When inventions kill!

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, 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, 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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? 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 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 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

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 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, and we'll come right back right after this. All right, 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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? 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 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,

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 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. 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

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 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 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. 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, 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

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 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, 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 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 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

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, let's do it, okay, alright, Chuck. I think we're down 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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. 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 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,

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 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, 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.

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 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 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. 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 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 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

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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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

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 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 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,