Sometimes inventing a device can be very dangerous, even building one can be. I don’t know how many of you remember the article about the parents of a teenage boy who let him build a nuclear reactor in their garage. Things worked  out, but the risk was far too great not only to him and his family, but also to the neighbors. One has to wonder why he was allowed to do this. Anyway when devices are invented sometimes there is a risk. We don’t often hear about this, but some inventors are killed by their own inventions. I know this sounds like a Frankenstein plot, but that is not what I am talking about. Take the case of William Bullock. Bullock had a dream, he wanted to invent a way of printing on many sheets of paper quickly. After working tireless on his invention, he created what is known as the modern printing press. In 1863 he improved the printing press tremendously and gave it great speed and made it much more efficient. What he didn’t do was make it very safe. As most of us know the printing press is a huge machine and there are many places on it where one can get hurt or even killed, so you can imagine how much more dangerous early ones were. On April 3, 1867 Bullock was adjusting a printing press. A drive belt was off of a pulley. He tried to kick it on and in so doing his leg was crushed and he developed gangrene and a week later was dead.

Louis Slotin was a chemist and a physicist from Canada. He had been enlisted to work on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He was very dedicated to his profession. When the war ended he continued to work with plutonium cores. He believed it was very important to determine the density of the cores for future nuclear devices. One day Slotin was conducting a demonstration for some of his peers. During the demonstration he accidently caused a fission reaction which in turn released deadly radiation. When he saw what happened he threw his body over the plutonium to protect the rest of the people in the room which resulted in his death nine days later. A scientist named Harry Daghlian had also died before him. Slotin was a hero and died at the age of 35 years old.

I have mention the fact the Confederate Army had a submarine called the Hunley before, but I don’t recall mentioning it was named after its inventor Horace Lawson Hunley. It was very important to the Confederates to develop this submarine, because they wanted to break the blockade the North had set up off their coast. Hunley worked hard to develop his submarine, but it turned out to be a killer. He built a prototype and seven sailors took it out and submerged. The submarine was never able to get to the surface again and all seven of the crew died. He then built what he called an improved version of the Hunley. He decided to captain it himself and took it out off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina. He submerged the submarine during a test and again it failed to surface, killing Horace Lawson Hunley and the crew.

One of the most dangerous devices were early airplanes. I say this, because most of them were underpowered, flimsy and unreliable. Aurel Vlaicu was an inventor from Romania who specialized in developing airplanes at the beginning of the era of heavier than air flight. He began by building a glider in 1909 and quickly advanced to powered aircraft. His first plane flew in 1910. His planes won many contests. He went on to build a monoplane which had 80 horsepower, quite a bit for its day, but it was not completely finished. Vlaicu had achieved records for the highest, longest and fastest flights and he kept pushing the envelope and was the test pilot for his own planes. He decided it was time to fly over the Carpathian Mountains, because this would give him the record for the highest altitude flight ever. He never returned from his flight.

Max Valier was from Austria and a rocket scientist. He helped to found the German Verein fur Raumschiffahrt which was a Spaceflight Society which brought together like minded scientists and helped to make spaceflight a realization later on. Somehow Valier changed his focus and began to build rocket powered cars and rocket powered aircraft. He had used both solid fuel and liquid fuel rocket engines. He decided to concentrate on improving the liquid fuel for his rockets and was able to have a successful test of a liquid rocket propelled car. He was experimenting with an alcohol-fueled rocket engine on his test bench in his workshop when it blew up. It killed him and burned his work shop to the ground.

Henry Smolinski was intrigued with the idea of inventing a flying car. This idea was nothing new, people had been trying to do this since almost the beginning of the age of the airplane. He decided why bother to try and build one from scratch when he could take a car body and use it as the basis for his invention. He had formed a company with a friend named Hal Blake called Advanced Vehicle Engineers in Van Nuys, California. He decided the way to build a flying car was to take a small car and a small plane and mix the parts. He wanted to take a car and fit it with an airframe which he could remove at an airport and have just a car again. He fitted a Ford Pinto to a Cessna Skymaster. On September 11, 1973 he and his partner took the flying car for a test flight. A wing came off killing Smolinski and Blake. Could they have died because they used a Pinto, a car which became known for its terrible fires during crashes?

Otto Lillenthal was an early pioneer of aviation. He earned the title “flying man.” He flew and designed early gliders. He had built an artificial hill near Berlin, Germany and used it to fly his gliders from. His glider operated similar to a hang glider today. In 1891 he began to design and fly his own gliders and by 1896 he had made over 2,000 flights. In 1896 he took one of his gliders out for a flight and as he was gliding it pitched forward. He was only at an altitude of 50 feet and since the glider was pointing down he couldn’t recover by shifting his weight. The glider crashed breaking his neck and he died the next day.