# Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions

An episode of [Be Amazed](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1687637469), 11 Feb 2026, 26 min.

Audio: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/9940f77b-0e39-464c-9c6a-ab5a468ee135/stream.mp3

Have you ever dreamed of making an incredible discovery? Whether that’s curing cancer or finding a way to end world hunger, we all want to have a positive impact on the world, right? Sadly, for the inventors on this list, their weird and wonderful creations turned against them in the grizzliest way possible. So, from the highest highs to the lowest lows – let’s take a look at some inventors who were killed by their own inventions. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

## Transcript

[0:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Have you ever dreamed of making an incredible discovery?
[0:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Whether that's curing cancer, funny, a way to end world hunger?
[0:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We all want to have a positive impact on the world, right?
[0:12] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Sadly, for the inventors on this list, they're weird and wonderful creations.
[0:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Turned against them in the grisliest ways possible.
[0:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So, from the highest eyes to the lowest lows, let's take a look at some inventors who were killed by their own inventions.
[0:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I adore listening to you and listening to you.
[0:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now, you'd be a fool to think these inventors aren't the most book smart people.
[0:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In fact, some of them were the geniuses of their day.
[0:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Take Abu Nassar Al-Jahari.
[0:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He was a notable Persian scholar born in Kazakhstan sometime in the 10th century.
[0:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He worked as a lexiconographer and wrote a little book.
[1:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I don't know if you've heard of it.
[1:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's called uh...
[1:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The Dictionary.
[1:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yeah, thanks.
[1:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Okay, it's not the Dictionary you were I might use today, it was entirely an Arabic, but still, smart dude.
[1:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Al Jahari spent his days traveling around the Middle East before settling a nishipper, and what is modern day around.
[1:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's where things took a little turn for the worst for him.
[1:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: See, according to some scholars, despite being incredibly smart, Aljahari began suffering serious mental delusions about being a bird.
[1:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What the clock?
[1:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In the first decade of the 11th century Aljahari climbed to the roof of Nishipur Mosque with two wooden wings he'd spent months laboring over.
[1:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Aljahari believed that with these lovingly crafted and bespoke wings, he could realize his fantasy of flight.
[1:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, it didn't exactly go to plan.
[1:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After leaping from the moss roof and flapping frantically, bird-boy-bound beak-first, end of the ground.
[2:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes.
[2:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Poor guy.
[2:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I guess he hadn't yet figured out the word dumb-dumb for his dictionary.
[2:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Being an inventor, you've got to be prepared to deal with a lot of failures if you hope to strike gold.
[2:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Sometimes, those failures can be pretty spectacular.
[2:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Take French aviation pioneer Jean François Bellopoulet de Rosier.
[2:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He went down in history for performing the first man hot air balloon flight in November 1783.
[2:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: but he went down even harder two years later after a planned trip across the English channel.
[2:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: See the balloon he used in his first untethered flight lacked the oof to fly from England to France.
[2:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So Darosia engineered his own balloon which ran off both hot air and hydrogen gas to give him that little extra thrust he needed.
[2:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Despite several attempts to get his special balloon off the ground though, Darosia wasn't able to launch from the lone surmere, until June 15th, 1785, when he did so with his companion B.A.
[3:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Romain.
[3:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After successful takeoff everything seemed to be going fine, until a sudden change of win pushed them back some three miles past their starting point.
[3:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What a bummer!
[3:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Upon realigning and getting going in the right direction again, the Rosier and Romaine traveled a measly seven miles before the balloon spectacularly burst into flames near Wimrope.
[3:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Huh?
[3:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yep, now I can't be certain but running a double fuel design could have been the Rosier's downfall.
[3:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Sea Hydrogen is extremely flammable, so there's a chance that the Hydrogen canister caught light and incinerated that balloon to a crisp.
[3:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: There OZA and his companion hurtled towards the ground from about 1,500 feet, and were no more.
[3:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes, talk about going on in a blaze of glory.
[4:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Unless you spent 2023 living under a rock, you must have heard about the Missing Titanic submarine saga.
[4:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I'll give you a quick recap, American businessman and co-founder and CEO of Deepsea Exploration Company Oceangate, Stockton Rush designed a small submersible vessel to view the wreckage of the Titanic in.
[4:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Famously anti-health and safety, Rush went on record saying, at some point safety just is pure waste.
[4:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If you want to be safe, don't do anything.
[4:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And Boyle boy did that bite him on the bottom.
