October 11, 2018 • 44 mins
Few things are more ironic than an invention killing its creator. The stories behind real life cases of death-by-invention are pretty interesting too. Pull up a chair and hear about a few from Josh and Chuck.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan, there's Jerry Rowland.
And this is Stuff you Should Know. I don't know
(00:21):
what addition this is should be a pretty interesting and
entertaining how about that? Uh? This this is the interrupting
Chuck from watching the Kabinaugh hearing addition. Yeah, really, man,
talk about historic huh Oh. I was glued to it
and then like I gotta go to do my job. Sorry.
For some reason, I feel guilty, like I'm responsible for that. No, no,
(00:42):
it's not your fault. Thanks for letting off the hook.
We gotta make the donuts. M hmm. Man, don't get
I'm recording it. So I'll just go back right after this. Okay, cool,
Well we'll talk really fast. I'll go back to seething
rage right after this. You'll just be like, uh, you'll
be like, no one tell me what happens? Oh goodness,
Uh all right, let's do it death by invention. Yeah,
(01:05):
I guess this would be the horribly ironic twist edition
of Stuff you Should Know. Yeah, and um, you know
we are talking up people who died by their own
hand in a way, it's in and it's really sad.
I mean, all these people are are pursuing their passions
for the most part, Uh, and to die because you
(01:26):
are a creative, inventive, passionate person, except maybe in the
case of Lacy. Uh, it's really sad. It is I think, um,
to die in any way, at any time, for any
reason is is unnatural. It's just wrong, you know. Yeah,
they listed out a couple before the official list of five. Yeah,
(01:49):
there's like a whole I mean, we could do the
same show like every white like once a quarter. Maybe
maybe we will chuck five more people. Yeah, we'll see.
We'll see how this one goes about that. Did you
want to touch on in a couple of those other
people though? Yeah, I mean, um, Henry wind Stanley is
definitely a kind of a famous one. He built a
(02:12):
very famous lighthouse, Eddie Stone Lighthouse back in and I
think that was the first iteration of it. I think
there's been four total, and we talked about it on
the Lighthouse episode. Yeah, I think this was the first
one on rock right, and this is like out out
there on on some rocks in the ocean or in
the channel, one of the two, or the sea. It's
(02:32):
out in the water. Yeah. A candle light, old school
candlelight lighthouse, very romantic lighthouse, very romantic, invented by, like
you said, Mr Henry wind Stanley, great name, and speaking
of great. Five years later there was a great storm
and this lighthouse actually that he built, collapsed on him
(02:55):
and killed him while he was trying to short up. Yeah, him,
he and five other people, and they were never found.
That's just sad. I guess the sweet, the sweet, the
sweet swept him as the sweet does sweet swell sweet
swells by the sweet war. Yeah, it's really that's it's
such a tragedy. What about Marie Curry who died at
(03:17):
sixty six from radiation poisoning, which technically she didn't invent
radium and polonium, she discovered them, but I mean her work.
She won Nobel prizes for it. Um. Yeah, like the
dangers of working with us, I mean always dangerous, but
especially back then and then again physicist Harry uh Daglion,
(03:41):
I'm gonna say, Dallian, Dallian, I like Daglion, Okay, Dallian,
That's what I'm going with but hey man, it's up
for grabs, so silent g silence, h yeah, kind of.
I mean there's a little bit of a guttural in there.
Why do you hate letters? Right? Those are superfluous right there.
So Harry daly In was another scientists who he was
(04:04):
working on the Manhattan Project on the Demon core, the
core of the plutonium bomb, and he died by his
own hand as well. He was stacking carbide bricks, tungsten
carbide around the core and dropped one, which I can't imagine, Like,
what a frightening moment that would be. Yeah, even more so, chuck.
(04:26):
He he had a monitor he was trying to see
how many tungsten bricks it took to make the plutonium
go critical, which is like once it goes critical, you've
got a nuclear explosion on your hands. So he's just
sitting there messing around with this. He's got a monitor
showing him and the bonitor said, hey man, that last
brick will make this go go critical. Um. It was
(04:47):
a monitor from the seventies, so it said things like
hey man, and uh so he knew, like, I gotta
get that brick away, and he went to go like
pull it back away from the stack, but in going
to pull it away, he accidentally knocked it onto the core,
so he had to go into the stack after it
to get it away from the core to make sure
that the thing didn't blow up, and he did, but
(05:09):
he supposedly suffered tremendously from um radiation poisoning. Yeah, I
mean he died within a month, So that's that's pretty tragic.
And you know, he it sounds like he was a
hero because if that thing would have exploded, uh, many many,
many lives lost. Yeah, he's definitely honored as a hero.
He also was not going to follow the rules apparently
(05:29):
because he was in there the lab by himself, which
was against protocol. I think he went back to work
after dinner and was sitting there working on a nuclear
pile by himself that he was trying to see where
the threshold was for getting it critical. Jeez, this is
a little crazy. So these examples to serve as a
set up though to the official five. Uh, and we're
(05:51):
gonna start with lee cy L. I s I I
got no love for Lecy. No. No, this is not
one of the ones where just a great creative following
their passion. I don't know. Maybe he was passionate about
harming others and people and court intrigue for sure. Yeah,
that's a good point. But we're going back to ancient
(06:13):
China here roughly to b C E. Is that what
we're saying now, and China this time was making the
conversion from just a big mess of of warring states
into what would be, uh eventually be the Keen dynasty.
(06:34):
Is that right? Chin Chin? We've been corrected by that
officially too. I looked it up because I was like,
I'm not I'm not following for this again here I
did it. I think it was you last time. It
definitely was so that, Yeah, the Chin dynasty finally being
ruled by one dynasty. So it was it was a
big change for China. It was um. But the way
(06:54):
that they assembled um all of these kind of like
facts fractious states into a single empire was through this
practice called legalism, which is a political doctrine that basically said,
it basically assumes the worst about people, that they're selfish
(07:15):
and dumb, and that the best way to make a
state out of your citizens is by exploiting them and
lying to them and passing a law for everything and
then brutally enforcing it. Yeah, and kind of the government
just fully uh fully ruling with an iron fists citizens.
(07:35):
It's like proto fascism, Like the point of your citizen
read is not to serve them, It's for your citizen
read to kind of give all their power and work
and attention to the state to the emperor. Yeah. So
there's this um sort of an outlier as far as
uh where this guy started out Leacy. He became very,
(07:57):
very prominent with the Chin dynasty, but he was he
was not born into it. He was a commoner and
he was a clerk at a at a local government office,
and he really worked his way up through the system
pretty yeah, all the way up to prime minister. So
local government clerk to prime minister. And I mean this
(08:19):
guy makes like Machiavelli and the Medici's look like cream puffs.
Who yeah, so Medici's queen puffs. Yeah, I am compared
to Lacy, Yes, and not not just Lisie. So like
the emperor of the Chin dynasty, the founder of basically
China was an emperor named Shi Wong d I'm pretty
(08:41):
sure that's tell you say it. I'm almost equally sure
that I've gotten it wrong. But he was the King
of Chin, the first Emperor of Chin, and Um he
was pretty brutal, but he he found good company with
Lesi in his brutality and the way that he saw
citizens and people. And then also the king's eunuch, who
(09:02):
was basically tied for second place with le cy Um.
He was the king's official spokesman. His name was Choo Chow,
and the three of them together just ruled quite brutally.
