List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions

[ZeroGravitas]

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.

[biohacker42]

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.

[yan]

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

[yread]

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?

[mattmaroon]

"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-named]

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

[Tichy]

Phew, no computer scientists on the list.

[zandorg]

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

[seldo]

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...

[tel]

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.

[blogimus]

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.

[varjag]

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

[vollmond]

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

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

[tlb]

No robotics section yet...

[dfranke]

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.

[callmeed]

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

Talk about a bad demo day ...

[oz]

Hoisted by one's own petard...

[vegashacker]

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.

[varjag]

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

[brfox]

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

[zandorg]

Thomas Midgley, Jr. seems like the most unfortunate.

[edw519]

Happy to see no software inventors (yet).

[anigbrowl]

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