[4:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He was on board the submersible with four others, including his young son on June 18th when the vessel lost contact with the surface ship of the polar prince.
[4:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Search and rescue missions were conducted for several days by the French American and Canadian governments, and it became a massive international news story.
[4:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On June 22, the first pieces of debris were discovered over 1,500 feet from the OG Titanic.
[5:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Ocean Gate released a statement saying they believe a rush and the other passengers had sadly been lost.
[5:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So, what happened?
[5:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While the debris was consistent with a trap of internal pressure, because the interiors of the sub couldn't stabilize the external pressure, instead of exploding where it goes boom, it caved in on itself like a tin can under a car tire.
[5:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Ouch.
[5:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's nasty.
[5:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: See, Rush can poop who health and safety only wants, but only if it's his own safety he's putting at risk.
[5:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When others are trusting you with their well-being, you'd better follow that to the tea.
[5:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hey, I get it.
[5:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: You want to look good.
[5:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But sometimes the stylish options aren't always the most practical.
[5:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well for Austro-Hungarian Taylor, Franz Reichelt, function, trump form every day.
[5:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He'd become fixated on developing a suit for aviators that could transform into a parachute in case of emergency and safely bring them back down to the ground.
[6:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: and boy is this thing stylish.
[6:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Raikled and run a few successful tests on his swag suit by throwing a test dummy from his fifth lore balcony in Paris.
[6:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, if he really wanted this thing to take off, he needed a much higher platform to test his invention.
[6:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After months of contacting the Parisian prefecture of police asking if he could test it from the Eiffel Tower in 1912, they finally agreed.
[6:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Except on the day of the test, Reichler decided instead of using the dummy he'd been testing the suit with, he'd run the test with an even bigger dummy.
[6:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: himself.
[6:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This wasn't in the agreement with the police, but Reichler went ahead and did it anyway.
[6:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, his parachute failed to deploy after he jumped and he co-reamed almost 200 feet toward the ground, landing with a deadly thud.
[6:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yolk's, Reichelt became headline news and his name echoed around France for all the wrong reasons.
[7:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now, that's not the kind of legacy anyone dreams of.
[7:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: social media nowadays loves a hustler, you know someone who's put in the graph to build themselves up from the ground by their bootstraps.
[7:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: One of those with a keen eye for business was Henry Winston Lee.
[7:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He was a 17th century English painter, engineer, and merchant who invested the money he made from his paintings into five merchant vessels.
[7:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Sadly life on the come-up was tough and two of those ships got savagely wrecked on Eddie Stone Rocks near Plymouth, England.
[7:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When Stanley was in rage, nothing was being done to protect ships moving through these dangerous waters.
[7:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Rather than sit about Mone, he decided to take the initiative and sent out to build the first Eddie Stone lighthouse to ensure other merchants didn't suffer the same fate he had.
[7:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Construction of the large octagonal tower began in 1696 and was completed in 1698.
[8:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Winston Lee was incredibly proud of his achievement, some might say, a little too proud.
[8:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During the great storm of 1703 incredibly harsh weather and giant waves tore into the British coastline.
[8:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In response, Wednesday rushed to his lighthouse to make some quick repairs and deemed it structurally sound enough to withstand any onslaught from the elements.
[8:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But let's just say in the morning there was no lighthouse and no one steadily.
[8:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Oh no.
[8:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Since Wednesday's demise, the Eddie Stone lighthouse has been rebuilt and flattened over and over again.
[8:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But its fourth-and-current iteration has been standing strong since 1881.
[8:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Whew!
[8:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And after all these years, it sounds like they finally nailed a winning formula.
[8:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Ah, I was wish I had a cool name when I was growing up.
[8:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I tried going by.
[8:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Snake venom, pith are straight for a little while, but I never really caught on.
[9:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So when I heard about Mad Mike use, I was a little curious as to how that name came about.
[9:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: You see, Mad Mike spent his days as a limousine driver, but moonlighted as a flat earth conspiracy theorist and dear devil.
[9:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yep, he's called Mad Mike because he was literally insane.
[9:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Mike wanted to take multiple rocket journeys into space to photograph it as a flat disk, but without any money, he resorted to crowdfunding the entire operation.
[9:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: All in all he raised 7,875 dollars, which doesn't sound like enough money to build a safe rocket.
[9:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But after a successful test flight on March 24, 2018, Mike returned to the ground safely after reaching speeds of 350 miles per hour while over 1800 feet high.
[9:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Color me impressed.
[9:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, not content with just one flight, Mike decided to try another launch in February 2020.
