Inventors killed by their own inventions
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> Alexander Bogdanov (22 August 1873 – 7 April 1928)...After undergoing 11 blood transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. His fellow revolutionary Leonid Krasin wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation"... But a later transfusion cost him his life, when he took the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis
>This article is AWFUL. I'm trying to do some research on comparative mythology of vampires, by culture, and am literally seeing Count Chocula in the same list as this broad-stroke "European" generalization.
>The case of Elizabeth Báthory inspired numerous stories during the 18th and 19th centuries. The most common motif of these works was that of the countess bathing in her victims' blood to retain beauty or youth.
> Midgley's legacy has been scarred by the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and Freon. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny".
Multiple sources seem to agree that the reason he chose to add lead to gasoline rather than ethanol (which was both greener and cheaper) was due to profit: his company could patent leaded gasoline, but not ethanol. That's an interesting lesson that we should learn any day now.
Interesting!
Fritz Haber & Robert Le Rossignol (who are both out of the running for being killed by their own inventions) might have a reasonable competing claim to their shares in "most impact on the atmosphere" for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
> Due to its dramatic impact on the human ability to grow food, the Haber process served as the "detonator of the population explosion", enabling the global population to increase from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 7.7 billion by November 2018. [...] Nearly 50% of the nitrogen found in human tissues originated from the Haber-Bosch process.
Being responsible for removing a bottleneck that enabled +100% more biomass of tool-using fossil-fuel-burning* primates arguably may have been a much larger indirect impact on the atmosphere (and many other things, for better or worse), leaving aside the direct impact on the nitrogen cycle.
* also, for various subsets of primates, perhaps add: airplane-flying, meat-eating, truck-driving, aircon-running, tree-planting, fish-catching, land-clearing, television-watching, hackernews-reading, list-enumerating, ...
I think nitrogen run off from soil has had quite an impact on changing water habitats as well, eutrophication and fish getting beat out by algae for limited oxygen resources.
He was completely unapologetic about it - he thought gas a better form of killing.
Both his wife and daughter seem to borne some guilt from his poison gas work. His wife committed suicide a week after Ypres - though some have disputed if it was connected. His daughter's suicide was on learning her research into poison gas cures couldn't be continued.
And profit for what? His immediate use?
I’m not seeing any indication of a family in his bios. Where did all of that wealth go?
According to "The secret history of lead" [1]:
> With a legal monopoly based on patents that would provide a royalty on practically every gallon of gasoline sold for the life of its patent, Ethyl promised to make GM shareholders–among whom the du Ponts, Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering were the largest–very rich. (...) In April 1923, (...) the General Motors Chemical Company was established to produce TEL, with Charles Kettering as president and Thomas Midgley as vice president.
So it seems most of it went to GM, Du-Pont, and Standard Oil. As for who inherited his personal fortune, he had a wife and two children [2].
The grandparent is the one claiming history did it wrong, by using leaded gasoline even though ethanol gasoline would have been the better choice.
Eh. "It could only be this way, because it was" is a textbook definition of begging the question and circular reasoning. It's entirely possible that there were multiple extrinsic reasons that lead to this situation that aren't "leaded fuel was just the better option". Marketing/PR, industry momentum, regulatory capture, cost-of-entry into the fuel industry. In fact it was noted below that the leaded fuel inventor has partnered with GM.
This is exactly what the GP meant by invoking History vs. Econ 101. You're assuming that this simplistic model of price/demand is an inevitable law of nature even though there are countless counter examples throughout history of the wrong decisions made for the wrong reasons.
Worse still, Midgely worked actively to cover the risks of lead up. He even held a press conference in 1924 where, to assure reporters that TEL was safe, he washed his hands in a bowl of the stuff (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-40593353)!
Deborah Blum covered the whole story in her excellent 2011 book, The Poisoner's Handbook (https://www.amazon.com/Poisoners-Handbook-Murder-Forensic-Me...). Blum excerpted the story of TEL for a piece in Wired, which can be read here: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/looney-gas-and-lead-poisoning-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Dyatlov
Still, he didn't get killed by it right away...
There are a lot of "old wives tales" about the lead being useful for lubrication or "cushioning the valves" or other nonsense that has been substantially debunked.
> Some modern scholars question if the brazen bull ever really existed, attributing reports of the invention to early propaganda.
However, it certainly wouldn't be the most barbaric form of execution humans have invented [0].
> Pendulum: A type of machine with an axe head for a weight that slices closer to the victim's torso over time.
> Scaphism: An Ancient Persian method of execution in which the condemned was placed in between two boats, force fed a mixture of honey and milk, and left floating in a stagnant pond. The victim would then suffer from severe diarrhea, which would attract insects that would burrow, nest, and feed on the victim.
> Blowing from a gun: Tied to the mouth of a cannon, which is then fired.
> Blood Eagle: Cutting the skin of the victim by the spine, breaking the ribs so they resembled blood-stained wings, and pulling the lungs out through the wounds in the victim's back. Used by the Vikings.