It was you know, you you bribe people and if
they didn't take bribes, you killed them. You tricked neighboring
states into accepting your rule. Book burning was huge, and
(09:24):
this is what lecy is most commonly remembered for is
instituting a policy of burning most books, especially history books,
in an effort to kind of form a um, a
single way of thinking for all Chinese to to fall
in line with. And the way that you start that
is to get rid of everything that's been written that
(09:44):
doesn't fall into that line of thinking. So he instituted
like a an empire wide book burning drive. Yeah, I
think like the only thing that he said it was okay,
or books on medicine, books on growing things in agriculture
and then divination, which I think I can't believe we
haven't done a podcast on that at this point. Is
(10:04):
that water witching? Yeah? I think so, right, Yeah, I
think that's probably also like reading frog guts and tea
leaves and stuff to see the future. Oh well, that
that part totally makes sense, right, because you got to
know how it's gonna come, and had Lesi been at
all capable of divination, he would have seen that his
end was coming horribly ironically and it was going to
(10:26):
be very painful for him. Yeah, so they like, speaking
of Machiavelli, they they definitely lead the path in do
anything necessary to get what you want. And he said,
you know what, I'm pretty I'm pretty into torture as
a means of getting what I want. And I've invented
a pretty full proof way to uh ensure that someone
(10:47):
is dead or gives us what we want and imagine
ended up dead anyway. It was called the Five Pains,
and it's basically cutting things off of the body one
at a time until you get to five, which is
the body. You cut the nose off first, then you
cut off a hand, then you cut off a foot,
(11:08):
then you cut off the penis or the the vagina castration,
and finally you just cut in half. Your body has
cut in half. That come done with you. Yeah, the
five pains really undersells it. It really does so, because
the five pains for me are traffic, right, traffic, This
(11:30):
is the five unbearable social media None of them involved
cutting off hands and feet, a nose, man, can you
imagine losing your nose? That's first too. So um Licy
is credited in some circles with inventing that. Others say
it's not entirely clear. But um Shi wangd the emperor
(11:51):
when he died, he died abroad suddenly, and Choo Chow
and Licy decided to conceal it because the king said,
my eldest son is my heir. I want him to
take over after I die. So Lesy and joo Chow
got rid of that decree and forged a new decree
(12:12):
to the oldest son, who had been exiled for opposing
that book burning idea. Yeah, that that was the reason
it was a problems because he was no friend of Licy,
right exactly. So lesy U and Joo Chow drafted a
new decree from the king and it said son, kill yourself,
and they sent it to him and the son killed himself. Yeah,
(12:34):
so they had now they had consolidated their power, and
they named an infant son of she she Wangdi to
be the new ruler. They decided that wasn't any good,
so they killed the infant and then they turned on
each other, and Joo Chow got the upper hand and said, licy,
I have some terrible news for you. You're about to
(12:55):
face the five pains yourself. Yeah. I mean, that's the
thing is when you're when you've got to psychotic creeps
working together, eventually one of them is going to turn
on the other. That's how it always goes. Let's hope
that never happens to us, because where a parapsychotic creeks
working together? You know, Um, what is the king's eunuch?
(13:18):
The so the eunuch was castrated? Unich is? But like,
so the king's eunuch is? Why did they castrate them
just to render them subjugated or whatever or trustworthy like
now I can trust you around my wife or whatever. Sure,
that's what why people were looking assized. But in this
case he was like the spokesperson for the emperor. He
(13:42):
was like the highest the imagine like the press secretary
and the chief of staff combined. Right, that's kind of
what he was. But no penis no right. So he
uh so jow Chow turns on Leasy and and has
him executed through the five five pains his invention supposedly
(14:04):
about which I looked into that five pains thing. It
seems to come under the tradition of ling Chi, which
is called slow slicing, which is as bad as it sounds,
and I think it's way worse than the five pains.
It's there can be twenty four cuts or a thousand cuts.
They call it um and they actually last used it
(14:25):
in nineteen o five. And there's a horrible picture of
the man who was executed in nineteen o five by this,
like being executed through this the slow slicing method. He
just cut all up and bloody. Yeah, it's pretty pretty rough.
It's pretty awful to see. Um. But they did it
up until nineteen o five. Remember the days when we
(14:46):
would send each other those awful pictures. Yeah, I think
we got to a certain point where we're like, se
seen too much. You find it on your own, More
power to you. Yeah, you've become a father, you know,
and I'm a father in my own way. I feel like,
you know, we have to protect ourselves from that. Oh boy.
All right, well let's go take a break. I'm gonna
go watch it. Four minutes of the Cabin all hearing? Okay,
(15:09):
and we'll come right back right after this. All right,
(15:38):
we're back. Now, let's talk about parachuting Franz right cult. Yeah,
I know a little bit about this one because, uh
I did something back when we were doing videos. I
can't remember exactly what it was, but one of our
half hearted attempts at a video series. I think it
(16:00):
was a blog post, was it. Yeah? Those didn't work either.
It was like in that same series of the Baby
Cage that like hung out over. Yeah, that's right. Remember
how what a relief it was when we were finally told, hey, guys,
why don't you just podcast because that's a job. That
was nice. Wasn't that great? Yeah? You don't have to
(16:20):
dance like a monkey on YouTube? Yeah, we're blog like
it's people missed that stuff though, It's crazy, I know,
but we enjoyed this. Yeah, I love podcasting, Chuck, all right,
So it's a late seventeen hundreds, we're in France and
there's a series of men that are intent on jumping
(16:43):
off of things and testing out this new thing called
a parachute. Yeah, and so in the fourteen seventies, Da
Vinci is credited with designing the first parachute just on paper.
I've seen pictures and apparently somebody did. Somebody built it,
and they're like, yeah, it works. Of course it's da Vinci.
But something and I couldn't figure out what it was.
(17:04):
But something in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century just
caused like parachute fever in France, and there was like
you really, you can't really attribute it to anybody else
but the French that the development or the early development
of the parachute. There was just a bunch of frenchmen
working on the parachute at about the same time. And
maybe it was the advent of hot air balloons, which
(17:28):
was another huge thing in France, and they were like, well,
I'm up here, and how am I going to get
down there if my balloon starts to crash? So it's
possible that was it. But there were a lot of
French guys jumping off of like buildings in the late
eighteenth in early nineteenth century trying out parachutes. Yes, I
mean over a ten or fifteen year period. There was
(17:48):
a guy named Joseph mont gulf Yer, great name that
means golf mountain. Oh nice, Louis Sebastian Uh Lenoman, It's okay,
I just dropped the last couple of letters on anything
French and the ally do it. And then a third
guy named Bourges he just he's like share right. All
(18:14):
of them were kind of making parachutes. There was another
one to um, Jean Pierre Blanchard, who actually realized that
silk is pretty good for getting out of a hot
air balloon as a parachute. He had to ditch once
back in. So there are a bunch of them. And
Lenormand is the guy who actually coined the term parachute,
(18:35):
which para in the Greek means against and shoot in
French means fall, so it's against falling. The parachute is
yeah in a way, so they they The parachute was
invented by a number of people, but there was one
specific parachute kind of like a wing suit, but it
differed from a wingsuit in that it didn't work at all,
(18:58):
and it was invented typically by a guy named Franz Reichelt,
and I would love to hear you say his name properly, France.
That's pretty good. Yeah. That that's an interesting case too,
because this was a full like close to a hundred
years after people were successfully using parachutes. Yeah, so it
wasn't like he was like, oh man, these things have
(19:19):
not worked yet and I really need to figure out
a better way. Um. So I think Franz was I
don't think he had a death wish, but I think
he was shooting for the stars. He was. He was
an eccentric. This is what I've gathered. Yeah, he was
an eccentric. He was a very talented tailor. But this
(19:40):
article points out, I think quite astutely as as part
part of being an inventor is knowing where to draw
inspiration from among other inventions and inventors. And this guy
apparently just went through to um first principles like Elon
Musk does, where it's like, um, oh, I can buy
batteries on the market for this. Let me instead figure
(20:02):
out what you need to make a battery, and I'll
go by those parts and make it for way cheaper
Franz Reicheld seemed to have the same impression about his
flying suit. He just kind of made it up, not
based on anything else. He just did it himself and
he was quite proud of it. And he took it
to the Arrow Club of France and said check this out,
(20:22):
and they said, do not use that ever. Ever, the
thing is not going to do anything, and he said, oh,
nuts to you. And he started doing trials from his
fifth floor apartment window with a dummy and it didn't work,
but he wasn't dissuaded by any of that. Yeah, the
only thing I can figure out is that um, because
again I don't think he had a death wish. I
think he must have thought. The only thing I can
(20:44):
figure is he must have thought a dummy like it
needs to be a real rigid human that can move
their body, and a dummy is just not gonna cut it.
So I need to try this thing out because I
think it's gonna work. It was a time in nineteens
well when apparently you could go to the Eiffel Tower
and just tell the cops, Hey, I'm gonna throw a
(21:06):
dummy um off of the Eiffel Tower to trap my
flying suit and they said go ahead. Uh so he
went up there. But UM, I don't think he changed
his mind. I think by all accounts it was he
intended fully to do this himself the whole time. And
the suit like you have um been hinting at it
(21:28):
didn't do anything. It didn't And actually I should have
sent you this one to British Pete or Pete, I'm
not quite sure what what the the old newsreel service.
They were there and and there is a haunting video
of him. There is close up like it's not far away,
but close up, like on the ledge of the first
(21:49):
platform of the Eiffel Tower nine ft or almost fifty
eight meters high, just like waiting, waiting, and then he
jumps and he just goes straight down like a sack
of potatoes and dies immediately hundred ninety feet very very tragic. Yeah,
And on the film that you see the police measuring
(22:10):
the depth of the impression he made in the ground
when he fell. When he hit the ground, it's really
sad to see, like you're like, don't do it, don't
do it, and you but you know obviously that he's
going to do it, and he he died. Well, it
was a time too where people were trying to figure
all this stuff out, so they're all kind of crazy.