[9:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This one didn't go to plan.
[9:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Witnesses at the scenes said they saw the rocket rubbing against the launch apparatus before takeoff.
[10:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Then once airbound, the landing parachute was ripped from the craft.
[10:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: With no way to safely land, Mad Mike's furious flight ended pretty horrifically, in a smoldering wreckage on the floor.
[10:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Worst of all, there was a camera crew there to capture it all for a TV show.
[10:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Man, I still can't get over how this ass-in-ine astronaut built a working rocket, which is $7,000.
[10:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I'm surprised he didn't go as far as strapping himself to the outside of it, then he'd really have gone out with a bang.
[10:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Seriously though, the homemade rocket was actually pretty impressive, despite the tragedy.
[10:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: NASA could have given him a job.
[10:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That is if NASA is even real!
[10:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now they are real.
[10:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Stop that.
[10:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Some of these ill-fated inventors were actual high flyers.
[10:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Take your anodical innovator Otto Lillianthall.
[10:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: You might have heard of the Wright brothers who flew the first man's motor operated plane in 1903.
[11:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, they'd have been the wrong brothers without our boy Otto's contributions.
[11:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: See, none of the aviator pioneered the idea of heavier than air flight.
[11:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: By curving the top of the wing, Lillianthong created a region of lower pressure above the wing, contrasted with the high pressure below, which generated an upward force called lift.
[11:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This became a central feature of his spectacular glider designs.
[11:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After performing the first successful flight in 1891, he'd go on to conduct thousands more.
[11:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, it wasn't all easy, breezy.
[11:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The Lianthos gliders were designed to distribute weight as evenly as possible to keep the craft stable.
[11:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: and they could be controlled to an extent by shifting your body around to change the center of gravity.
[11:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But if the glider became pointed towards the ground, it was really difficult to recover from that position.
[12:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On August 9th, 1896 after successful test lights were e-glided for a staggering 820 feet, Lilitha went for one more flight.
[12:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This one's sampling would be his last.
[12:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The glider pitched forward and began to nose down faster than Lilitha could recover.
[12:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: he crashed from around 50 feet in the air, which wasn't fatal than in there, but was enough to fracture his cervical vertebrae.
[12:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After being rushed to the hospital, Lillianthau succumbed to his injuries around 36 hours after the faithful crash.
[12:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Man, what a hero.
[12:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, out his work and sacrifices, you might have never got on the plane for your vacation, so the next time you're sitting on the runway, spirit thought for the godfather of aviation, old auto lilyenthal.
[12:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Few things in life are objectively cool.
[12:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Skinny jeans, planking, and plan dance dance revolution with your homies.
[13:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's it.
[13:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Oh, and motorbikes?
[13:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Motorbikes are cool.
[13:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: and we've got Sylvester H. Roper to thank for that.
[13:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This American inventor specialized in automobile innovations coming to public attention in 1863 for developing a steam garage.
[13:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: One of the earliest working automobiles in the first ever motorbike the Velocipade in 1867.
[13:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Look is no Harley, but I bet back in Roper's day if you pulled up on one of these bad boys.
[13:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: as a Jew.
[13:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, as I know too well being so darn cool all the time comes with a terrible price.
[13:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On June 1st 1896, Roper wrote one of his later Velassipied models to the Charles River Bike Track and Cambridge Massage Shoops.
[13:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After making a few labs that are a blistering pace of 40 miles per hour in zooming past prosegales, ropers bikes suddenly get a fit of the wobbles.
[14:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What happened next is a bit unclear.
[14:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Rober definitely came off his bike and hit his head.
[14:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, the autopsy showed his cons of death was a heart attack.
[14:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Whether the crash caused the heart attack or the heart attack caused the crash, we don't know.
[14:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We're helmet-yabozos.
[14:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We covered all sorts of great and ingenious inventors, but what about the inventors who did more harm than good?
[14:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But one of those was American chemical engineer Thomas Mitchley Jr.
[14:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He's remembered most for helping to develop lead at gasoline in 1921.
[14:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Magelly Junior found that by adding tetrathal lead to gasoline, car manufacturers could reduce the wear and tear on internal engine components and help them run longer.
[14:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Awesome!
[14:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But burning liquified lead is devastating to the environment.
[15:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Lead is a heavy metal and lasts long after the other exhaust gases like carbon monoxide have dissipated.
[15:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: and the ensuing decades measurable quantities of lead clung to American streets, sidewalks, and walls.
