TOP 20 INVENTORS KILLED BY THEIR OWN INVENTIONS

There’s something ingrained in humans that cause us to take dangerous risks and try things that might change the world. Over the course of civilization, thousands upon thousands of inventions succeeded beyond their creator’s wildest dream. But some were epic fails. Here’s a look at the top 20 inventors who were killed by their own inventions.

20. Thomas Andrews was the chief naval architect for the R.M.S. Titanic and it was his honor to accompany the ship on its maiden voyage. Andrews was aware of the Titanic’s vulnerability in ice-laden waters and originally called for the Titanic to be double-hulled and equipped with forty-six lifeboats, instead of the twenty it actually carried. He was overruled due to cost constraints. When the Titanic struck the iceberg on April 15, 1912, Andrews heroically helped many people into the lifeboats. He was last seen in the first-class smoking lounge, weeping. His body was never recovered.

19. William Bullock invented the first modern printing press. While installing a machine for the Philadelphia Public Ledger, Bullock tried to kick a belt onto a pulley and got his leg crushed in the moving mechanism. He quickly developed gangrene and his leg needed amputating. During his surgery on April 12, 1867, Bullock died of complications.

18. Francis Edgar Stanley invented the photographic dry plate which he sold to George Eastman of Eastman-Kodak fame. With the profits, he founded the Stanley Motor Carriage Company and developed a line of steam-powered automobiles called Stanley Steemers. On July 13, 1918, Francis Stanley was testing one of his Steemers and swerved to miss some farm animals. He plowed into a wood pile and died.

17.  Jean-Francoise Pilatre de Rozier was a French chemistry and physics teacher as well as being the true father of aviation. He made the first hot air balloon flight in 1783. He was also the first to experiment with hydrogen as a propellant, testing it by taking a mouthful and blowing it across an open flame. After losing his hair and eyebrows, he dismissed hydrogen as being too volatile—something the makers of the Hindenburg would later confirm. On July 15, 1785, de Rozier attempted to cross the English Channel in his balloon. It crashed, killing de Rozier and his passenger.

16. Louis Slotin was an American nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhatten Project. After the war, Slotin continued to experiment with plutonium and accidently set off a fission reaction which released a hard burst of radiation. Realizing what he’d done, Slotin heroically covered the material with his body while the others made a run for the hills. He died on May 30, 1946, two weeks after the exposure.

15. Karel Soucek was a Czechoslovakian daredevil and inventor. He built a specially-designed, shock-proof barrel and repeatedly flowed over Niagara Falls. To top this feat, Soucek invented a new capsule which was dropped from the roof of the Houston Astrodome on January 20, 1985. It missed its target, which was a small water container, and Soucek was killed on impact. World-renown stuntman, Evel Knievel, tried to talk Soucek out of it, saying “It was the most dangerous thing I’ve ever seen.”

14. Sylvester H. Roper invented the world’s first motorcycle. He called it a velocipede and it was actually a converted bicycle powered by a steam engine. On June 01, 1896, Roper was testing the machine on a bicycle racing track and was lapping the pedal-powered two-wheelers at over forty mph. Suddenly, he wiped out and died. The autopsy showed the cause of death to be a heart attack, but it’s not known if the attack caused the crash or if the crash caused the attack. He was seventy-two.

13, Horace Lawson Hunley invented the submarine. His first prototype trapped seven sailors underwater and killed them all. Hunley went back to the drawing board and came up with a new and improved sub, aptly named the H.L. Hunley, which he skippered himself. On October 15, 1863, Hunley was testing the Hunley off the coast of Charleston, South Carolina, when it failed to surface and again killed the crew—including Hunley himself.

12. Aurel Viaicu was a Romanian inventor and test pilot of his own line of aircraft, called the Vlaicu WR I, II, and III. He achieved many notable firsts such as the highest, longest, and fastest flights. On Friday, September 13, 1913, Vlaicu’s luck ran out when he attempted the highest altitude flight ever—crossing the peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. The cause of the crash was never determined.

11. Valerian Abakovsky invented the Aerocar, also known as the Aerowagon, which was a steam-powered, propeller-driven rail car intended to whisk railway executives quickly across the vast lands of Siberia. On July 24, 1921, the twenty-five-year-old Abakovsky was whirling a group of twenty-two big-shots from Tula to Moscow when he approached a curve at over one hundred mph. His Aerocar went airborne and killed six, including the inventor.

