Learn from mistakes. But with these people - physicists, engineers and even tailors - fate played a cruel joke.
Russian roads as a barrier
Valerian Abakovsky's invention, like the legendary Titanic, met an unexpected obstacle on its way, but in the form of not an iceberg, but Russian railways. Abakovsky's aerial car, which could accelerate to a record 140 km / h at that time, fell victim to uneven rails and went out of the way at high speed.
Valerian Abakovsky served as a driver in the Tambov branch of the Cheka, and in his spare time he worked on the drawings of the air car. As a result, he presented his project for a motor railcar with an aircraft propeller and received money for its construction. After several tests, the air car was put into operation and its first official trip was the Moscow - Tula route in the summer of 1921, where it was supposed to deliver representatives of the communist parties from different countries. The air car successfully brought the delegates to Tula, but did not make it back to Moscow. As a result of the accident, seven people died, including the inventor himself.
Sacrifices Must Be Made
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This phrase was uttered by Otto Lilienthal before his death. The engineer who made everyone believe that a person can fly like a bird died after a failed test of another device. Otto Lilienthal is known for pioneering the development of aircraft, having flown thousands of flights on various structures - from monoplanes to ornithopters that resemble mechanical dinosaurs. Lilienthal conducted test flights from different hills, and in 1893 he even built one artificial one near Berlin and named it Fliegeberg (German - "mountain for flights").
On his fateful day, August 9, 1896, Otto flew from the hills near the city of Rinow in northern Germany. When the engine of his glider stalled in the air, Lilienthal fell from a height of 15 m and broke his neck. He was urgently taken to Berlin for the best surgeon in those days, but, unfortunately, they did not manage to save him. 40 years after Lilienthal's death, the artificial hill he built for experimental flights was converted into a memorial.
Destructive devotion to science
Maria and Pierre Curie not only started a new milestone in the history of physics and chemistry, but literally gave their health to the development of science and medicine. This married couple is known for an amazing dedication to their vocation: they discovered polonium and radium while working in a dilapidated shed full of samples, and they obsessively studied the properties of these new elements in all their free time.
The Curies, without much hesitation, carried test tubes with these substances in their pockets, and Maria, according to her diaries, generally liked to leave a test tube with radium on the bedside table and watch it flicker in the night
At the beginning of the 20th century, it was not yet known how harmful effects of polonium and radium on health were. Therefore, the Curies, without much thought, carried test tubes with these substances in their pockets, and Maria, according to her diaries, generally liked to leave a test tube with radium on the bedside table and watch it flicker in the night. The death of Pierre Curie has nothing to do with his work activity: he died quite absurdly, falling under the wheels of a horse carriage just three years after receiving the Nobel Prize. Marie Curie continued her work on polonium and radium, won the second Nobel Prize, this time in chemistry, and eventually died of leukemia at the age of 66. The notebooks in which the Curies kept detailed descriptions of their experiments are kept in the National Library of France in Paris. However, until now they can be taken exclusively under the signature,reaffirming our understanding of the health risks posed by these pages, saturated with radioactive residues.
Sinking ship hero
One of the heroes of the sunken "Titanic" is rightfully considered its designer Thomas Andrews Jr. so that they can keep afloat.
Thomas Andrews Jr. was a leading shipbuilder in early 20th century Ireland. He worked on the creation of passenger liners, and his brightest work was the Titanic, the largest liner of those times. Andrews knew the location of every node and passage on the ship, and shortly before that first and last voyage he admitted that the Titanic is "an example of, perhaps, the ideal creation of the human brain."
After the liner hit an iceberg, Andrews inspected the ship and concluded that the Titanic was destined to go to the bottom. After painstaking work to save the maximum number of passengers, Andrews himself refused to leave the ship and died along with his creation
After the liner hit an iceberg, Andrews inspected the ship and concluded that the Titanic was destined to go to the bottom. After painstaking work to save the maximum number of passengers, Andrews himself refused to leave the ship and died along with his creation. On the night of April 10, 1912, out of more than 2,000 passengers, 700 people were saved.