I mean, I know we haven't done one on the
(22:32):
Right Brothers yet, but I mean you've seen all the
crazy flying machines that people were trying to come up with.
It was. It was a time of the spirit of
adventure was in the air, and everyone there was probably like, man,
check out this guy. He's going to fly off the
Eiffel Tower. Yeah. I mean they thought that or they
all had a lot of blood lust and we're coming
out to see this guy die. You know, I don't
(22:55):
think he had a death wish either, Chuck, And he
actually applied for a permit. That's sweet. So I mean,
why would you apply for a permit if you had
a pretty good idea you were going to die. I
think he thought very much that they was going to
work and he was going to live, and he didn't
want to get in trouble, so he applied for a
permit first. That's a good point. How about moving on?
(23:15):
Yes number three? Max Valierre would say it, Valier, I
don't like I don't like extra letters, man, I need
to take French. Um. Sure, Although this guy wasn't even French,
was he. No, he was born Get this, he was
born in Austria Hungary and the town of Bozen. But
(23:36):
Austria Hungary broke up. It was very sad and um
that town is now known as Bozano, Italy. But the
guy's last name is Vollier. So that was the Italian
or what we would consider Italian if he was. If
he had been born after the Austro Hungarian Empire collapsed,
he would have been Italian. But he was Austro Hungarian. Well, yeah,
(23:57):
but you know what I mean. I mean, it's not
like said all you Austro Hungarians get out of here.
I don't know, I really don't know. I would guess
because it was an empire, there was probably a lot
of movement around the empire. So who knows what his
his his ethnicity or pedigree was in his family. Well,
we know one thing for sure is that he was
(24:18):
a smart dude. And he did not have a degree
in science, but he was very good at figuring stuff out.
He was and and I guess an amateur engineer would
be the best thing to call him. Yeah, in a
bit of a groupie, sure, but but like a groupie
who put his his his actions where his mouth was. Yeah.
(24:40):
So he reads a book by um, a German engineer
named erman O Birth and it was called The Rocket
Into in an Interplanetary Space. Just just wonderful in the
in the early twentieth century when books like this would
be written. Yeah, this is this is I think credited
with helping inspire the idea that like, um, we actually
(25:01):
could do this. Yeah. Yeah, So this guy gets inspired
by this book on an amateur level. He develops a
four stage program and starts to get to work on
what what would be with with a car company, Opal
at his side, like in partnership on a rocket powered car,
not a space rocket, but a car. And he built
(25:24):
these things and he actually worked. Yeah, and Opal was
involved in this to like a red bull degree. They
were like, look at this crazy stuff. Check this out.
We're making a rocket car. But Vollier was like, no,
this is the future. Rockets are going to power everything.
And he actually I think some of the first tests
were pretty putsy, like one of them win a hundred
(25:45):
and twenty five in thirty five seconds. Not super fast,
I mean like a football field in a quarter in
thirty five seconds. Is not fast, but later on he
got some of these rocket cars up to a hundred
and forty five. That's impressive. And then he got a
rocket sled up to two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Yeah,
this is in Yeah, so like these rockets are working.
(26:08):
He's he's making him work. But then there were there
was a phase three and four of his four point plan,
and it went from static engines just the rocket engine
tests themselves, to rocket cars and rocket sleds, and then
to rocket powered aircraft in then um space rockets. Yeah,
and to his credit, like, um, it's not like things
were going really poorly and he was just pressing on anyway,
(26:30):
Like like you said, he got one of them up
to two hundred fifty miles an hour, so it would
make sense to go to a stage three, the rocket
assisted aircraft. And then very tragically May seventeen, Uh, he
died working on phase three. He's working on a liquid
oxygen gasoline fueled rocket motor. This thing explodes, a piece
(26:52):
of shrapnel severs his aorta, and he's dead, like immediately, yeah. Yeah,
everything I saw was that he he just dropped it.
So it must have been a heck of a severed
a Yorda. I mean, right, there was hard I guess then, huh,
I guess so jeez man. Yeah, an explosion that shoots
a piece of strapnel that severed you a yorda. You're
not gonna last much very long after that. And he
(27:14):
was only thirty five years old at the time too.
He had a pretty bright future. In all of this
is self taught rocket guy. It's pretty impressive. But his
um this article is hilarious. It talks about how his
legacy continued. So he helped found u UM, an organization
called you want to take that one? Uh sure, um,
(27:37):
I love that. I take German and you take French,
and both of us should have taken Spanish and neither
one of us can do Chinese. That's right. I'm gonna
say Verine, fire Ram Chift, not bad Chuck. That's what
I would have said too. It means a society for
space travel, because again, at the time, this is like
(27:58):
people smart people are saying, like we can actually do this,
let's figure out how to do it. And some very
famous UM people were members of this space society, and
some of the members actually went on to work on
the Saturn five project, including one member named Arthur Rudolph.
And the thing that cracks me up about this article
is Arthur Rudolph was a Nazi war criminal, right, who
(28:22):
was basically plucked out of Nazi Germany at the end
of the war from the V two rocket program, which
just devastated Britain and other parts of Europe um and
put to work on the the Apollo space mission. And
then after that they said, okay, you have to go
now be you're being accused of working people at death
in your V two factory. But he carried on Max
(28:44):
Valier's legacy. Yeah, in a way, I guess. So. Yeah, yep.
Have you seen the trailer for the Neil Armstrong movie. No,
I haven't. All of you here is Oscar Buzz looks good.
I'm sure man. That the Ryan Gosling man. He's he's
pretty good. He's great. You want to take a break, Yeah,
(29:08):
let's do it, okay, alright, Chuck. I think we're down
(29:35):
to two. And this is weird because normally we do
top tens, but we only do seven or eight of them.
This is a top five, and by god, we're doing
all five. That's right. When the couple added on, ah, yeah,
this one William Bullock, Old Bill Bullock in eighty two.
That was the printing in the printing press. You know
(29:56):
the history of the printing press. In fact, we should
do one on that too, at some point, you bet.
Really fascinating and many many people contributed to the printing
press gaining attraction and gaining and speed and just getting
more efficient and being able to pump out more and
more what you would call sheets per hour paper sheets
per hour, right and up to and by eight thirty
(30:19):
two they're up to about four hundred sheets per hour.
That was good, like, yeah, not bad at all. Um.
It was like it was a flat press. You had
the type set on like a flatboard that came down
and you'd take the paper off or flip it over
and then print another one another one. They could do
like four hundred sheets per hour like that. And then
this guy named Richard Hoe came up with He replaced
(30:39):
that flat thing with the type setting with a cylinder
with type setting, so it just spun and you just
moved that paper on and off as fast as you could,
and all of a sudden you could do like a
thousand to four thousand papers pages an hour. So there
was a huge leap, right, and by I think eighteen
thirty two is when Richard Hose invention came along. Yeah,
so flash four word another thirty to thirty three years
(31:04):
and William Bullock comes along again, a great period of
invention in the world and in the United States, and
he created the Bullock press, which was I think this
is sort of the one we're more used to seeing now,
which is a rotary press which had um, not sheets
of paper, but one big, huge roll of paper. Some
(31:24):
of these were up to five miles long, where you're
just continually cranking these things through and all of a
sudden you could get twelve thousand sheets per hour. Yeah,
what was amazing about? So before, like it didn't matter
how fast that cylinder was moving, you still had a
human who had to take a paper off after it
(31:45):
was printed and put a piece of blank paper on
to do the next one. With this, it was just
fully automated, and you had a cylinder on top doing
the front and you had a cylinder on bottom doing
the backside of the paper. So you could print two
sided twelve thousand chiefs per hour. And today, from what
I saw, those rotary presses that um Bullock invented move
(32:07):
paper through it like twenty miles an hour, and can
do like I think, sixty four thousand, hundred and twenty
eight page booklets in an hour. Now they're they're that fast,
which is I'm impressed. It's it's come a long way.
But Bill Bullock, like you said, kick the whole thing
off with his web rotary printing press. And I mean,
think about it, think about making an improvement to a
(32:28):
machine where it was four thousand pages an hour, now
it's twelve thousand thanks to you, You feel pretty good
about yourself. Plus he was a newspaper editor too, so
he was kind of doing this based on his own
observations and how to make improvements in his own industry.
And he was an orphan raised by his brother who
was self taught in mechanics just from reading books. So
(32:50):
I'm impressed with William Bullock, except for one of the
last things he ever did in his life. Yeah. So
because he was invented this machine, he would work on
it himself. He would adjust it and make repairs himself. Uh.