10. Marie Curie was a Polish chemist/physicist who pioneered research into radioactivity and won the Nobel Prize—twice. Besides proposing the theory of radiation and discovering two elements, she is credited with inventing radiography or X-rays. Curie died on July 14, 1934, in a French sanatorium from aplastic anemia due to long-term exposure to radiation, probably from her habit of carrying test-tubes of plutonium in her pockets.

9. James Fuller “Jim” Fixx didn’t exactly invent running but he popularized it through his mega-bestselling book Complete Book Of Running. Fixx took up the sport after a lifetime of stress and bad habits. He became a world celebrity on fitness and healthy living. On the morning of July 20, 1984, he was out for his daily running fix and fell dead in his tracks on Route 15 in Hardwick, Vermont. His official cause of death was a fulminant heart attack. The autopsy showed his heart arteries were 70% blocked in the right anterior descending, 80% blocked in the left anterior descending, and 95% blocked in the circumflex. Runner Jim Fixx was fifty-two.

8. Max Valier was an Austrian rocket scientist who invented solid and liquid fueled missiles. Given his success with flight, Valier thought it’d be cool to make a rocket-propelled car. It worked, too, and he got it up to 250 mph. Trying to get even better, Valier experimented with alcohol as a combustible. That got away on him and blew up on his workbench, killing Valier and burning his workshop down.

7. Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian physician, writer, politician, and inventor of sorts. He was a major player in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and ended up in jail. He talked his way out of death row and back into medicine where he became obsessed with blood. Bogdanov founded the Institute For Haematology and was convinced that blood transfusion was the ticket to the fountain of youth. To back up his beliefs, he used himself as a crash-test dummy and transfused blood from a patient suffering malaria and tuberculosis into his own system. He died two days later on April 07, 1928, but the patient slowly got better. It seems that the blood types were incompatible—something little known in the day.

6. Otto Lilienthal was known as The Glider King. A German pioneer in aviation, Lilienthal made over 2,000 glider flights and is credited with perfecting the gull-wing design and set the long-held record of soaring to 1820 feet. On August 10, 1896, Lilienthal experimented with “shifting weight” in a glider at fifty feet. It lost lift, stalled, and he augered into the ground, breaking his neck.

5. Li Si died in 208 BC at age seventy-two of The Five Pains. That was a form of torture or “punishments” involving tattooing the face, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, castration, and finally death by exposure. Li Si was Prime Minister during China’s Qin Dynasty and fell out of favor with the Emperor. It should be noted Li Si invented The Five Pains.

4. Henry Smolinski held a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Northrup Institute Of Technology. Old Hank got it in his head that a flying car would be a good idea so he bastardized the boxed-wing rear section of a Cessna 337 Skymaster and welded it onto the top of a ’71 Ford Pinto. He actually got the thing to fly. On September 11, 1973, Hank took his buddy, Harold Blake, up for a spin in the Pinto-cross. At around three hundred feet, one of the wings snapped and the pony-car-plane bucked them off to a fiery death. The Transportation Safety Board investigated and said there was nothing wrong with Hank’s design, just that his welding was the shits.

3. Abu Nasr Ismail ibn Hammad a-Jawhari died around 1008 AD at Nishapur which is in today’s Iraq. He was a Muslim cleric, scholar, and a bit of an inventor. He was fascinated with flight so he built a pair of feather-covered, wooden wings and strapped them to his back and arms. To impress the Iman, Mr. a-Jawhari jumped off the roof of the mosque hoping they’d work. They didn’t, but to commemorate the first known attempt at human flight, they built a mural on the wall of the mosque. It’s actually quite pretty.

2. Wan-Hoo may, or may not, have been real. Some say he was apocryphal, or doubtful, but one thing’s for sure—he’s a legend. Wan-Hoo was reported to be a 16th-century Chinese official who tried to shoot himself to the moon by attaching forty-seven rockets to a chair and lighting them all at once. They say there was this huge bang and, when the smoke cleared, Wan-Hoo and his chair were nowhere to be found. Today, there’s a crater on the moon named after Wan-Hoo, and I’m not making this up.

