Three Innovative Inventors Who Died by Their Own Invention
Oops, these three inventors died of their own invention. Read here who they were and which inventions were fatal to them.
Most inventors are obsessed with their idea. They work on it twenty-four hours a day and often don’t stop until it’s finished. Or if it proves fatal to them. So too with these three inventors, where their invention came to their end.
Inventors who died
Some died a not so pleasant death, others were gone in one fell swoop. Below are three inventors who lost their lives because of their own invention.
Marie Curie
The first is like a woman, namely Marie Curie. The noted chemist and inventor discovered radium and polonium at the end of the 19th century. But she also transformed combat medicine forever when she created the first mobile radiology machine. Like the X-ray machines that popped up in major city hospitals, Curie’s car-sized devices could be used by army surgeons on the battlefield to quickly get a picture of any bullets or shrapnel lodged in their patients. Many lives are still being saved by this.
While her device may have saved countless people on the battlefield, it would eventually kill her — her overexposure to X-rays later in life is widely accepted as one of the main causes behind the case of aplastic anemia she developed. As a result, she died on June 4, 1934.
Franz Reichelt
The second inventor in our list of late inventors is Franz Reichelt – aka “The Flying Tailor”. He was an Austrian-born tailor living in France in the early 20th century, becoming famous for pioneering a fully wearable parachute suit. It doesn’t look very sturdy though. But that didn’t stop Reichelt from testing it out in a jump from the Eiffel Tower in early February 1912.
In fact, he was so confident in that jump that he called the local press to film his invention in action. Needless to say, things didn’t go as planned: Reichelt collapsed from the tower, suit and all, crushing his skull, spine, and a few other key bones as he hit the ground. He was dead almost immediately. The entire event was caught on film and, if you’re not scared, you can see the entire debacle for yourself here.
William Bullock
The last of the three inventors is William Bullock, an American inventor who lived in the mid-1800s and is widely regarded as one of the early parents of the modern printing press. In 1863 Bullock created a new kind of printing machine that was very modern at the time.
The only problem with this machine was that it wasn’t what you would call ‘safe’. The inventor experienced this himself. His leg entered one of the presses while it was being installed for a local Philadelphia newspaper. His leg was shattered and became gangrenous within a week. Nine days later he was dead.
