Trial and error is one of the best ways to figure things out in life. You have an idea; you test it, and if it doesn’t work, you try something different. That works well with new recipes, math equations, even relationships. But sometimes a person can test an idea that’s just terrible, and even if it ends up being a successful test, the results are still harrowing at best.
10. The Spiritualist Who Died to Prove Life After Death
Spiritualists, mediums, psychics, and others have professed for ages that they can communicate with the spirits of the dead. Science says there is no evidence to support this whatsoever, and more than one of these mediums has been outed as complete frauds over the years. Still, people want to believe and the idea perseveres. Sometimes the belief is so strong people do the unthinkable just to support it.
Thomas Lynn Bradford sought to prove the existence of life after death back in 1921 when he closed his doors and turned on the gas in his heater, letting it fill his room until he asphyxiated. A spiritualist himself, Bradford wholly believed in the beyond. He left a note stating as much that he was seeking to prove the phenomena of spirits and so his suicide was meant to be taken with a caveat – he’d be back.
He had conspired with a living partner to return from beyond. He did not. His partner, neither a psychic nor someone he’d really had a longstanding relationship with, claimed she didn’t even know Bradford planned to die. But she received no ghostly messages and Bradford failed to change science as we know it, as was his ultimate goal.
9. Franz Reichelt Tested his Own Parachute
There’s an old joke about what the first person to ever eat an oyster must have been thinking. Some things just seem counterintuitive, like things no sane person would never try. But when it comes to testing a parachute for the first time, eating an oyster seems like child’s play. At least gravity can’t betray you when you eat an oyster.
Franz Reichelt was a tailor and inventor who, in 1912, felt he had designed the perfect parachute. Airplanes were still relatively new, of course, and devising ways to make them safer was even newer. Reichelt felt a devise that could let you sail safely back to earth was a great idea. And it was, in theory.
Despite having tested his inventions unsuccessfully on numerous dummies from his own apartment window, Reichelt believed the failing was not in his design but the height. So he headed up the Eiffel Tower to prove it worked. Alas, it did not and there is even a grim video of the failure as he performed the test before an audience.
8. Flat Earther Mike Hughes Tested a Homemade Rocket
Flat Earthers became internet punchlines a few years back when people came to realize there are people out there who genuinely believe the world is flat. And while many are dismissed as not being serious or, at least, not worth serious consideration, the fact is some of them are deadly serious. Mike Hughes was one such man.
Daredevil and rocket enthusiast, Mike Hughes also claimed to believe the Earth was flat. And he planned to prove it once and for all by building a rocket, ascending to the heavens, and looking down on the flat disc of our world for himself. He’d actually had success in the past with two previous rocket launches that took him to just over 1,300 feet and then 1,800 feet. But his final attempt, in a steam-powered rocket of his own design, took place in 2020. The parachute mechanism failed, and the rocket crashed, killing him.
The tragic irony, according to his PR representative, was that he didn’t actually believe the flat earth theory at all, it was just a stunt to raise money and get press.
7. Horace Hunley Died Testing His Own Submarine
As an inventor, you need confidence in your ideas. But a little bit of practical caution couldn’t hurt either, especially if your invention is a submarine and the year in 1863. Horace Hunley was attempting to test his own submarine by traveling under an anchored vessel when the sub got stuck in the mud.
The 40-foot sub was operated by a crew of eight and had previously succeeded in a test run. Later, an accident caused it to dive with a hatch open, killing six of the crew. Finding a new crew was hard, so Hunley stepped up to prove his own creation was still safe and viable. He died with his entire crew.
Incredibly, the sub was salvaged and sent on yet another mission, where it became the first sub to sink another vessel in battle. It sank on the way home and a third crew perished.
6. Troy Hurtubise Invented a Bear Suit
No one could say Troy Hurtubise wasn’t a showman, even if the things he showed were weird, suspect, or just ill-conceived. The Canadian inventor made international headlines when a documentary about him hit the scene, chronicling his attempts to make a bear-proof suit.
Inspired by an alleged encounter with a real bear in which the bear opted to not kill him outright, as well as the movie RoboCop, Hurtubise created a massive, awkward suit that could withstand the brutal strength of a bear. But how does a man test such a thing? He lets his friends beat him with sticks and giant logs. And a pickup truck.
While no one can doubt Hurtubise made a suit and it could withstand remarkable punishment. When it was taken into the field for a test, he was unable to even walk in it and had to be helped to his feet.
5. Edwin Katskee Overdosed on Cocaine
Not so long ago, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of the drugs we considered dangerous narcotics were simply used as medicine. Things like heroin and cocaine were pretty ubiquitous in the world of pain management and that meant doctors had to have a degree of familiarity with them. Dr. Edwin Katskee was aware of the effects of cocaine back in 1936, but only in a general way. For instance, neither he nor anyone else at the time had a firm grasp on exactly how much cocaine was too much cocaine. So he sought to figure that out.