1. Franz Reichelt was real—a real stupid sonofabitch if there ever was one. He was known as The Flying Tailor and is credited with inventing the coat parachute. To prove it worked, he conned the keepers of the Eifel Tower to let him demonstrate. On February 04, 1912, Franz held a major press venue so they could witness his inaugural jump. He leaped from the first deck and gravity took over. It was captured on film and today you can watch this moron splat himself on YouTube.

Here’s the link.

HELPFUL OR HOMICIDAL — HOW DANGEROUS IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like DeepThink and OpenAI, you have no idea how fast. It’s growing at an exponential pace. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeline. Ten years at the most. I am close—really close—to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is beyond enormous. Mark my words. AI is far more dangerous to humans than nukes.” ~Elon Musk, uber-billionaire founder of SpaceX, Tesla, and leading investor in AI companies DeepThink and OpenAI.

Artificial intelligence isn’t a thing of the future. Not some grand vision of twenty-second-century technology. It’s here. Right now, I’m using AI to write this piece. My PC is a brand new HP laptop with Windows 11 backed by the latest Word auto-suggest and a Grammarly Premium editing app. My research flows through Google Chrome, and I have an AI search bar that (creepy) seems to know exactly what I’m thinking and wanting next. This is also the first post I’m experimenting with by plugging into an AI text-to-speech program for an audio version of this site.

AI is great for what I do—create content for the entertainment industry—and I have no plans to use AI for world domination. Not like a character I’m basing-on for my new series titled City Of Danger. It’s a work in progress set for release this fall—2022.

I didn’t invent the character. I didn’t have to because he exists in real life, and he’s a mover and shaker behind many world economic and technological advances including promoting artificial intelligence. His name is Klaus Schwab.

Klaus Schwab – Founder & Executive Chairman of World Economic Forum

Who is Klaus Schwab? He’s the megalomanic founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum which is a left-leaning, think tank operated out of Davos, Switzerland. Since 1971, Klaus Schwab has amalgamated a unity among the Wokes—billionaires, heads of state, religious leaders, and royalty to convene in Davos and hammer out a new world order. I couldn’t have built a more diabolical villain if I had access to all the AI in the world and an organic 3D printer.

I’m not making this up. And it’s not a whacko conspiracy theory. Check out the World Economic Forum for yourself. Go deep. You’ll see they speak openly about their new world order based on their Stakeholder Capitalism principle designed for their Fourth Industrial Revolution. My take—the participating billionaires aren’t sucked in. They’re turning old school communism into neo-capitalist profit centers to which Klaus Schwab promotes by motivating the ultra-fat-cats and facilitating their network. Part of this grand scheme is using the creative power of artificial intelligence for realignment of the global economy. Redistribution of wealth—more for them and less for us.

What’s in it for Klaus Schwab to promote artificial intelligence as part of his new world order? Well, Klaus Schwab is 83 and he’s wearing out. Klaus Schwab is fascinated with artificial intelligence which is a founding principle behind transhumanism. He fervently believes humans can meld with AI machines and extend all capabilities including life spans. It’s entirely in Klaus Schwab’s interest to fast-track AI development if he wants to live long enough to wear his Master-Of-The-Universe jacket in public.

Here’s a quote from Klaus Schwab (Thick German accent):

In the new world order of the fourth industrial revolution, you will rent what you need from the government. You shall own nothing, and you will be happy.”

Setting Klaus Schwab aside, there’s something else going on in the world’s order involving AI. Here’s a quote from Russian President Vladimir Putin:

Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with enormous opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become ruler of the world.”

A bit of AI trivia. Ukraine has a world-class, artificial intelligence tech industry. Some of the best and brightest AI designers work in Kyiv which is now under siege by Putin’s military. There are 156 registered AI firms in Ukraine and 8 universities specializing in AI research and teaching. The Ukrainian AI industry includes the finest, most advanced blockchain and cryptography technology anywhere on the planet as well as being a frontline in the development of autonomous AI weapons systems.

——

Before looking at just how dangerous AI is to human order, let’s take a quick look at what AI actually is.

Artificial Intelligence uses computers to do things traditionally requiring human intelligence. This means creating algorithms to classify, analyze, and draw predictions from collected data. It also involves acting on that collected data, learning from data, and improving over time. It’s like a child growing up to be a (sometimes) smarter adult. Like humans, AI is not perfect. Yet.

