Death by invention: You won’t believe how these inventors died

Though inventors shape our lives and the products we rely on every day, for some, their life’s work ends up being their death sentence. For many on this list, their inventions are far from household items, and their deaths are partially explained by the dangers that lurk behind their beloved creations. Inventors like Franz Reichelt, whose invention led to his grand, dramatic, and, of course, tragic death, stand in contrast to other great thinkers, like Nobel prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, who developed complications as a result of her research that would lead to her passing in 1934. Nevertheless, the work advanced by Curie earned her the Nobel Prize and set the field of radiobiology on a new path that would be followed by the scientists who inherited her findings.

The dark fate of many inventors-turned-stuntmen

Many of the others on the list are inventors-turned-stuntmen, whose inventions, or their stunts involving said inventions, are responsible for their deaths. Karel Soucek, born in 1947, died while performing in a barrel that he described as shock-absorbent, which he had used to survive a tumble over Niagara Falls in 1984. Local news covered the Soucek’s stunt, which resulted in a seven-inch gash on his head.

A year later, using the same design, the Czech stuntman died performing at the Houston Astrodome after his barrel was prematurely ejected, leading him to fall 180 feet and crash outside of his designated landing zone. Instead, Soucek’s barrel landed on the rim of a tank of water, and though he survived the initial impact, he died before the show’s final curtain had closed. The legendary inventor and stuntman was thirty-eight at the time of his death. Soucek’s grave can be found in Drummond Hill Cemetery in Niagara Falls, Ontario, and is marked by a placard with a quote of his which reads: “It is better for a person to take a chance from life than to live in that gray twilight and know not victory nor defeat.”

Soucek was far from the first to meet his tragic fate, testing the extremes of human innovation and domination over the force of gravity. Franz Reichelt, born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1879, was a tailor who also dabbled in the emerging art of parachuting. His design, the “Flying Tailor,” was a wearable parachute that led to his eventual death when he attempted to test his invention by jumping off the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 1912. Reichelt was motivated to design a wearable parachute to prevent deaths in aviation, which was beginning to emerge as a critical means of military transport at the turn of the 20th century.

Deaths of this nature continue to take place, and in a recent example that many will remember, it appears that a lack of hubris played a serious role in the demise of the inventor. The Titan submersible disaster, which claimed the lives of five individuals, including the founder of the company that offered the expedition, Stockton Rush, perished when the submersible imploded in the cold waters of the Atlantic near the site of the Titanic.

Discovery and advancement can come with a cost

Not all inventors on this list meet their deaths in such public and high-profile ways. Consider the example of Thomas Andrews, a designer and shipbuilder known for his role in creating one of the most ill-fated ships in history, the Titanic. Andrews was aboard the ship’s inaugural voyage and perished in the wreck.

Before Andrews, American inventor William Bullock, whose contributions to the improvement of Richard March Hoe’s rotary printing press were critical to the proliferation of art, allowing information to be spread through print much more quickly. Sadly, his own press would ultimately be responsible for his death after his leg was caught in the machine during installation at the Philadelphia Public Ledger on April 2, 1867. Bullock developed gangrene and died on the operating table just over a week later when surgeons attempted to amputate the infected leg.

Additionally, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, whose early studies of radioactivity were ultimately blamed for her death as she developed aplastic anemia, a result of overexposure to radiation.

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