Karel Soucek was a daredevil and invented devices for his acts. He lived in Canada. He decided going over Niagara Falls in a barrel was a great stunt, but he wasn’t going to just do it without research, so he spent a lot of time researching what others who had done this did. After much studying he decided to build the perfect barrel for the stunt. It was nine feet long and five feet in diameter. This seems more like a small room than a barrel since a typical bathroom in a Cape Cod house is eight feet long by five feet wide. He and his barrel made it over the falls safely. He wasn’t so lucky when during a stunt at the Astrodome in 1985 the barrel with Soucek was suspended in the air 180 feet and was released too soon and missed a tank of water, spinning out of control. It hit the rim of the tank and Soucek died before the show was over.

I have talked about early flight many times, but Abu Nasr Ismail ibn Hammad a-Jawhari was involved with VERY EARLY flight attempts. He had attempted flight sometime in the early years of the first millennium. No one is sure of the exact year. He came from what is today Kazakhstan. It is said he thought if he created two wooden wings attached with a rope he would be able to fly. The story goes he climbed the stairs of a mosque and maybe climbed to the top of a minaret. He then tied on his wings, jumped and fell like a stone.

Franz Reichelt is known as a parachuting pioneer. He is also known as the flying tailor. He designed his own parachute. If one looked at it today they would know instantly this thing is not going to work. It didn’t look like any modern parachute, but looked more like a giant overcoat. Picture a coat which had two feet more above your head and about an extra arm’s length on the sides and you have an idea of what his supposed parachute looked like. He convinced authorities to let him jump off the Eiffel Tower in 1912 as a demonstration of his parachute. Even more chilling was the filming of the event with an early movie camera. One can see him crashing to the ground on YouTube today. Very sad. Here is the address on YouTube for the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BepyTSzueno
Copy and paste this address into the address area of your browser. Sorry Truthfacts doesn’t use live links.

Thomas Andrews was responsible for building the biggest invention of all. He was the managing director and head of the drafting department of Harland and Wolff in Belfast, Ireland. In case that doesn’t ring a nautical bell, they built the Titanic. When this ship was built it was said to be unsinkable. When you are responsible for building a ship which was considered one of the wonders of the age, what do you do? You take a trip on its maiden voyage of course. He got the trip for free since workers from his company always took the maiden voyage to observe the ship’s performance. He was responsible for overseeing the plans not only for the Titanic, but also its sister ship the Olympic, both White Star Line ships and the biggest of their time. As we all know, the ship hit an iceberg in 1912 and sunk.

We take the motorcycle for granted today. While it isn’t as popular as the automobile, there are still millions of them around the world. There was a time however when the motorcycle didn’t exist. Sylvester H. Roper is said to have invented the first one. He had also built one of the very first automobiles in 1863 called a steam carriage. Here is an unusual fact, the first motorcycle he built was also steam powered. How would you have liked to try and drive that with a boiler between your legs? Some say he was riding a steam powered bicycle with a steam engine added while others say this was the first motorcycle. I’ll let you decide, but at any rate he got the contraption up to 40 miles per hour and then was seen wobbling and falling. He hit his head and died. After the body was examined it was said he suffered heart failure and that was what really killed him and not the fall, but I included this anyway since at first it was thought the fall did kill him and maybe the fall gave him heart failure.

Valerian Abakovsky invented the Aerowagon or Aerocar. He was born in Russia and intensely interested in transportation. He was born in Riga in 1895. He was always looking to go faster and the result of his pursuit was the invention of the Aerowagon, a self-propelled railcar which had a powerful engine and used a propeller. In 1921 he was traveling in one of his railcars with other people on a run from Moscow to the Tula collieries. It was a test of the Aerowagon. They made it to Tula, but on the return trip the Aerowagon was going too fast and derailed. Six of the twenty-two on board died including Abakovsky.

One of the most famous of the old time cars was the Stanley Steamer. There is something about that name which seems to make us think about the old time cars of the period. Francis Edgar Stanley had a twin brother Freelan Oscar Stanley and they were responsible for inventing the Stanley Steamer in 1896. In 1906 they got the steamer up to 127 miles per hour. An incredible record for the time. Francis Edgar Stanley was driving a Stanley Steamer when he saw an obstacle in the road coming up quickly. He swerved to avoid it and turned his car over, killing him.