AI has two paths. One is narrow AI where coders write specific instructions, or algorithms, into computer software for specific tasks. Narrow AI has fixed algorithms which cannot evolve into more advanced AI systems. General AI is more advanced. It’s specifically designed to learn from itself, teach itself new ideas, and invent stuff we’ve never dreamed possible.

General AI is the guy you gotta be scared of. Here’s a 1951 quote from Alan Turing, widely regarded as the father of modern computerism:

Let us assume these smart machines are a genuine possibility, which I believe they are, and look at the consequences of constructing them. There would be plenty to do in keeping one’s intelligence up to the standards set by the machines, for it seems that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not be long for them to outstrip our feeble powers. At some stage, we would have to expect the machines to take control.”

In rabbit-holing (aka researching) this piece, I read a few books. One, of course, was Klaus Schwab’s The Fourth Industrial Revolution. It’s a must if you want to get inside this guy’s head. Another was Davos Man—How the Billionaires Devoured the World by Peter S. Goodman. This is a fascinating look at how Klaus Schwab has organized mega-money to change the world’s governance and economic structures to which AI plays a big part. Then there’s Superintelligence—Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom.

Here’s a take-away quote from Nick Bostrom in Superintelligence:

Once unfriendly superintelligence exists, it would prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences. Our fate would be sealed“.

Therein lies the general AI danger. Like all human creations, it’ll be fine they said until something goes wrong. Once a malicious AI manipulator allows an AI computer program to go rogue, our fate would be sealed. It would be impossible to put the digital genie back in the bottle. Here are the main perils possible with general AI, rogue or not:

Automation-Spurred Job Losses

AI overseers view employment realignment as the first general AI concern. It’s no longer a matter of if jobs will be lost. It’s already occurring, and the question is how many more will fall. The Bookings Institute estimates that 36 million Americans work in jobs that have high exposure to job automation where 70 percent of their tasks can be done cheaper and more efficiently by AI-programmed machines, Smart robots, if you will.

Not all threatened workers are blue-collar by any means. White-collar guys and gals earning $100K per year can be replaced by AI. Think of the savings where a $200K software program can take over for 10 execs. That’d be an $800K/yr saving, and the boss would be perfectly within their legal rights to fire them. Would the boss feel bad about it? Probably, but AI wouldn’t care.

Privacy, Security, and the Rise of Deepfakes

Look at China if you want to see AI in action. The Chinese government has hundreds of millions of networked surveillance cameras watching their citizens. Data mining includes individual habits such as travel, consumer purchases, entertainment choices, political views expressed by social media or online searches, and even walking characteristics let alone facial recognition. Part of the security-over-privacy design of China’s AI Big Brother is making a social credit profile of its 1.4 billion people. The better your score (behavior) the better your life.

Deepfakes are terrifying possibilities. This is a drill down on fake news where AI constructs a completely convincing facsimile of a person for fraudulent use. Forget about raiding a bank account using an AI-simulated profile or an AI scammed IRS phone call. Think of a world leader like a president during election time when a fake AI image of them publicly performs an act so reprehensible that it costs them the office. Or supporting a dictator. Whose lies would you believe?

Stock Market Instability Caused by Algorithmic High-Frequency Trading

This has already happened. In 2010, the Flash Crash took the Dow Jones down by 1,000 instantaneously costing the marketplace over $1 trillion. It was caused by a manipulator who short-stocked a trade that the algorithmic high-frequency took to be a market upset. The computers took over and instantly sold off private stocks in a hyper-dumping.

Algorithmic trading occurs when a computer system—unencumbered by human instincts or emotions—executes trades based on pre-programmed instructions. These computer systems make extremely high-volume, high-frequency, and high-value exchanges based upon algorithmic calculations they have been programmed for. They’re just doing what they’ve been told. Imagine what they’d do when they thought for themselves.

Autonomous Weapons and a Potential AI Arms Race.

Imagine this. A rogue AI weapons system decides to create mischief—or wrongly reads a warning—and chucks a nuclear-tipped cruise missile at its neighbor. The AI detection system on the other side of the fence reprograms the missile in flight and sends it back home only to have the instigator release the whole arsenal in a mutually-assure destruction defense. Humans, meanwhile, having a beer with shrimps on the barbie get vaporized.