And there was the Philadelphia Public Ledger in eighteen sixty
seven one of his Bullock presses needed some work, so
(33:11):
he went in there himself, was working on it, and
exactly what you think happened happened. His leg gets caught
in one of these rollers and there was no pulling
out at that point and crushed his leg. That turned gangrenous,
and he died a few days after that. Yeah, during
(33:32):
an operation to amputate the leg. Yeah, very like. I
feel like he was close to making it. He was.
Here's the thing though, from what I saw, what got
him was he was trying to kick a belt back
onto a pulley and if his leg got caught in
there and sucked in, that means he was doing that
while the machine was operating. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
(33:53):
So yeah, not that impressive, but he um, yeah, that's
a terror by way to go Gang Green through complications
of surgery from Gang Green, brought onto leg crushing, brought
on by not just stopping to turn the machine off,
brought on by being a brilliant inventor, great guy. Nothing
makes me more relaxed and enthralled in watching a a
(34:17):
newspaper operation being printed. I've said it before, have you?
I have you because it doesn't ring a bell. Yeah,
I think I said it when we were talking about
the the movie that last year, what's called The Paper, No,
the Post, the Post there Um. One of the hokeyest
shots I've ever seen in my life is in that
(34:39):
movie what is It? Where the lawyers and the editors
are all at um uh. I think they're at Tom
Hanks's house and they're arguing and they like the cameras
just moving around the room, just taking in all this
frenetic scene. And one of the shots is Bob and
(35:01):
David from Mr. Show like pointing into the chests of
the lawyers like in rhythm, and then the lawyers are
backing up in rhythm, almost like it's like a Rogers
and Hammers Hammerstein musical. That's I suddenly is breaking out.
It's crazy, And I was like, who directed this? And
then I saw that Steven Spielberg directed this, and I thought,
(35:24):
I think his maybe B or C director maybe came
up with that one, like his second unit was hoping.
I'm hoping. I just love that he cast Mr. Show
and that it was pretty great. I did not expect
to see that in that movie. Have you seen The
Paper the Michael Keaton, Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
That's that is a world classman. That was a Ron
(35:46):
Howard movie. Yeah. Those guys know how to make movies
for the most part, unless it's a Star Wars movie.
Uh do they make one? Yeah? Ron Howard made the
Han solo movie. I didn't know that, did you see it?
I didn't care for it. The what the one I
saw that I liked was a rogue rogue one that
(36:06):
was great. Yeah. I had nothing to do with anything, right,
it was just its own thing. I mean that's great. Yeah.
I wouldn't say it had nothing to do with anything,
but it wasn't like part of the I don't even
know what Star Wars fans call that the cannon. Yeah,
we're just gonna get slaughtered for this, So that's fine.
I've been slaughtered for less, So let's move on. Then.
(36:29):
How are you gonna how do you pronounce that guy's name?
Ker Michael Dacre? That's what I'm going with, al Right,
you're keeping all the letters. I looked it up, and um,
I couldn't find any news coverage of it. That's usually
how you can find somebody's Yeah, and this is surprising
because this was very recently. Um, and we're going back
to rockets again. With this one. Uh, and this is
(36:50):
a really interesting idea for an invention. If you look
at these things, I assume you checked out the pictures
of the jet pod, dude. So this guy idea uh.
He was born in the UK in ninety six, was
a pilot in the British Army and um but good pilot,
and he had this idea for something called the jetpod,
(37:14):
which is basically an air taxi. So he was like,
if I I think if I can invent something that
goes uh, doesn't need very much runway to take off,
can go really really fast and in a quick time um,
and land in a in a kind of a truncated area,
then I can speed up. I can make like a
(37:36):
a jet taxi where people can get from like an
airport to a city center. In the case of London,
he said, in four minutes from heath he Throw to
central London. Yes, dude, which I'm sure you know this
from when we did our UK tour. It takes an
hour at least to get there by regular like car taxi. Yeah,
(37:57):
by the by black cab. It's horrible. So the idea
of getting from central London to Heathrow in four minutes
is a dream by itself, right, they really are. And
from what I can tell, this was not just like
some pie in this guy kind of thing, like this
guy was on track. This thing was like the real deal.
(38:18):
It was something called very quiet short takeoff and landing aircraft,
which is a type of vt o L vertical takeoff
and landing, which, like you said, it just needed a
very short strip of land, which meant you didn't have
to you didn't have to have an airport. You could
have like a dedicated, say air strip, but it could
be it would just take up a very small amount
of land in the middle of the city. And they
(38:41):
were going to sell them for a million dollars, which
meant that trips on these things would have been like
fifty sixty bucks, um, it's as much as yeah, and
in four minutes rather than an hour. And the whole
point was this was this was gonna ease congestion. It
was going to be a cheap and easy way to
kind of hop short distances or medium distances. And he
(39:03):
had some ideas for military and like ambulance um uses
for it as well. So it was close and who
knows if we might have these things by now, because
um and two thousand nine the guy died and he
was It was during a test flight of one of
the jet pods. Yeah, there were a few of them. Um.
(39:24):
I don't think we said on any feet. About four
feet to take off, um, which is about and it
would go like three hundred and fifty miles an hour,
which is awesome. But he had three models. The T
one hundred UM sort of if you look these things up,
it looks like a little ultra light plane, but it's
a jet. This would take about fifty trips a day
(39:47):
back and forth between the airport and city centers. It
looks like a short bus plane, is what it looks like,
because it's yellow, you know, it's totally and it's like stubby. Yeah,
it's stubby with wings and goes super super fast. Then
he had the M three hundred, which was bigger, bigger.
This is the one that like, um, he thought could
(40:09):
take the place of like military helicopters, right or not
take the place up, but you know, assist with removing
injured soldiers from the battlefield. And then the E four
hundred was like a like a flying ambulance. Yeah. So
these things, like you said, they were speeding along again,
not pyeing the sky. This was a real thing that
(40:29):
was happening. And then on August six, two thousand nine,
not very long ago, he took one of the eight
Seedar models, a prototype UH in Malaysia for a test flight.
I also saw I was in Taiwan. Oh really, yeah,
I couldn't tell where it actually happened. Interesting, So he
and this is where it gets a little frustrating, because
(40:49):
he he could not get airborne on three attempts. And that,
to me is when you're like, all right, let's just
ground it for the day and figure this out. But
he tried to fourth time, the aircraft went right straight
up into the air vertically and then right back down
and killed him. Yeah, it shut up five seven feet
(41:10):
and then yawned left and crashed and that was that.
And that was that. I don't I'm curious. I would
imagine that this thing wasn't completely scrapped after that. I'm
curious what the status is. I couldn't find anything about it.
It's the company that he founded that was developing its
absent a V C E N and I couldn't find
what the status of that thing is. I hope they
(41:31):
continue on with it because it would just be wonderful
to have these things. Because another thing, I mean, these
were jets, but something they had some sort of technology
that cut the jet noise in half by fifty. Yeah,
so it's not like we would just hear jets in
our city skies constantly. It was relatively inexpensive. Yeah, but
(41:53):
you need to solve that straight up and straight down thing. Well,
our I P, Michael Dacre and r He all those
inventors except ly see are really interested in wishing him well.
Um who who died by their own invention, hats off
to you for your spirit of curiosity and ingenuity. Agreed. Uh.
(42:15):
If you want to know more about inventors who died
by their own inventions, go onto the internet. There's all
sorts of stuff about that. And in the meantime, it's
time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this. I love
it when we get answers to questions that we asked
because this from Scott Miller, and we asked about how
they test for color blindness and animals, and he knows
(42:37):
because he does that. Guys just finished that episode. In
Chuck's question about how they test, I was very excited
because This comes from my own area of study in
behavior analysis. It's actually a very simple and clever experiment.
Experiments will will teach an animal to respond to a color,
often by pressing a lever or button, um or performing
(42:59):
some action that is easy for them, and in doing so,
the animal earns a treat. But the animals only get
treats if they press the lever when certain colors are
presented to them. So in this way, if an animal
does not respond differently between two colors e g. Green
and red for dogs, then that would indicate that they
are deficient in detecting those colors. The same is true
(43:21):
for birds, rodents, cats, and anything else. They have tried
this with. Congratulations on being one of the greatest podcast ever.
Love Scott Miller. Thanks Scott Geeze so as sweet as that. Yeah,
that was very sweet and thanks for explaining. It makes
total sense. The poor animals, they're like, I can't tell
between red and green, so they don't give you mouse
(43:42):
heads anymore. Can I get another mouse head? If you
want to get in touch with this, like Scott did,
we would love to hear from you. You can hang
out with us at our home on the web. Stuff
You should Know dot com. You can also find links
to our social media accounts, where you can sometimes find
us lurking around UM. Or you can send a plain
(44:04):
old fashioned email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
Is it how stuff works dot com Yah,
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot Com. Hey you, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan, there's Jerry Rowland.