[15:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When it rained, all that toxic lead washed into fresh water supplies, poisoning millions of innocence and leading to its eventual phase out in 1996.
[15:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes!
[15:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But let it gas wasn't the invention that spelled mentally juniors demise.
[15:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He contracted polio in 1940, a horrific disease that left him partially paralyzed.
[15:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Becoming mostly bedbound, mentally juniors designed an elaborate poli system that allowed him a modicum of mobility in his sorry state.
[15:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, one morning in 1944, he was found unfortunately tangled in the robes.
[15:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes.
[15:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Look, I know his flagship invention caused a huge amount of harm, and I'm not excusing that, but that's a horrible way to go.
[16:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Poor guy.
[16:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Why is it that an old movie is about the future?
[16:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They thought it would all be flying cars and robot waitresses by now.
[16:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Let's still struggle to do my laces, something about a bush into a bunny or something, right?
[16:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Anyways, one man who had a solid crack at making a flying car was Henry Spalansky.
[16:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: His incredible invention called the Miser fused the back part of a sesna skymaster and the front part of a Ford Pinto into this chimera hybrid.
[16:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I guess you'd call it a carmera.
[16:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Okay, y'all, see myself out.
[16:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Shockingly, Smolensky's invention was a literal piece of junk that fell apart at a general breeze.
[16:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: During a test flight on August 26, 1973, the pilot had to make an emergency landing and a bean field when the wing struck the dad shortly after takeoff.
[16:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hmm, sounds like a pretty fatal design flaw, right?
[17:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, Smolensky was unperturbed by the events, and decided to take it out again on September 11 with no further adjustments.
[17:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Once airborne Smolensky attempted a sharp return and the wing-struck collapsed again.
[17:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Only this time, the entire aircraft disintegrated in mid-air and small and ski log with his business partner Howard Blake never made it back to the ground alive.
[17:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Sadly, our dreams of flying cars seem no closer to the present than they did 50 years ago.
[17:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On a bummer, nowadays you can access pretty much anything on your phone, but it wasn't always like that.
[17:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now back in the olden times, everything was printed out and one of the key figures in making that happen was William Bullick.
[17:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He was an American inventor who made significant improvements to the rotary press, a type of large-scale industrial printing machine.
[17:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Bullick's contribution to the rotary press was designing his system that fed a continuous role of material into the press, meaning nobody had to stand there feeding it all day.
[18:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: neat.
[18:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, in April 1867, while making a few adjustments to one of his new presses at the Philadelphia Public Ledger newspaper, Bullet kicked the machine and got his leg stuck, and crushed in the process.
[18:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Ouch!
[18:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now this exit in a lone wasn't enough to take his life, however the leg contracted gangrene.
[18:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: been became infected.
[18:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: A few days later he passed while undergoing surgery on his gimme lag.
[18:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He yikes.
[18:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What a truly horrible way to go.
[18:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I've never been more glad I can just read the news on my iPhone.
[18:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When I think about it, my life is pretty boring.
[18:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I read a video, edit a video, get a little out of the hordes of loyal fans, and it's quite, but I like it.
[18:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But then, I hear about people like Alexander Bagden of and it's hard meant to compare yourself.
[18:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This Russian physician philosopher and science fiction writer co-founded the Bolsheviks of revolutionary Russian political party.
[19:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What a crazy life.
[19:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, Bagden of is best remembered for being a pioneer in blood transfusions where blood is transferred from one patient to another.
[19:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 1924, Bogdenov embarked on some co-washed and humble experiments.
[19:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He hoped to achieve eternal youth or at least partial rejuvenation by a transfusing himself with younger people's blood.
[19:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: With their consent, I might add, and according to some dubious peer reviews, he actually had some success.
[19:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He claimed his eyesight improved, his balding stopped, and his peer said he looked seven to ten years younger.
[19:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: How true you think this is is up to you, but I think there's something fishy about it.
[19:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, in 1928 it all came to a horrible end when Bogdanov decided to exchange blood with a student of his who he knew had malaria and tuberculosis.
[20:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What exactly he hoped to achieve with this, I'm not sure, but the student made a full recovery.
[20:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Nice, that's awesome.
[20:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yeah, but sadly, Bogdanov contracted malaria and tuberculosis from the infected blood and was in so lucky.
[20:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes, he went from 10 years younger to 6 feet under.
[20:21] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes to see it.
[20:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: ever since the dawn of time, humankind has dreamed of exploring the great yonder.
