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List of inventors killed by their own invention

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This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by editing the page to add missing items, with references to reliable sources.

This is a list of people whose deaths were in some manner caused by or directly related to a product, process, procedure, or other technological innovation that they invented or designed.

Ill-fated inventors

Automotive

Sylvester H. Roper (1823–1896), inventor of the Roper steam velocipede, died of a heart attack or subsequent crash during a public speed trial in 1896. It is unknown whether the crash caused the heart attack, or the heart attack caused the crash.[1]

William Nelson (c. 1879–1903), a General Electric employee, invented a new way to motorize bicycles. He fell off his prototype bike during a test run.[2]

Francis Edgar Stanley (1849–1918) was killed while driving a Stanley Steamer automobile. He drove his car into a woodpile while attempting to avoid farm wagons travelling side by side on the road.[3]

Fred Duesenberg (1876–1932) was killed in a high-speed road accident in a Duesenberg automobile.[4]

David Ogle (1921–1962) was killed in an auto accident when he lost control while driving the Ogle SX1000 he had designed.[5]

Aviation

The death of Franz Reichelt (d. 1912), who jumped off the Eiffel Tower expect­ing his con­trap­tion to act as a parachute.<br>Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (died c. 1003–1010), a Kazakh Turkic scholar from Farab, attempted to fly using two wooden wings and a rope. He leapt from the roof of a mosque in Nishapur and fell to his death.[6]

Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier (1754–1785) was the first known fatality in an air crash when his Rozière balloon crashed on 15 June 1785 while he and Pierre Romain attempted to cross the English Channel.

Thomas Harris (d. 1824) invented the gas discharge valve, the first such device for emptying a lighter-than-air balloon of gas. He died when the cord attached to the gas discharge valve in his balloon tightened as it was deflated, releasing more gas than intended and crashing the balloon.[7]

Robert Cocking (1776–1837) died when his homemade parachute failed. Cocking failed to include the weight of the parachute in his calculations.[8]

Vincent de Groof (1830–1874) died after losing control of his ornithopter and crashing.[9]

Otto Lilienthal (1848–1896) died from injuries sustained in a crash of his hang glider.[10]

Percy Pilcher (1867–1899) died after crashing his glider, having been prevented from demonstrating his powered aircraft.

Franz Reichelt (1879–1912), a tailor, fell to his death from the first deck of the Eiffel Tower during the initial test of a coat parachute which he invented. Reichelt promised the authorities he would use a dummy, but instead he confidently strapped himself into the garment at the last moment and made his leap in front of a camera crew.[11]

Aurel Vlaicu (1882–1913) died when his self-constructed airplane,[12] A Vlaicu II, failed during an attempt to cross the Carpathian Mountains.[13]

Victims of the 1930 crash of the British R101 airship included designers Vincent Crane Richmond and Michael Rope, along with Secretary of State for Air Lord Thomson who proposed the voyage, Air Vice Marshal Sir Sefton Brancker, responsible for its safety certification, and Director of Airship Development Reginald Colmore, who had managed its construction and overruled a safety inspection that recommended rebuilding.[14][15]

Henry Smolinski (1933–1973) was killed during a test flight of the AVE Mizar, a flying car based on the Ford Pinto and the sole product of the company he founded.[16][17]

Charles Ligeti (d. 1987) was killed in a crash in 1987 when testing modifications to his Ligeti Stratos aircraft of novel closed wing design.[citation needed]

Michael Dacre (1956–2009) died after a crash that occurred while testing his flying taxi device.[18][19][20]

John Williams (d. 2024) was killed when his replica P-51 airplane, designed and built by his own company, crashed into a tree during a failed landing.[21]

Chemistry

Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity and is credited for discovering radioactive polonium and radium, and the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different scientific fields. On 4 July 1934, she died at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy, Haute-Savoie, from aplastic anaemia believed to have been caused by her long-term exposure to radiation, some of which was from the devices she...