And this is Stuff you Should Know. I don't know
(00:21):
what addition this is should be a pretty interesting and
entertaining how about that? Uh? This this is the interrupting
Chuck from watching the Kabinaugh hearing addition. Yeah, really, man,
talk about historic huh Oh. I was glued to it
and then like I gotta go to do my job. Sorry.
For some reason, I feel guilty, like I'm responsible for that. No, no,
(00:42):
it's not your fault. Thanks for letting off the hook.
We gotta make the donuts. M hmm. Man, don't get
I'm recording it. So I'll just go back right after this. Okay, cool,
Well we'll talk really fast. I'll go back to seething
rage right after this. You'll just be like, uh, you'll
be like, no one tell me what happens? Oh goodness,
Uh all right, let's do it death by invention. Yeah,
(01:05):
I guess this would be the horribly ironic twist edition
of Stuff you Should Know. Yeah, and um, you know
we are talking up people who died by their own
hand in a way, it's in and it's really sad.
I mean, all these people are are pursuing their passions
for the most part, Uh, and to die because you
(01:26):
are a creative, inventive, passionate person, except maybe in the
case of Lacy. Uh, it's really sad. It is I think, um,
to die in any way, at any time, for any
reason is is unnatural. It's just wrong, you know. Yeah,
they listed out a couple before the official list of five. Yeah,
(01:49):
there's like a whole I mean, we could do the
same show like every white like once a quarter. Maybe
maybe we will chuck five more people. Yeah, we'll see.
We'll see how this one goes about that. Did you
want to touch on in a couple of those other
people though? Yeah, I mean, um, Henry wind Stanley is
definitely a kind of a famous one. He built a
(02:12):
very famous lighthouse, Eddie Stone Lighthouse back in and I
think that was the first iteration of it. I think
there's been four total, and we talked about it on
the Lighthouse episode. Yeah, I think this was the first
one on rock right, and this is like out out
there on on some rocks in the ocean or in
the channel, one of the two, or the sea. It's
(02:32):
out in the water. Yeah. A candle light, old school
candlelight lighthouse, very romantic lighthouse, very romantic, invented by, like
you said, Mr Henry wind Stanley, great name, and speaking
of great. Five years later there was a great storm
and this lighthouse actually that he built, collapsed on him
(02:55):
and killed him while he was trying to short up. Yeah, him,
he and five other people, and they were never found.
That's just sad. I guess the sweet, the sweet, the
sweet swept him as the sweet does sweet swell sweet
swells by the sweet war. Yeah, it's really that's it's
such a tragedy. What about Marie Curry who died at
(03:17):
sixty six from radiation poisoning, which technically she didn't invent
radium and polonium, she discovered them, but I mean her work.
She won Nobel prizes for it. Um. Yeah, like the
dangers of working with us, I mean always dangerous, but
especially back then and then again physicist Harry uh Daglion,
(03:41):
I'm gonna say, Dallian, Dallian, I like Daglion, Okay, Dallian,
That's what I'm going with but hey man, it's up
for grabs, so silent g silence, h yeah, kind of.
I mean there's a little bit of a guttural in there.
Why do you hate letters? Right? Those are superfluous right there.
So Harry daly In was another scientists who he was
(04:04):
working on the Manhattan Project on the Demon core, the
core of the plutonium bomb, and he died by his
own hand as well. He was stacking carbide bricks, tungsten
carbide around the core and dropped one, which I can't imagine, Like,
what a frightening moment that would be. Yeah, even more so, chuck.
(04:26):
He he had a monitor he was trying to see
how many tungsten bricks it took to make the plutonium
go critical, which is like once it goes critical, you've
got a nuclear explosion on your hands. So he's just
sitting there messing around with this. He's got a monitor
showing him and the bonitor said, hey man, that last
brick will make this go go critical. Um. It was
(04:47):
a monitor from the seventies, so it said things like
hey man, and uh so he knew, like, I gotta
get that brick away, and he went to go like
pull it back away from the stack, but in going
to pull it away, he accidentally knocked it onto the core,
so he had to go into the stack after it
to get it away from the core to make sure
that the thing didn't blow up, and he did, but
(05:09):
he supposedly suffered tremendously from um radiation poisoning. Yeah, I
mean he died within a month, So that's that's pretty tragic.
And you know, he it sounds like he was a
hero because if that thing would have exploded, uh, many many,
many lives lost. Yeah, he's definitely honored as a hero.
He also was not going to follow the rules apparently
(05:29):
because he was in there the lab by himself, which
was against protocol. I think he went back to work
after dinner and was sitting there working on a nuclear
pile by himself that he was trying to see where
the threshold was for getting it critical. Jeez, this is
a little crazy. So these examples to serve as a
set up though to the official five. Uh, and we're
(05:51):
gonna start with lee cy L. I s I I
got no love for Lecy. No. No, this is not
one of the ones where just a great creative following
their passion. I don't know. Maybe he was passionate about
harming others and people and court intrigue for sure. Yeah,
that's a good point. But we're going back to ancient
(06:13):
China here roughly to b C E. Is that what
we're saying now, and China this time was making the
conversion from just a big mess of of warring states
into what would be, uh eventually be the Keen dynasty.
(06:34):
Is that right? Chin Chin? We've been corrected by that
officially too. I looked it up because I was like,
I'm not I'm not following for this again here I
did it. I think it was you last time. It
definitely was so that, Yeah, the Chin dynasty finally being
ruled by one dynasty. So it was it was a
big change for China. It was um. But the way
(06:54):
that they assembled um all of these kind of like
facts fractious states into a single empire was through this
practice called legalism, which is a political doctrine that basically said,
it basically assumes the worst about people, that they're selfish
(07:15):
and dumb, and that the best way to make a
state out of your citizens is by exploiting them and
lying to them and passing a law for everything and
then brutally enforcing it. Yeah, and kind of the government
just fully uh fully ruling with an iron fists citizens.
(07:35):
It's like proto fascism, Like the point of your citizen
read is not to serve them, It's for your citizen
read to kind of give all their power and work
and attention to the state to the emperor. Yeah. So
there's this um sort of an outlier as far as
uh where this guy started out Leacy. He became very,
(07:57):
very prominent with the Chin dynasty, but he was he
was not born into it. He was a commoner and
he was a clerk at a at a local government office,
and he really worked his way up through the system
pretty yeah, all the way up to prime minister. So
local government clerk to prime minister. And I mean this
(08:19):
guy makes like Machiavelli and the Medici's look like cream puffs.
Who yeah, so Medici's queen puffs. Yeah, I am compared
to Lacy, Yes, and not not just Lisie. So like
the emperor of the Chin dynasty, the founder of basically
China was an emperor named Shi Wong d I'm pretty
(08:41):
sure that's tell you say it. I'm almost equally sure
that I've gotten it wrong. But he was the King
of Chin, the first Emperor of Chin, and Um he
was pretty brutal, but he he found good company with
Lesi in his brutality and the way that he saw
citizens and people. And then also the king's eunuch, who
(09:02):
was basically tied for second place with le cy Um.
He was the king's official spokesman. His name was Choo Chow,
and the three of them together just ruled quite brutally.
