Morbid Inventions

[Ruky]

History has always interested me, especially when it consists of death and despair. I guess It's interesting to see how it all came about and learn what NOT to do! It's a natural occurrence in life, we can't always expect great things to happen! Also, just don't be stupid.

I saw a post on RGT and it got me thinking about past inventions that killed people/killed the creator. The history on some of these inventions is extremely interesting and also very horrific! If you find any, please post them here! They can be great reads. I'll start!

In the 1910s Franz Reichelt believed he could fly, but after jumping off the Eifel tower, his parachute failed and he fell to his death. This was of course fueled by a large sum offered up to anyone who could create a safe way for pilots to jump off aircraft and safely reach the ground or in better terms "Create a parachute that actually worked". Sadly, he did not succeed.

 

[trickybus]

Henry Winstanley was an English engineer that built the first known off-shore lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall, England. Along that shoreline, there's an expansive coral reef that proved treacherous to incoming ships; the reef wasn't visible above the sea surface, so marine vessels would damage themselves on it while trying to land safely.

Winstanley's first iteration of the Eddystone lighthouse was made entirely of wood. Surprisingly, it withstood the ravages of the sea for almost five years until the Great Storm of 1703—a cyclone. Neither Winstanley, the five men accompanying him, nor the lighthouse itself were ever seen again.

 

[RiskyAsh]

Interesting topic! So, Niagara Falls has inexplicably always attracted death, usually in the form of suicide; the massive waterfalls just seem to scream "might as well die somewhere" to folks. Perhaps because of that reputation, death-defying stunts were bizarrely popular throughout the previous century.

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Initially, it was high-wire acts performed across a stretch of the falls, like the picture here of Samuel Dixon back in 1890. Some people see two adjacent high points and think, "I'm gonna walk across that on a piece of rope". Shit's crazy, couldn't be me. Go join the circus, stop threatening to drop on people like so much bloody man-shaped rain, sky terrorists.

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Then Annie Edson Taylor survived a drop off Niagara Falls in a padded barrel she'd ginned up back in 1901, and a new, uh, craze was born. (She tested it on a cat first, who reportedly also survived thank goodness). Taylor was 63, and performed the stunt hoping it would secure her financially for the rest of her days. She wrote a book and did a little promotional speaking about the experience, but in the end didn't make much. I'm sure Martin Scorsese could make something about the American Dream out of that; honestly, the "weird inventor" has always been one of my favorite kinds of American archetypes, going back to the Wizard of Oz. (Sadly, I think that slice of national storytelling has helped prop up some pretty terrible people, but that's definitely another topic).

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All this leads to the person I wanted to bring up, Karel Soucek. He was a professional daredevil, a contemporary of Evel Knievel, and successfully survived a drop at the Falls in a barrel of his own design back in the 80's. Karel decided that barrel drops were just his "thing", and attempted a drop in another barrel in front of a packed crowd at the Houston Astrodome in 1985. In fairness, the invention might have withstood 180-foot drop without killing him, if the show had actually gone as planned. Instead of landing squarely in a massive pool of water, the Karel Barrel was dropped early and off-kilter, spun off-course, and struck the rim of the tank. Just a pretty tragic accident, all told.

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(....there is a video on Youtube of the event, but it's really recent, looks like something that was put on TikTok, and I'm not sure it isn't AI-generated so I'm not gonna bother posting it).

 

[trickybus]

Popping back in to talk about Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky, a co-founder of the Radium Luminous Material Corporation (founded 1914 in NYC) and inventor of its star product, a glow-in-the-dark paint that was applied to the faces of the wristwatches the factory produced. The paint was patented under the name 'Undark' and made most of its profits from military orders during World War l, adorning not just watches but various dials and aircraft instruments.

The task of carefully applying Undark to small surfaces required the company to hire workers—usually young women—who could neatly paint the necessary details by hand with small brushes. In order to keep the brushes at a fine tip, the women were encouraged to lick the brushes between applications.

By 1927, 50 female workers at the Radium Luminous Material Corporation had died of acute radiation poisoning because the Undark paint they were exposed to (and ingested) for hours a day was so radioactive, the first victim's jaw detached from her skull shortly before her death. Lawsuits followed and the company did its best to smear any factory worker (collectively called The Radium Girls) brave enough to pursue litigation by claiming the sicknesses were caused by other, unrelated diseases like syphilis. A year later in 1928, the Radium Girls were gifted more irrefutable evidence that the paint was carcinogenic when its inventor, Dr. von Sochocky, also died of radiation poisoning.