We have long been accustomed to the conveniences and comfort of modern vehicles - and few people think that behind the creation of aircraft, ships or cars lies the hard work of thought of many inventors. Not all of them were lucky enough to live up to the moment when their creation gained deserved popularity. And some devices became lethal for their authors - after all, those had to conduct tests, often not knowing what the experiment would lead to.
Why don't people fly like birds?
In the mythology of almost every nation, there are legends about people who tried to fly. The most famous of them is the ancient Greek story about the master Daedalus and his son Icarus, who constructed wings from feathers fastened with wax. According to legend, Icarus decided to rise above the birds, but the wax melted under the influence of the sun's rays, and the young man fell down, crashing to death.
Historians agree that the heroes of this legend undoubtedly had real prototypes, whose names have not survived. But there is documentary evidence of later inventors who died as a result of testing artificial wings.
One of them was the oriental philosopher and linguist Ismail al-Jauhari, compiler of the most complete explanatory dictionary of the Arabic language for his time. At the beginning of the 11th century, he died, jumping with homemade wings from the roof of a mosque in the city of Nishapur (the territory of modern Iran).
In Russian written sources there is information that Ivan the Terrible's servant Nikita, son of Trofimov, made wings and demonstrated to the sovereign a successful flight from the Crucifixion bell tower in the Aleksandrovskaya Sloboda. But the further fate of the inventor was tragic. The king commanded: man is not a bird, and the one who made wings creates against nature, which means he is friends with evil spirits. The slave's head was cut off, and the wings were sprinkled with holy water and burned.
In total, the names of at least 75 people appear in historical documents who tried to make wings and died during their tests.
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Machine like Fantômas
Many tragedies have happened to the inventors of heavier-than-air aircraft.
One of the pioneers of aviation, the German glider designer Otto Lilienthal, whose ideas were developed by the theorist of scientific aerodynamics Nikolai Zhukovsky and the creators of the first aircraft, the brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright, crashed in 1896 while testing his apparatus. The machine turned over from a strong gust of wind and fell down, the inventor died. The airport in Berlin is named after him.
American design engineer Henry Smolinsky and his partner Harold Blake invented a flying car in the 1970s (this idea was used in the popular French film about Fantômas, where the main villain drove such a car). According to the concept, this vehicle could move on wheels on the ground, and, if necessary, unfold its wings and make a flight. The device was created on the basis of a Ford Pinto car, for which they sawed and made folding wings from a Cessna Skymaster aircraft. Alas, it was from this that they lost strength - and during a test flight in 1973, both designers died due to wing breakage.
Already in our time, British inventor Michael Dacre tried to create an air taxi - a small plane capable of moving in urban environments, with almost silent engines and the ability to use roofs as ultra-short runways. In 2009, during the first test conducted in Malaysia, the device crashed to the ground, and Michael Dacre, who piloted it, was killed.
Eternal rest in depth
Some devices that were destructive for their creators were sea vehicles.
During the American Civil War, engineer Horace Lawson Hunley created a submarine propelled by oars. This submarine became the first in history to successfully attack an enemy ship (steam frigate) and sink it. On August 29, 1863, a boat moored to a steamer unexpectedly capsized and sank. She was raised to the surface, after which Hunley decided to conduct a new series of tests. On October 15 of the same year, the submarine could not surface, the inventor and seven more crew members were killed.
At the end of the 19th century, a Russian naval officer Vladimir Alekseevich Stepanov developed a project of a minelayer vessel with an automatic mine placement system. The ship, named "Yenisei", in 1904 was engaged in mining the water area in the harbor of Port Arthur to prevent a possible landing of Japanese troops. One of the mines surfaced, and the Yenisei blew up on it. Stepanov, as befits a captain, supervised the rescue operations. Most of the crew managed to escape, but the commander sank to the bottom with the ship.
Irish businessman and shipbuilder Thomas Andrews was one of the designers of the famous Titanic and a passenger on its only voyage in 1912. When the ship hit the iceberg, the captain called the designer to assess the situation. He examined the ship and concluded that it would soon sink. Andrews, not thinking about himself, tried to help other people. He directed the launch of the boats and threw the sun loungers from the deck so that those in the water could use them as life-saving devices. Andrews' body was never found after the disaster.
Handyman from the Cheka
And, of course, one cannot fail to say about the tragedies that happened to the inventors of vehicles traveling on land.
In 1921, Valerian Abakovsky, a young chauffeur of the Tambov Cheka, invented an aero car - a covered motor railcar with an aircraft engine and a propeller. The device was built in a local railway workshop and could reach speeds unprecedented at that time up to 140 kilometers per hour. The tests were carried out on the Moscow - Tula section. The airborne car reached the capital in record time, but on the way back, because of the railroad track not adapted to such loads, it derailed. Abakovsky and five more people died, 15 other passengers managed to survive. Despite the fact that such devices were no longer created in the country, the invention was recognized as outstanding and Abakovsky was buried near the Spasskaya Tower of the Kremlin.
In 1930, the Austrian physicist Max Valier, with the support of Opel, conducted experiments to create a rocket-powered car. The very first test drive showed a stunning result. But during the second, a rocket with alcohol as a liquid propellant, attached to a car, exploded. Max Valier, who was in the pilot's seat, was killed on the spot by a fragment of her steel cylinder.
Two years later, the famous American mechanic Frederic Dusenberg, the creator of Duesenberg cars, crashed in a car of his own production. Among his inventions is a braking system with uniform deceleration of the speed of all four wheels, which is still used today. In 1931, at a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers, Dusenberg proclaimed that the speed of 100 miles (approximately 160 kilometers) per hour would soon become normal for a car. A year later, his Duesenberg overturned due to an attempt to reach this speed on a wet road. The driver suffered a spinal cord injury, dislocated shoulder and chest contusion. As a result, he developed pneumonia, and a few weeks after the disaster, the inventor passed away. In 1997, Frederick Dusenberg's name was inducted into the United States Motorsport Hall of Fame.
The tragic fate befell the inventor of the device, which can be called the first motorcycle. American Sylvester Roper figured out how to make cycling easy and enjoyable. In 1894, he created a two-wheeled machine with a steam engine under the seat.
Coal had to be thrown into a small furnace from time to time, and the steam coming from the hot boiler turned the rear wheel. The handle on the steering wheel regulated the steam power and, accordingly, the speed of the device. The steam bike was very noisy and smoky, and Roper was even sued to be banned from riding. But there were no laws on such vehicles yet, so the inventor did not violate anything, and the case against him was closed. Although this did not bring happiness to Sylvester Roper. Two years later, the 73-year-old designer fell off his steam motorcycle. The head injury he received was fatal.
One of the most recent tragedies of this kind happened to the British multimillionaire Jimi Heselden, the owner of a Segway company, a popular electric scooter with two wheels on either side of the driver. In 2010, while walking on this vehicle, he died, falling off a high cliff into the river. And although Heselden was not the inventor of the segway (this was done by the American designer Dean Kamen), he, as the owner of the company and the trademark, can be counted among the creators of such electric scooters - and even those who became a victim of the device he created.
Elena Gatchina