[20:28] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It's a dream few have ever gotten to realize, but even fewer have achieved it quite like legendary Chinese official one-hoo.
[20:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: There's a lot of conflicting information about when he lived, some say it was as early as 2000 BC, some say as late as the 1600s, and some say he may have never lived it off.
[20:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But if his tale is true, one who would be the world's first astronaut.
[20:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What?
[20:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: How?
[20:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While the story goes, one built a special chair with 47 rockets attached to it.
[21:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On the day of liftoff, he got dressed up and his best clothes climbed into his best chair and had 47 servants light one rocket each before making a mad dash for cover.
[21:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: There was a huge explosion that shook the ground and after the smoke and cleared one and his chair were gone.
[21:21] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Never to be seen again.
[21:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Wow.
[21:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Okay, so maybe one who did make it into space on board is rocket chair contraption.
[21:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But, maybe he just got blown to smithereens?
[21:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What do you think?
[21:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Was this a jelly for one kind or did it all go up in smoke for no reason?
[21:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Have you ever met that person who always has opinions about things they know nothing about?
[21:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Annoying, right?
[21:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, that's exactly the kind of person British watercolor artist Robert cocking was.
[21:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Despite his somewhat successful painting career, cocking was always fancying himself as a kind of amateur scientist.
[22:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And he was very, very amateur.
[22:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Despite having no scientific qualifications whatsoever, cocking caught one of the first pair-shoe jumping England in 1802 and felt like he could do better.
[22:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So he spent the next few years of his life redesigning a new, conical shaped bear-shoed 170 feet in circumference.
[22:21] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Once his passion project prototype was finished, he contacted two friends who owned a hot air balloon to help him test his master piece out.
[22:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On June 24, 1867 despite being a whopping 61 years old, and again, having no formal qualifications in science, cocking roadups suspended beneath the balloon.
[22:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: At 5,000 feet he deployed, but the cone shaped parachute inverted causing cocking to plummet doors the ground.
[22:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hacking's Natsukleva design completely fell apart 200 to 300 feet above the ground and he didn't survive the impact.
[22:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: See, Kaki Kacking here had forgotten to consider the weight of the parachute when performing his calculations.
[23:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Therefore, he was considerably heavier than he anticipated.
[23:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What a fool!
[23:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: At that pure reminder to you, leave the smart stuff to the smart
[23:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I'd be young and full of life again, my youth is now sadly a distant memory.
[23:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, one budding young inventor called William Nelson suffered an incredibly tragic fate that cut his life short.
[23:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: At just 24 years of age, Nelson was working for general electric and disconnected in New York where he was viewed as an upcoming talent with a great deal of promise.
[23:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, on October 3, 1903 Nelson took his latest and potentially greatest invention out for a new spin.
[23:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was a prototype motorized bicycle that he wheeled to the top of a hill opposite the home of his father-in-law.
[23:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now, I'm not sure exactly what happened to our boy Willie, but he got on the bike and flew down the hill at rapid speed.
[24:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Whether he lost control and collided with a tree or simply fell off and bumped his head, it's not clear.
[24:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What we do know is that he had an accident halfway down and when he reached the bottom of the hill, Willie was no more.
[24:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: She's that's heartbreaking.
[24:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Believe me, I have worked for some maniacal narcissists in my time.
[24:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Some people just earn nice leaders, and that's definitely true for a farce the tyrant.
[24:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He ruled over Ocargas and Sicily around 570 BC and had quite the reputation for his excessively cruel punishments.
[24:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I can't give y'all the grizzly details, however there was one punishment called the unreasonable that ended up working against him.
[24:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: One of the larces devoted employees proposed the sick idea of a life-sized bull made of bronze that was hollow on the inside.
[24:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The larse could load his enemies inside the bull's set of fire beneath it and make his enemies go bye-bye.
[25:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yikes!
[25:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: adds sounds horrible.
[25:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The Lars love the idea, but decided to add some extra crew details like making smoke below from the nose and clouds of spicy incense.
[25:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Wow.
[25:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This guy's a real piece of work.
[25:21] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, what goes around comes around?
[25:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: According to the legend, when Ocargos was overthrown by Telemokus in 554 BC, the Lars got a taste of his own medicine.
[25:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Telemokus put the Lars inside the Brasson bulllander that was the end of him.
[25:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Nice.
[25:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Karma can be a cruel mistress in paying its dues, and this evil ruler was the long overdo.
[25:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Thanks for listening to the podcast, we'll see you again next time you'll want to be amazed.

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