These Inventors Were Killed By Their Own Creations

These Inventors Were Killed By Their Own Creations History is full of brilliant, brave people who built something the world had never seen. And some of them were destroyed by the very thing they created. A tailor jumped off the Eiffel Tower to test his own parachute suit, and the cameras filmed him fall. A lighthouse builder was so certain of his creation that he wished to be inside it during the fiercest storm imaginable, and got exactly what he asked for. A submarine pioneer drowned in his own invention after it had already killed two crews. And the chemist who fed half the planet also fathered the deadliest gas in history, before being strangled by a machine of his own design. These are the inventors who paid the ultimate price, killed by their own genius. We uncover the stories of Franz Reichelt, Henry Winstanley, Otto Lilienthal, Horace Lawson Hunley, Marie Curie, Sabin von Sochocky, Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier, and Thomas Midgley Jr. Genius and blindness, it turns out, are very often the same thing. 🔔 Subscribe for more of the strange, dark, and unbelievable truths behind the world you thought you knew. SOURCES: Franz Reichelt — the "Flying Tailor" who died on 4 February 1912 leaping from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower (~57m) in his self-designed parachute suit; the jump was filmed by newsreel cameras and the footage survives; he had permission to test with a dummy but jumped himself — documented in contemporary French press (Le Figaro, Le Petit Parisien) and the surviving Pathé footage Henry Winstanley — engineer who built the world's first offshore lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks (1696–1698); famously wished to be inside it during "the greatest storm there ever was"; killed when the Great Storm of 1703 destroyed the lighthouse with him inside, leaving almost no trace — documented in British maritime history and contemporary accounts of the Great Storm Otto Lilienthal — the "Glider King," made 2,000+ documented flights and produced aeronau