffering malaria and tuberculosis he died.

 

6. Marie Curie

Last to be mentioned is Marie Curie, a brilliant chemist and physicist who won two Nobel prizes for her scientific findings in radioactivity. Besides the theory of radiation and discovering two elements, she’s also extremely important for inventing radiography or X-rays.

Her research exposed her to a lot of radiation though and she died of leukemia in 1934.

She’s the first woman to win the Nobel prize twice and the only woman to have been awarded twice. She still remains the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, Physics and Chemistry.

Maria, 3scB