> Flaying: The skin is removed from the body.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_methods_of_capital_pun...
From Wikipedia:
- Brazen bull: "Some modern scholars question if the brazen bull ever really existed, attributing reports of the invention to early propaganda."
- Scaphism: "The primary source is Plutarch's 'Life of Artaxerxes II', where he attributes the story to Ctesias, a notoriously suspect source"
- Blood Eagle: "There is continuing debate about whether the ritual was a literary invention, a mistranslation of the original texts, or an authentic historical practice."
Let's be very clear about how bad an idea this was: it was a balloon filled with hydrogen, with a chamber beneath it filled with hot air warmed by an open fire. An open fire. Beneath a container of hydrogen.
Later ones filled with helium were more successful, as they allow the balloonist to control buoyancy without dropping ballast or carrying enough fuel to maintain lift sufficient for the entire craft.
But who sticks a hydrogen balloon over an open fire and expects good things?
>they allow the balloonist to control buoyancy without dropping ballast or carrying enough fuel to maintain lift sufficient for the entire craft.
1. Rozier invented that 2 chamber balloon.
2. helium was discovered only more than half a century later.
If anything, i think the guy deserve the respect for what he did directly risking his life in the face of the known and unknown dangers and limited knowledge and technology of the time.
The first class? Try Lilienthal, Percy Pilcher, Geoffrey de Havilland, the X-15 pilot whose name I can't recall — all these died testing something they couldn't have known would kill them, and the world gained from their sacrifice.
De Rozier had an idea that he knew he couldn't safely implement, but went ahead and did it anyway, and died. What did we learn from it? We knew hydrogen was flammable — de Rozier himself demonstrated it safely, except for his eyebrows. The balloon was only flown the once, and there's no evidence he grasped its potential, having little understanding of piloting a balloon. Useless sacrifice, in my opinion.
sounds familiar - https://youtu.be/fSTrmJtHLFU?t=43
> Useless sacrifice, in my opinion.
i wonder where you draw a line between the Challenger and De Rozier, of course if you draw any line here at all.
The Challenger astronauts didn't have all the knowledge they needed to be aware of the certainty of their own deaths — I'd hold that there was no such certainty. The explosion was due to a confluence of events beyond their control, even beyond their knowledge. De Rozier had all the knowledge he needed to avoid dying, and no new information was gained by his death. There's not just a line between the two, there's a broad gulf, dividing reasonable reliance on systems that one knows could fail, and unreasonable trust in a device one knows to be misconceived from the start.
I had heard that all development stopped because the entire team watched on its initial test. They had carefully built an altimeter into the device that triggered the explosion at the desired height. Like all good plans gone awry they completely forgot that a rocket must first go up before it can go down and at launch it hit it's desired altitude on the way up at which point it exploded and took out the entire rocket development team.
Anyone know if this is a real thing?
Here's my personal favorite Wikipedia list: List of lists of lists
> The AVE Mizar (named after the star Mizar) was a roadable aircraft built between 1971 and 1973 by Advanced Vehicle Engineers [...] The prototypes of the Mizar were made by mating the rear portion of a Cessna Skymaster to a Ford Pinto.
...
If I just jump from a building and throw a bottle on the way down, saying that the bottle will 'throw me back up because physics', and then I die (obviously), I'm not an inventor, I'm just an idiot.
There's your between the lines. He was mentally ill later in his life, which caused his untimely death. I don't know what you were reading between the lines, but if it was making fun of an old man and his mental illness, please keep it to yourself.
And as a disclaimer I did not downvote you nor do I see any purpose to it. If somebody tries to explain themselves in coherent fashion I think it's admirable even though I might disagree with them.
Hoist with his own petard¹
1: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoist_with_his_own_petard)
My, what a grisly list that is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2018/11/05/young-rugby...
Good thing I'm thousands of miles away from where it would be deployed.
https://gizmodo.com/police-drone-crashes-into-police-5890507
What could possibly go wrong with a money rewarding GHG emissions?
When you think about it, if successful, Bitcoin will indeed achieve its goal of freeing us from central banks: no human being will be available to operate them. Very clever!
I've read several articles about the power consumption of these mines and it's jaw dropping:
Of course, by the end of 2017, the players who were pouring into the basin weren’t interested in building 5-megawatt mines. According to Carlson, mining has now reached the stage where the minimum size for a new commercial mine, given the high levels of difficulty, will soon be 50 megawatts, enough for around 22,000 homes and bigger than one of Amazon Web Services’ immense data centers.
https://www.politico.eu/article/this-is-what-happens-when-bi...
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39377851/ns/world_news-europe/t/se...
"Okay, start it up."
We only know about inventors killed by their own inventions where the scene was understood well enough to be reported and the incident notable enough to survive into Wikipedia.
It would be easy enough for someone way ahead of their time to have an unexplained death with a bunch of weird artifacts surrounding them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer)
[1] http://theconversation.com/marie-curie-and-her-x-ray-vehicle...
Hard to feel sorry for that guy.