More Inventors Whose Inventions Killed Them

Eight more inventors who died from their own inventions. To see the original eight click here.

John Godfrey Parry-Thomas

Parry-Thomas was a motor-racing driver and engineer who wanted to break the land speed record set by Malcolm Campbell in the 1920’s. Parry-Thomas developed and built a car to do this which he named Babs. Babs had exposed chains connecting the wheels to the engines. On consecutive days in April of 1926, Parry-Thomas broke the land speed record driving Babs (he went over 170 mph). In 1927 Campbell reclaimed the record. When Parry-Thomas tried to break the new record one of the exposed chains snapped and flew into his neck nearly decapitating him and he died instantly.

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.

Daghlian’s hand scarred by radiation

Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. was a 24 year old Armenian-American physicist with the Manhattan Project who in 1945 at the remote Omega Labratory in Los Alamos, NM accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium bomb core causing an immediate critical reaction which was accompanied by a blue glow of ionization and the release of radiation. To halt the reaction, Daghlian had to partially disassemble the tungsten-carbide pile and suffered acute radiation sickness from which he died a few weeks later.

Cowper Phipps Coles

HMS Captain

Coles was an English Naval Captain who developed and built a rotating turret ship, the HMS Captain, in 1866. Many warned that the ship’s design was flawed and the vessel would float too low in the water. Nevertheless the ship was built with the warning that Coles would be responsible for any flaws. After successful test trials in 1870 the ship went to sea and promptly heeled over under the force of heavy winds and sank with 500 crew members on board including Coles. Only 18 survived and Cowper Phipps Coles went down with his ship.

Henry Smolinski 

Smolinski was the founder of the Advanced Vehicle Engineers (AVE) company of Oxnard, California which built the AVE Mizar flying car in the early 1970’s. The Ave Mizar was really just a Ford Pinto car with wings attached (see photo above). Henry Smolinski believed that by simply adding wings to an affordable car like the Pinto he could make flying affordable for hundreds of thousands of people. But the Pinto was built to be a car and not a plane. Smolinski was killed along with pilot Harold Blake after the prototype of the AVE Mizar lost its wings in its initial flight due to bad welds and too much weight resulting in a fiery crash.