More Inventors Whose Inventions Killed Them

Horace Lawson Hunley

Hunley was a Confederate marine engineer during the Civil War. He developed early hand-powered submarines, the most famous of which was named for him, H. L. Hunley. During initial testing the first H. L. Hunley was swamped by the wake of a passing ship which pushed water through her open hatches. Five of her nine man crew died. In 1863, Hunley recruited a new crew and decided he would take command of the ship during a training exercise. The submarine once again sank and killed all eight members of the crew and Hunley himself. Hunley’s submarine would go on to sink the USS Housatonic in 1864 but the submarine never surfaced after the sinking and once again all hands were lost.

Confederate Submarine H.L. Hunley, suspended from a crane during her recovery from Charleston Harbor, 8 August 2000

Roland Garros

The famous French aviator and fighter pilot during World War I helped to invent the device which allowed machine gun fire to pass straight through spinning airplane blades making planes much more effective for killing. Garros quickly shot down 5 enemy aircraft with his new invention but was unluckily shot down when a German rifleman somehow managed to hit his fuel line. German aviator and inventor Anthony Fokker inspected the downed plane and improved upon Garros’ design with the interrupter gear which was soon adopted by the Germans. Garros escaped from the Germans and in 1918, just one month before the War would end, he was shot down and killed by a German fighter plane using Fokker’s improved machin gun design which was directly modified from Roland Garros’ own invention. Prior to Garros’ invention fighter pilots would simply try to shoot down the enemy with a pistol or rifle.

William Bullock

Source

Bullock invented the web rotary printing press in 1863. In 1867, Bullock was installing one of his presses in Philadelphia when his foot got caught in the press and was crushed. The leg was infected with gangrene and Bullock died during the operation to remove his leg.

Franz Reichelt 

Franz Reichelt was an Austrian tailor who experimented with a coat parachute as seen in the picture above. Reichelt convinced the Paris police that his coat parachute would work and they allowed him to test his invention by leaping from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower, some 200 feet from the ground. The coat parachute failed and Reichelt plummeted to his death.

For more see:

• Mad Scientists, Wacky Inventors and the Crazy Ways They Died
• Twelve Bizarre and Wacky Deaths.