Famous last words:
“Let’s stop for the night”
“We’ll stop over my dead body”
Those “flying suits” are exceptional even for this category, having offed 96% of their inventors.
His favorite song:
ETA: I guess he’ll be a (bald) Eagle Scout.
In "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,’ Miss Brodie claims this man as an ancestor. “He died on a gibbet of his own devising!” I had no idea that he wasn’t as fictional as she is.
Didn’t the designer of the SS TITANIC go down with it?
The alleged plot to survive the hanging jingled an ancient memory. I remember seeing a cartoon in Mad magazine suggesting a pipe inserted in the throat as a way of surviving a mock suicide. I shall hence call it from now on “Brodiecide.”
Samuel Erasmus Wilkinson and Nathaniel Sword fell out over a patent ownership and ended up coming to blows at their place of work.
Sword eventually grabbed what was nearest at hand,a prototype razor blade,and slashed W.s Carotid artery who responded in kind with another razor blade from the same sample batch they were both taken to hospital but died of wounds.
No I’m sorry that was completely and utterly untrue…I’ll get my coat.
While Jim Fixx did die relatively young, while jogging, the thing that people forget is that he was suffering from massive heart disease, and had a family history of it.
It’s kind of amusing to mention his death while jogging, and I do it myself, but any honest look at the facts leaves one convinced that his jogging probably extended his life.
Rats. I see Pravnik beat me to this one. But without the link, so I can pretend I’m contributing something to this thread, anyways.
Ralph124c, yes - Thomas Andrews, the man who designed the Titanic, and her sisters, did go down with the ship.
A minor nitpick- the ship was the RMS (Royal Mail Steamer) Titanic, not “SS Titanic”.
The exact identity of the person who invented gunpowder has been lost to history, but given that even static electricity can detonate black powder, I’d be extremely surprised if they didn’t end up being blown up (or otherwise done a serious injury) by the stuff when they finally got around to mixing sulphur, saltpetre, and charcoal together…
To nitpick your nitpick: I agree that Titanic was an RMS, but it still qualifies as SS - Steam Ship, as well. It’s not an official, governmental designation, but it’s not wrong to say.
Thus providing the incentive to invent the laboratory assistant.