Interesting blog post about folks who were killed by their own inventions. One of the more interesting ones:
You can see the video of it here. (Not terribly graphic, it having been shot during the silent film era.)
I present to you Deacon Brodie
I like the bit where they measure the depth of the crater he made. He definitely made an “impression.”
Another: Otto Lilienthal - Wikipedia
What about Jim Fixx, “inventor” of jogging?
Lets make sure to not add Joseph-Ignace Guillotin who neither invented the guillotine nor was a victim of it.
I’ll suggest Donald Crowhurst. Problems with his new design of yacht prompted him to falsify his progress in a round the world race which drove him insane. He committed suicide leaving his log books as a record of his madness.
EDIT: Oops, I didn’t read to the bottom of that blog ^.
Sounds like he was still telling the truth…
Likewise, the popular story that King Louis XVI helped with the design is also false.
“It is a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn’t blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Catling wasn’t shot. If it hadn’t been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumour would never have got started.”
-* Terry Pratchett.*
Wow, the first thing I thought about when reading the thread title was that French guy fluttering down from the Eiffel tower.
How about Marie Curie?, radiation exposure from the elements she discovered finally did her in.
I submit Thomas Midgley, killed not by leaded petrol, but by a harness he devised to help him get out of bed.
http://www.timelinescience.org/resource/students/midgley/trouble.htm
Dr. Frankenstein?
i also recall that an industrial robot killed a guy in a japanese auto factory.
There is a story that the inventor of the brazen bull, Perillos, was ordered to take it for a test run and of course burned alive.
I remember hearing about that first on QI, when I also learned that he was the world’s biggest ecological menace.
Did the monster kill Frankenstein or was it the torch- and pitchfork-bearing mob of villagers?
Neither.
Not quite an invention, but Marie Curie was killed by aplastic anemia, most likely due to long term exposure to radiation.
It’s been awhile since I’ve read the book, but I think the ending is a bit ambiguous - him and his monster sail off together amidst the icebergs, or something of that sort. No villagers involved, pitchfork-wielding or otherwise.
Right, and while Lavoisier proved oxygen was an element, he also died from a lack of it (among other things) after being guillotined.
According to a video I have, Lavoisier told a friend that he would try to blink his eyes when they held his severed head up…and he did, about a dozen times.
Tempting, but I vote nah. He had a family history of heart disease and his father died from the same thing ten years younger. Running might have added years to his life he might not have gotten otherwise.
Maximilien Robespierre invented the legal system that was later used to execute him.
Alessandro Guidoni, an Italian test pilot, went up one day in 1928 to test a new parachute he had designed, after informing his commanding officer that it probably wouldn’t open.
It didn’t. :dubious:
I’m sorry to say that my English language cite is no longer online. Here is one in Italian. I don’t speak much of it, but paracadute is a parachute and dubbioso means doubtful.