Victim of progress
The rotary printing press was invented by Richard March Howe in 1843, but it was the enhancements of another inventor, William Bullock, that helped break the printing industry 20 years later. Bullock introduced a new automatic paper feeding system as well as folding, double-sided printing and multi-ink printing mechanisms. This made it possible to produce up to 30,000 sheets per hour and significantly increase the circulation of newspapers and books.
Only four years after the introduction of an improved model of the so-called web rotary press, Bullock fell victim to his own invention. On one of his working days at the publishing house of the Public Ledger newspaper, he decided to fix a stuck mechanical block of the machine by kicking it back on the tape with his foot, as a result of which the leg was pinched in the printing press and crushed. A few days later, Bullock developed gangrene and died during amputation.
Let my heart down
Mechanic Sylvester Roper has been busy all his life improving existing mechanisms and creating new ones. His track record includes his own model of a sewing machine, a steam car, and even a manual chopper. And in his 70s, Roper decided to take up a bicycle and screwed a steam engine to it, thereby creating a prototype of the first motorcycle. In June 1896, he went for a ride on his steam bike and, right in front of the amazed audience, fell from it at a speed of over 60 km / h. Roper did not survive the fall and died on the spot. An autopsy showed that the cause of death was cardiac arrest. True, whether Sylvester's heart stopped from falling or even during a high-speed race on his beloved invention remained unknown.
Stand to the last
Henry Winstanley, a British artist and engineer living in the late 17th century, was known throughout Essex for his fascination with mechanical devices and hydraulic structures. He turned his own home into a "house of wonders" where he allowed visitors to marvel at a variety of mechanical quirks, and opened an amusement center on London's Piccadilly, entertaining guests with unusual fountains, water cannons and fireworks. In the late 1690s, Winstanley switched to a new project - building the first lighthouse on the dangerous Ediston Cliffs, where countless merchant ships crashed.
One can only marvel at how Winstanley managed to build a lighthouse on rocky ridges 14 km from the coast, where even today he manages to get into in rare moments of calm. The result of his work was a 40-meter wooden lighthouse on a stone foundation, decorated with red tiles and author's engraving. People did not really believe in the strength of Winstanley's building, to which he proudly replied that he himself would be inside the lighthouse on the day of the next strongest storm. Therefore, during the famous hurricane on November 26, 1703, which claimed the lives of at least 8,000 people throughout the UK, Winstanley was inside his lighthouse and died with it. Some time after the storm, when the curious swam to the Ediston Rocks, in the place of the lighthouse there was neither a lighthouse, nor its workers, nor, in fact, Winstanley. By the way, the next lighthousebuilt on these rocks and known as the concrete Smeaton Tower, influenced the design of lighthouses around the world and the use of concrete in construction.
Leap into the unknown
The tailor Franz Reichelt is considered one of the pioneers of aviation security. After all, it was he who first invented the parachute raincoat, which, according to the idea, was supposed to help pilots during accidents. Reichelt conducted the first tests of the parachute raincoat from the window of an apartment, and dummies acted as test pilots. However, test flights were unsuccessful and the parachutes were not deployed. After completing the product, Reichelt decided to test it on himself and from a higher point. To do this, he obtained a special permission from the Paris prefecture to jump from the Eiffel Tower.
As a result, on February 4, 1912, Reichelt crashed to death, as his parachute cloak, as in previous attempts with dummies, did not open again. The experiment was watched by a whole crowd of Parisians, and the death leap was even captured on film.
Reichelt's persistence makes him akin to other inventors. Although many of them died from their own inventions, it is thanks to their perseverance and hard work in the modern world that there are not only strong and deployable parachutes, but also high-speed aircraft, the existence of which Otto Lilienthal once dreamed of.