It was you know, you you bribe people and if
they didn't take bribes, you killed them. You tricked neighboring
states into accepting your rule. Book burning was huge, and
(09:24):
this is what lecy is most commonly remembered for is
instituting a policy of burning most books, especially history books,
in an effort to kind of form a um, a
single way of thinking for all Chinese to to fall
in line with. And the way that you start that
is to get rid of everything that's been written that
(09:44):
doesn't fall into that line of thinking. So he instituted
like a an empire wide book burning drive. Yeah, I
think like the only thing that he said it was okay,
or books on medicine, books on growing things in agriculture
and then divination, which I think I can't believe we
haven't done a podcast on that at this point. Is
(10:04):
that water witching? Yeah? I think so, right, Yeah, I
think that's probably also like reading frog guts and tea
leaves and stuff to see the future. Oh well, that
that part totally makes sense, right, because you got to
know how it's gonna come, and had Lesi been at
all capable of divination, he would have seen that his
end was coming horribly ironically and it was going to
(10:26):
be very painful for him. Yeah, so they like, speaking
of Machiavelli, they they definitely lead the path in do
anything necessary to get what you want. And he said,
you know what, I'm pretty I'm pretty into torture as
a means of getting what I want. And I've invented
a pretty full proof way to uh ensure that someone
(10:47):
is dead or gives us what we want and imagine
ended up dead anyway. It was called the Five Pains,
and it's basically cutting things off of the body one
at a time until you get to five, which is
the body. You cut the nose off first, then you
cut off a hand, then you cut off a foot,
(11:08):
then you cut off the penis or the the vagina castration,
and finally you just cut in half. Your body has
cut in half. That come done with you. Yeah, the
five pains really undersells it. It really does so, because
the five pains for me are traffic, right, traffic, This
(11:30):
is the five unbearable social media None of them involved
cutting off hands and feet, a nose, man, can you
imagine losing your nose? That's first too. So um Licy
is credited in some circles with inventing that. Others say
it's not entirely clear. But um Shi wangd the emperor
(11:51):
when he died, he died abroad suddenly, and Choo Chow
and Licy decided to conceal it because the king said,
my eldest son is my heir. I want him to
take over after I die. So Lesy and joo Chow
got rid of that decree and forged a new decree
(12:12):
to the oldest son, who had been exiled for opposing
that book burning idea. Yeah, that that was the reason
it was a problems because he was no friend of Licy,
right exactly. So lesy U and Joo Chow drafted a
new decree from the king and it said son, kill yourself,
and they sent it to him and the son killed himself. Yeah,
(12:34):
so they had now they had consolidated their power, and
they named an infant son of she she Wangdi to
be the new ruler. They decided that wasn't any good,
so they killed the infant and then they turned on
each other, and Joo Chow got the upper hand and said, licy,
I have some terrible news for you. You're about to
(12:55):
face the five pains yourself. Yeah. I mean, that's the
thing is when you're when you've got to psychotic creeps
working together, eventually one of them is going to turn
on the other. That's how it always goes. Let's hope
that never happens to us, because where a parapsychotic creeks
working together? You know, Um, what is the king's eunuch?
(13:18):
The so the eunuch was castrated? Unich is? But like,
so the king's eunuch is? Why did they castrate them
just to render them subjugated or whatever or trustworthy like
now I can trust you around my wife or whatever. Sure,
that's what why people were looking assized. But in this
case he was like the spokesperson for the emperor. He
(13:42):
was like the highest the imagine like the press secretary
and the chief of staff combined. Right, that's kind of
what he was. But no penis no right. So he
uh so jow Chow turns on Leasy and and has
him executed through the five five pains his invention supposedly
(14:04):
about which I looked into that five pains thing. It
seems to come under the tradition of ling Chi, which
is called slow slicing, which is as bad as it sounds,
and I think it's way worse than the five pains.
It's there can be twenty four cuts or a thousand cuts.
They call it um and they actually last used it
(14:25):
in nineteen o five. And there's a horrible picture of
the man who was executed in nineteen o five by this,
like being executed through this the slow slicing method. He
just cut all up and bloody. Yeah, it's pretty pretty rough.
It's pretty awful to see. Um. But they did it
up until nineteen o five. Remember the days when we
(14:46):
would send each other those awful pictures. Yeah, I think
we got to a certain point where we're like, se
seen too much. You find it on your own, More
power to you. Yeah, you've become a father, you know,
and I'm a father in my own way. I feel like,
you know, we have to protect ourselves from that. Oh boy.
All right, well let's go take a break. I'm gonna
go watch it. Four minutes of the Cabin all hearing? Okay,
(15:09):
and we'll come right back right after this. All right,
(15:38):
we're back. Now, let's talk about parachuting Franz right cult. Yeah,
I know a little bit about this one because, uh
I did something back when we were doing videos. I
can't remember exactly what it was, but one of our
half hearted attempts at a video series. I think it
(16:00):
was a blog post, was it. Yeah? Those didn't work either.
It was like in that same series of the Baby
Cage that like hung out over. Yeah, that's right. Remember
how what a relief it was when we were finally told, hey, guys,
why don't you just podcast because that's a job. That
was nice. Wasn't that great? Yeah? You don't have to
(16:20):
dance like a monkey on YouTube? Yeah, we're blog like
it's people missed that stuff though, It's crazy, I know,
but we enjoyed this. Yeah, I love podcasting, Chuck, all right,
So it's a late seventeen hundreds, we're in France and
there's a series of men that are intent on jumping
(16:43):
off of things and testing out this new thing called
a parachute. Yeah, and so in the fourteen seventies, Da
Vinci is credited with designing the first parachute just on paper.
I've seen pictures and apparently somebody did. Somebody built it,
and they're like, yeah, it works. Of course it's da Vinci.
But something and I couldn't figure out what it was.
(17:04):
But something in the eighteenth century and nineteenth century just
caused like parachute fever in France, and there was like
you really, you can't really attribute it to anybody else
but the French that the development or the early development
of the parachute. There was just a bunch of frenchmen
working on the parachute at about the same time. And
maybe it was the advent of hot air balloons, which
(17:28):
was another huge thing in France, and they were like, well,
I'm up here, and how am I going to get
down there if my balloon starts to crash? So it's
possible that was it. But there were a lot of
French guys jumping off of like buildings in the late
eighteenth in early nineteenth century trying out parachutes. Yes, I
mean over a ten or fifteen year period. There was
(17:48):
a guy named Joseph mont gulf Yer, great name that
means golf mountain. Oh nice, Louis Sebastian Uh Lenoman, It's okay,
I just dropped the last couple of letters on anything
French and the ally do it. And then a third
guy named Bourges he just he's like share right. All
(18:14):
of them were kind of making parachutes. There was another
one to um, Jean Pierre Blanchard, who actually realized that
silk is pretty good for getting out of a hot
air balloon as a parachute. He had to ditch once
back in. So there are a bunch of them. And
Lenormand is the guy who actually coined the term parachute,
(18:35):
which para in the Greek means against and shoot in
French means fall, so it's against falling. The parachute is
yeah in a way, so they they The parachute was
invented by a number of people, but there was one
specific parachute kind of like a wing suit, but it
differed from a wingsuit in that it didn't work at all,
(18:58):
and it was invented typically by a guy named Franz Reichelt,
and I would love to hear you say his name properly, France.
That's pretty good. Yeah. That that's an interesting case too,
because this was a full like close to a hundred
years after people were successfully using parachutes. Yeah, so it
wasn't like he was like, oh man, these things have
(19:19):
not worked yet and I really need to figure out
a better way. Um. So I think Franz was I
don't think he had a death wish, but I think
he was shooting for the stars. He was. He was
an eccentric. This is what I've gathered. Yeah, he was
an eccentric. He was a very talented tailor. But this
(19:40):
article points out, I think quite astutely as as part
part of being an inventor is knowing where to draw
inspiration from among other inventions and inventors. And this guy
apparently just went through to um first principles like Elon
Musk does, where it's like, um, oh, I can buy
batteries on the market for this. Let me instead figure
(20:02):
out what you need to make a battery, and I'll
go by those parts and make it for way cheaper
Franz Reicheld seemed to have the same impression about his
flying suit. He just kind of made it up, not
based on anything else. He just did it himself and
he was quite proud of it. And he took it
to the Arrow Club of France and said check this out,
(20:22):
and they said, do not use that ever. Ever, the
thing is not going to do anything, and he said, oh,
nuts to you. And he started doing trials from his
fifth floor apartment window with a dummy and it didn't work,
but he wasn't dissuaded by any of that. Yeah, the
only thing I can figure out is that um, because
again I don't think he had a death wish. I
think he must have thought. The only thing I can
(20:44):
figure is he must have thought a dummy like it
needs to be a real rigid human that can move
their body, and a dummy is just not gonna cut it.
So I need to try this thing out because I
think it's gonna work. It was a time in nineteens
well when apparently you could go to the Eiffel Tower
and just tell the cops, Hey, I'm gonna throw a
(21:06):
dummy um off of the Eiffel Tower to trap my
flying suit and they said go ahead. Uh so he
went up there. But UM, I don't think he changed
his mind. I think by all accounts it was he
intended fully to do this himself the whole time. And
the suit like you have um been hinting at it
(21:28):
didn't do anything. It didn't And actually I should have
sent you this one to British Pete or Pete, I'm
not quite sure what what the the old newsreel service.
They were there and and there is a haunting video
of him. There is close up like it's not far away,
but close up, like on the ledge of the first
(21:49):
platform of the Eiffel Tower nine ft or almost fifty
eight meters high, just like waiting, waiting, and then he
jumps and he just goes straight down like a sack
of potatoes and dies immediately hundred ninety feet very very tragic. Yeah,
And on the film that you see the police measuring
(22:10):
the depth of the impression he made in the ground
when he fell. When he hit the ground, it's really
sad to see, like you're like, don't do it, don't
do it, and you but you know obviously that he's
going to do it, and he he died. Well, it
was a time too where people were trying to figure
all this stuff out, so they're all kind of crazy.