Katskee’s plan was to simply document the effects of cocaine on the human body. He would dose himself and then chronicle what he felt and experienced in a journal. Sounds reasonable enough, except since we’ve already established no one really knew how much was too much, Katskee ended up severely overdosing.
As he died, he took notes. Some were as mundane as “eyes mildly dilated” but one of the final ones, in messy handwriting, was simply “paralysis.”
The notes were written on the walls of his office and they were discovered, along with his dead body, the next day.
4. Clement Vallandigham Died Testing a Theory of How Another Man Died
Humans love a mystery and, as the proliferation of true crime blogs has shown, we really love a murder mystery. Sometimes the need to solve one can lead to even greater tragedy.
In 1870, Thomas Meyer was playing cards when five men burst into the room. A fight broke out and shots were fired. In the end, Meyer collapsed, dead from a gunshot wound. In the melee, no one could say for sure who had killed Meyer, but a man known to have hated him was the prime suspect. This, however, was not enough evidence for lawyer Clement Vallandigham.
Vallandigham studied the case and came up with a new conclusion. Witnesses had heard a muffled gunshot before Meyer drew his own gun. What if he had accidentally shot himself?
Vallandigham proceeded to test his theory, working with gunpowder residue and other evidence. And he believed he had proven it happened as he suspected, which he sought to demonstrate to a friend.Unfortunately he mixed up his own empty gun with Meyer’s still loaded gun and shot himself during the demonstration.
Amazingly, a second man, in recounting what happened to Vallandigham, also shot himself dead. But the man originally accused of shooting Meyer was acquitted, though he too was shot dead a few years later.
3. Nicholas Senn Filled His Own Butt with Hydrogen
Have you ever heard that you can find a leak in a tire by spreading soapy water on it to see where the bubbles form? It’s a simple trick that can help you patch up a flat. But what happens when the leak isn’t in a tire so much as a colon? Well, there’s a trick for figuring that out too and one doctor discovered it by shooting hydrogen gas up his own butt.
Dr. Nicholas Senn was treating patients during the Spanish-American War and was faced with a serious problem. Bullet wounds that perforated the intestines were very hard to treat. Finding perforations was difficult and if the wounds weren’t treated promptly, a painful death was sure to follow. Senn devised the idea of locating the wounds by filling the colon with a harmless hydrogen gas.
Senn first tested the experiment on dogs and all the ones that survived recovered well. This, of course, implies others didn’t survive. But to determine just how well the method worked, he did it to himself as well.
Though there was discomfort, he determined it wasn’t all that bad. And he went on to use the technique to great success, saving a good number of lives until the invention of the X-ray.
2. An F-11 Pilot Shot Himself Down
The movie Top Gun assured us all that pilots have the need, the need for speed. And speed is definitely the name of the game when it comes to military aircraft. A MiG-25 can reach speeds of Mach 3.2, giving it a world record for speed. And with each new supersonic jet comes a test pilot who has to see how the thing handles when it’s going faster than the sounds of his screams when something goes wrong.
Back in 1956, Navy pilot Thomas Attridge was testing the new Grumman F-11 Tiger. He was doing a weapons test of the jet, which was able to reach supersonic speeds, something its predecessors had not been able to do.
At 20,000 feet above the Atlantic, Attridge fired the 20mm cannons as he dove to 13,000 feet. From there, he kicked it into supersonic speed and headed straight down to 7,000 feet to fire off another round. And that’s when someone shot him.
Something tore through the windshield, and he dropped speed to try to head back to base. The engines were failing and what he initially thought had been caused by a bird proved even stranger. In his rapid descent, the F-11 outpaced its own bullets. He got ahead of them and shot himself down.
A mile from base the plane crashed, but Attridge did survive.
1. Michael Smith Got Stung By Bees on Purpose
Aposematism is the name for the mechanism by which a living organism lets you know it’s dangerous just by looking dangerous. Poison dart frogs are all brightly colored to let predators know they’re bad news and insects like bees are striped in the same fashion. Animals know instinctively to avoid these things. But humans? Sometimes our own intelligence can work against us and we seek out danger instead of avoiding it. Consider the case of Michael Smith.
Smith studies bees and has a PhD in neurobiology and behavior. His research deals with how bee colonies work but, along the way, he’s suffered one or two stings. Stands to reason, right? And during one session in particular, a bee made its way up his shorts and stung him in a very sensitive place. But the unusual thing was that, for Smith, it didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would. And that got him thinking, what is the most painful place a bee could sting a man?
No one else had a definitive answer, so he conducted tests on himself. He began subjecting himself to stings, dozens of them, all over his own body in places like the top of the skull, the nipple, and the armpit. And his findings led him to one painful conclusion. A bee sting directly on the nostril is the most painful of all.