I mean, I know we haven't done one on the
(22:32):
Right Brothers yet, but I mean you've seen all the
crazy flying machines that people were trying to come up with.
It was. It was a time of the spirit of
adventure was in the air, and everyone there was probably like, man,
check out this guy. He's going to fly off the
Eiffel Tower. Yeah. I mean they thought that or they
all had a lot of blood lust and we're coming
out to see this guy die. You know, I don't
(22:55):
think he had a death wish either, Chuck, And he
actually applied for a permit. That's sweet. So I mean,
why would you apply for a permit if you had
a pretty good idea you were going to die. I
think he thought very much that they was going to
work and he was going to live, and he didn't
want to get in trouble, so he applied for a
permit first. That's a good point. How about moving on?
(23:15):
Yes number three? Max Valierre would say it, Valier, I
don't like I don't like extra letters, man, I need
to take French. Um. Sure, Although this guy wasn't even French,
was he. No, he was born Get this, he was
born in Austria Hungary and the town of Bozen. But
(23:36):
Austria Hungary broke up. It was very sad and um
that town is now known as Bozano, Italy. But the
guy's last name is Vollier. So that was the Italian
or what we would consider Italian if he was. If
he had been born after the Austro Hungarian Empire collapsed,
he would have been Italian. But he was Austro Hungarian. Well, yeah,
(23:57):
but you know what I mean. I mean, it's not
like said all you Austro Hungarians get out of here.
I don't know, I really don't know. I would guess
because it was an empire, there was probably a lot
of movement around the empire. So who knows what his
his his ethnicity or pedigree was in his family. Well,
we know one thing for sure is that he was
(24:18):
a smart dude. And he did not have a degree
in science, but he was very good at figuring stuff out.
He was and and I guess an amateur engineer would
be the best thing to call him. Yeah, in a
bit of a groupie, sure, but but like a groupie
who put his his his actions where his mouth was. Yeah.
(24:40):
So he reads a book by um, a German engineer
named erman O Birth and it was called The Rocket
Into in an Interplanetary Space. Just just wonderful in the
in the early twentieth century when books like this would
be written. Yeah, this is this is I think credited
with helping inspire the idea that like, um, we actually
(25:01):
could do this. Yeah. Yeah, So this guy gets inspired
by this book on an amateur level. He develops a
four stage program and starts to get to work on
what what would be with with a car company, Opal
at his side, like in partnership on a rocket powered car,
not a space rocket, but a car. And he built
(25:24):
these things and he actually worked. Yeah, and Opal was
involved in this to like a red bull degree. They
were like, look at this crazy stuff. Check this out.
We're making a rocket car. But Vollier was like, no,
this is the future. Rockets are going to power everything.
And he actually I think some of the first tests
were pretty putsy, like one of them win a hundred
(25:45):
and twenty five in thirty five seconds. Not super fast,
I mean like a football field in a quarter in
thirty five seconds. Is not fast, but later on he
got some of these rocket cars up to a hundred
and forty five. That's impressive. And then he got a
rocket sled up to two hundred and fifty miles an hour. Yeah,
this is in Yeah, so like these rockets are working.
(26:08):
He's he's making him work. But then there were there
was a phase three and four of his four point plan,
and it went from static engines just the rocket engine
tests themselves, to rocket cars and rocket sleds, and then
to rocket powered aircraft in then um space rockets. Yeah,
and to his credit, like, um, it's not like things
were going really poorly and he was just pressing on anyway,
(26:30):
Like like you said, he got one of them up
to two hundred fifty miles an hour, so it would
make sense to go to a stage three, the rocket
assisted aircraft. And then very tragically May seventeen, Uh, he
died working on phase three. He's working on a liquid
oxygen gasoline fueled rocket motor. This thing explodes, a piece
(26:52):
of shrapnel severs his aorta, and he's dead, like immediately, yeah. Yeah,
everything I saw was that he he just dropped it.
So it must have been a heck of a severed
a Yorda. I mean, right, there was hard I guess then, huh,
I guess so jeez man. Yeah, an explosion that shoots
a piece of strapnel that severed you a yorda. You're
not gonna last much very long after that. And he
(27:14):
was only thirty five years old at the time too.
He had a pretty bright future. In all of this
is self taught rocket guy. It's pretty impressive. But his
um this article is hilarious. It talks about how his
legacy continued. So he helped found u UM, an organization
called you want to take that one? Uh sure, um,
(27:37):
I love that. I take German and you take French,
and both of us should have taken Spanish and neither
one of us can do Chinese. That's right. I'm gonna
say Verine, fire Ram Chift, not bad Chuck. That's what
I would have said too. It means a society for
space travel, because again, at the time, this is like
(27:58):
people smart people are saying, like we can actually do this,
let's figure out how to do it. And some very
famous UM people were members of this space society, and
some of the members actually went on to work on
the Saturn five project, including one member named Arthur Rudolph.
And the thing that cracks me up about this article
is Arthur Rudolph was a Nazi war criminal, right, who
(28:22):
was basically plucked out of Nazi Germany at the end
of the war from the V two rocket program, which
just devastated Britain and other parts of Europe um and
put to work on the the Apollo space mission. And
then after that they said, okay, you have to go
now be you're being accused of working people at death
in your V two factory. But he carried on Max
(28:44):
Valier's legacy. Yeah, in a way, I guess. So. Yeah, yep.
Have you seen the trailer for the Neil Armstrong movie. No,
I haven't. All of you here is Oscar Buzz looks good.
I'm sure man. That the Ryan Gosling man. He's he's
pretty good. He's great. You want to take a break, Yeah,
(29:08):
let's do it, okay, alright, Chuck. I think we're down
(29:35):
to two. And this is weird because normally we do
top tens, but we only do seven or eight of them.
This is a top five, and by god, we're doing
all five. That's right. When the couple added on, ah, yeah,
this one William Bullock, Old Bill Bullock in eighty two.
That was the printing in the printing press. You know
(29:56):
the history of the printing press. In fact, we should
do one on that too, at some point, you bet.
Really fascinating and many many people contributed to the printing
press gaining attraction and gaining and speed and just getting
more efficient and being able to pump out more and
more what you would call sheets per hour paper sheets
per hour, right and up to and by eight thirty
(30:19):
two they're up to about four hundred sheets per hour.
That was good, like, yeah, not bad at all. Um.
It was like it was a flat press. You had
the type set on like a flatboard that came down
and you'd take the paper off or flip it over
and then print another one another one. They could do
like four hundred sheets per hour like that. And then
this guy named Richard Hoe came up with He replaced
(30:39):
that flat thing with the type setting with a cylinder
with type setting, so it just spun and you just
moved that paper on and off as fast as you could,
and all of a sudden you could do like a
thousand to four thousand papers pages an hour. So there
was a huge leap, right, and by I think eighteen
thirty two is when Richard Hose invention came along. Yeah,
so flash four word another thirty to thirty three years
(31:04):
and William Bullock comes along again, a great period of
invention in the world and in the United States, and
he created the Bullock press, which was I think this
is sort of the one we're more used to seeing now,
which is a rotary press which had um, not sheets
of paper, but one big, huge roll of paper. Some
(31:24):
of these were up to five miles long, where you're
just continually cranking these things through and all of a
sudden you could get twelve thousand sheets per hour. Yeah,
what was amazing about? So before, like it didn't matter
how fast that cylinder was moving, you still had a
human who had to take a paper off after it
(31:45):
was printed and put a piece of blank paper on
to do the next one. With this, it was just
fully automated, and you had a cylinder on top doing
the front and you had a cylinder on bottom doing
the backside of the paper. So you could print two
sided twelve thousand chiefs per hour. And today, from what
I saw, those rotary presses that um Bullock invented move
(32:07):
paper through it like twenty miles an hour, and can
do like I think, sixty four thousand, hundred and twenty
eight page booklets in an hour. Now they're they're that fast,
which is I'm impressed. It's it's come a long way.
But Bill Bullock, like you said, kick the whole thing
off with his web rotary printing press. And I mean,
think about it, think about making an improvement to a
(32:28):
machine where it was four thousand pages an hour, now
it's twelve thousand thanks to you, You feel pretty good
about yourself. Plus he was a newspaper editor too, so
he was kind of doing this based on his own
observations and how to make improvements in his own industry.
And he was an orphan raised by his brother who
was self taught in mechanics just from reading books. So
(32:50):
I'm impressed with William Bullock, except for one of the
last things he ever did in his life. Yeah. So
because he was invented this machine, he would work on
it himself. He would adjust it and make repairs himself. Uh.
And there was the Philadelphia Public Ledger in eighteen sixty
seven one of his Bullock presses needed some work, so
(33:11):
he went in there himself, was working on it, and
exactly what you think happened happened. His leg gets caught
in one of these rollers and there was no pulling
out at that point and crushed his leg. That turned gangrenous,
and he died a few days after that. Yeah, during
(33:32):
an operation to amputate the leg. Yeah, very like. I
feel like he was close to making it. He was.
Here's the thing though, from what I saw, what got
him was he was trying to kick a belt back
onto a pulley and if his leg got caught in
there and sucked in, that means he was doing that
while the machine was operating. Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
(33:53):
So yeah, not that impressive, but he um, yeah, that's
a terror by way to go Gang Green through complications
of surgery from Gang Green, brought onto leg crushing, brought
on by not just stopping to turn the machine off,
brought on by being a brilliant inventor, great guy. Nothing
makes me more relaxed and enthralled in watching a a
(34:17):
newspaper operation being printed. I've said it before, have you?
I have you because it doesn't ring a bell. Yeah,
I think I said it when we were talking about
the the movie that last year, what's called The Paper, No,
the Post, the Post there Um. One of the hokeyest
shots I've ever seen in my life is in that
(34:39):
movie what is It? Where the lawyers and the editors
are all at um uh. I think they're at Tom
Hanks's house and they're arguing and they like the cameras
just moving around the room, just taking in all this
frenetic scene. And one of the shots is Bob and
(35:01):
David from Mr. Show like pointing into the chests of
the lawyers like in rhythm, and then the lawyers are
backing up in rhythm, almost like it's like a Rogers
and Hammers Hammerstein musical. That's I suddenly is breaking out.
It's crazy, And I was like, who directed this? And
then I saw that Steven Spielberg directed this, and I thought,
(35:24):
I think his maybe B or C director maybe came
up with that one, like his second unit was hoping.
I'm hoping. I just love that he cast Mr. Show
and that it was pretty great. I did not expect
to see that in that movie. Have you seen The
Paper the Michael Keaton, Yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
That's that is a world classman. That was a Ron
(35:46):
Howard movie. Yeah. Those guys know how to make movies
for the most part, unless it's a Star Wars movie.
Uh do they make one? Yeah? Ron Howard made the
Han solo movie. I didn't know that, did you see it?
I didn't care for it. The what the one I
saw that I liked was a rogue rogue one that
(36:06):
was great. Yeah. I had nothing to do with anything, right,
it was just its own thing. I mean that's great. Yeah.
I wouldn't say it had nothing to do with anything,
but it wasn't like part of the I don't even
know what Star Wars fans call that the cannon. Yeah,
we're just gonna get slaughtered for this, So that's fine.
I've been slaughtered for less, So let's move on. Then.
(36:29):
How are you gonna how do you pronounce that guy's name?
Ker Michael Dacre? That's what I'm going with, al Right,
you're keeping all the letters. I looked it up, and um,
I couldn't find any news coverage of it. That's usually
how you can find somebody's Yeah, and this is surprising
because this was very recently. Um, and we're going back
to rockets again. With this one. Uh, and this is
(36:50):
a really interesting idea for an invention. If you look
at these things, I assume you checked out the pictures
of the jet pod, dude. So this guy idea uh.
He was born in the UK in ninety six, was
a pilot in the British Army and um but good pilot,
and he had this idea for something called the jetpod,
(37:14):
which is basically an air taxi. So he was like,
if I I think if I can invent something that
goes uh, doesn't need very much runway to take off,
can go really really fast and in a quick time um,
and land in a in a kind of a truncated area,
then I can speed up. I can make like a
(37:36):
a jet taxi where people can get from like an
airport to a city center. In the case of London,
he said, in four minutes from heath he Throw to
central London. Yes, dude, which I'm sure you know this
from when we did our UK tour. It takes an
hour at least to get there by regular like car taxi. Yeah,
(37:57):
by the by black cab. It's horrible. So the idea
of getting from central London to Heathrow in four minutes
is a dream by itself, right, they really are. And
from what I can tell, this was not just like
some pie in this guy kind of thing, like this
guy was on track. This thing was like the real deal.
(38:18):
It was something called very quiet short takeoff and landing aircraft,
which is a type of vt o L vertical takeoff
and landing, which, like you said, it just needed a
very short strip of land, which meant you didn't have
to you didn't have to have an airport. You could
have like a dedicated, say air strip, but it could
be it would just take up a very small amount
of land in the middle of the city. And they
(38:41):
were going to sell them for a million dollars, which
meant that trips on these things would have been like
fifty sixty bucks, um, it's as much as yeah, and
in four minutes rather than an hour. And the whole
point was this was this was gonna ease congestion. It
was going to be a cheap and easy way to
kind of hop short distances or medium distances. And he
(39:03):
had some ideas for military and like ambulance um uses
for it as well. So it was close and who
knows if we might have these things by now, because
um and two thousand nine the guy died and he
was It was during a test flight of one of
the jet pods. Yeah, there were a few of them. Um.
(39:24):
I don't think we said on any feet. About four
feet to take off, um, which is about and it
would go like three hundred and fifty miles an hour,
which is awesome. But he had three models. The T
one hundred UM sort of if you look these things up,
it looks like a little ultra light plane, but it's
a jet. This would take about fifty trips a day
(39:47):
back and forth between the airport and city centers. It
looks like a short bus plane, is what it looks like,
because it's yellow, you know, it's totally and it's like stubby. Yeah,
it's stubby with wings and goes super super fast. Then
he had the M three hundred, which was bigger, bigger.
This is the one that like, um, he thought could
(40:09):
take the place of like military helicopters, right or not
take the place up, but you know, assist with removing
injured soldiers from the battlefield. And then the E four
hundred was like a like a flying ambulance. Yeah. So
these things, like you said, they were speeding along again,
not pyeing the sky. This was a real thing that
(40:29):
was happening. And then on August six, two thousand nine,
not very long ago, he took one of the eight
Seedar models, a prototype UH in Malaysia for a test flight.
I also saw I was in Taiwan. Oh really, yeah,
I couldn't tell where it actually happened. Interesting, So he
and this is where it gets a little frustrating, because
(40:49):
he he could not get airborne on three attempts. And that,
to me is when you're like, all right, let's just
ground it for the day and figure this out. But
he tried to fourth time, the aircraft went right straight
up into the air vertically and then right back down
and killed him. Yeah, it shut up five seven feet
(41:10):
and then yawned left and crashed and that was that.
And that was that. I don't I'm curious. I would
imagine that this thing wasn't completely scrapped after that. I'm
curious what the status is. I couldn't find anything about it.
It's the company that he founded that was developing its
absent a V C E N and I couldn't find
what the status of that thing is. I hope they
(41:31):
continue on with it because it would just be wonderful
to have these things. Because another thing, I mean, these
were jets, but something they had some sort of technology
that cut the jet noise in half by fifty. Yeah,
so it's not like we would just hear jets in
our city skies constantly. It was relatively inexpensive. Yeah, but
(41:53):
you need to solve that straight up and straight down thing. Well,
our I P, Michael Dacre and r He all those
inventors except ly see are really interested in wishing him well.
Um who who died by their own invention, hats off
to you for your spirit of curiosity and ingenuity. Agreed. Uh.
(42:15):
If you want to know more about inventors who died
by their own inventions, go onto the internet. There's all
sorts of stuff about that. And in the meantime, it's
time for listener mail. I'm gonna call this. I love
it when we get answers to questions that we asked
because this from Scott Miller, and we asked about how
they test for color blindness and animals, and he knows
(42:37):
because he does that. Guys just finished that episode. In
Chuck's question about how they test, I was very excited
because This comes from my own area of study in
behavior analysis. It's actually a very simple and clever experiment.
Experiments will will teach an animal to respond to a color,
often by pressing a lever or button, um or performing
(42:59):
some action that is easy for them, and in doing so,
the animal earns a treat. But the animals only get
treats if they press the lever when certain colors are
presented to them. So in this way, if an animal
does not respond differently between two colors e g. Green
and red for dogs, then that would indicate that they
are deficient in detecting those colors. The same is true
(43:21):
for birds, rodents, cats, and anything else. They have tried
this with. Congratulations on being one of the greatest podcast ever.
Love Scott Miller. Thanks Scott Geeze so as sweet as that. Yeah,
that was very sweet and thanks for explaining. It makes
total sense. The poor animals, they're like, I can't tell
between red and green, so they don't give you mouse
(43:42):
heads anymore. Can I get another mouse head? If you
want to get in touch with this, like Scott did,
we would love to hear from you. You can hang
out with us at our home on the web. Stuff
You should Know dot com. You can also find links
to our social media accounts, where you can sometimes find
us lurking around UM. Or you can send a plain
(44:04):
old fashioned email to Stuff podcast at how stuff Works
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics.
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