On a lesser scale, autonomous AI weapons currently exist, and the Ukrainians have been making them for Russia. There are probably slaughterbot drones flying over the streets of Kyiv right now that are programmed to fire at whatever, or whoever, matches their target profile. And there is sure to be a race to see who can come up with the best anti-AI bots.

The AI arms race matter is so serious that thousands of concerned experts have signed an open letter to world leaders. It says:

AUTONOMOUS WEAPONS: AN OPEN LETTER FROM AI & ROBOTICS RESEARCHERS

Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.

Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.

Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations, and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.

Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.

In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.

As Elon Musk said:

The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like DeepThink and OpenAI, you have no idea how fast. It’s growing at an exponential pace. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five-year timeline. Ten years at the most. I am close—really close—to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me. It’s capable of vastly more than anyone knows, and the rate of improvement is beyond enormous. Mark my words. AI is far more dangerous to humans than nukes.”

Updates 31March2023

Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and 100 other prominent figures signed an Open Letter calling for a 6-month moratorium on AI research & development given the incredible advances in AI technology over the past year. Read it here.

Sam Altman of Open AI/ChatGPT issued this Statement on Planning for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Read it here.

And if you’re interested in more about AI/AGI, here is a release on the Asilomar AI Principles drafted in 2017 that foresaw the AI race and attempted to put sanity in it. Read it here.

BROWN DEATH — BOSTON’S MONSTROUS MOLASSES MASSACRE

A massive molasses storage tank ruptured in downtown Boston, Massachusetts at 12:40 pm on Wednesday, January 15, 1919. 2.3 million gallons of liquid sludge, weighing over 12,000 tons, burst from the receptacle and sent a surge of brown death onto Boston’s streets. The sickly sweet wave was 40 feet high and moved at 35 miles per hour. When the sugary flood stopped, 21 people were dead and over 150 suffered injuries. Property damage was in the millions, and the legal outcome changed business practices across America. Sadly, the Boston Molasses Disaster, or Boston Molasses Flood, was perfectly preventable.

The molasses tank (reservoir or container, if you will) belonged to the Purity Distillery Company owned by United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA). It was 50 feet tall (five stories), 90 feet in diameter, and had a circumference of 283 feet. At the time, the Boston molasses tank was the city’s largest liquid storage facility. It was also the deadliest.

In January 1919, Boston was a happening place. The U.S. concluded World War I efforts two months earlier and was on the verge of Prohibition being enacted. Alcohol was in huge demand, both recreational for making spirits and industrial for manufacturing explosives. Molasses was a staple source for both, and Boston was an ideal spot for storing molasses.

Through Purity Distilling, USIA owned a strategic location on Commercial Street at Boston’s north end waterfront. It’s now a public place called Langone Park. The tank site was adjacent to a wharf where longshoremen could unload molasses tankers arriving from sugar cane plantations in the West Indies, pump the slurry mix to the receptacle, and then load it into rail cars when needed by USIA’s Purity distillery in Cambridge, west of downtown Boston.

The tank’s construction began in 1915, but it suffered delays. Completion occurred in 1917 and it went into operational use with little testing applied. Immediately, molasses leaks appeared at riveted seams where the metal panels overlapped. Many nearby residents, mostly Italian immigrants, complained of the unsightly mess and unfavorable smell. USIA’s response was not to fix the leaks but paint the tank brown  to mask the molasses stains.

People complained about more than the appearance and the odor. Employees who worked around the tank heard creaks and groans coming from within the molasses storage unit. They felt shudders and shakes when the tank was loaded and unloaded, and they sounded their concerns about the structural integrity of the hastily-built monstrosity. Their voices fell on deaf management ears.

On January 12, 1919, the shaky tank took on a 1.3 million gallon load of Cuban molasses. The tank was at its highest-ever capacity with an overall weight of 26 million pounds. The molasses sat until the Wednesday morning when the sun came up and began an unusual temperature gain for that time of year.

Without warning, at 40 minutes past noon, the molasses tank ruptured at its bottom seams. A massive force sent metal debris flying as heavy-weight shrapnel with the gooey molasses mess radiating in a four-story-high wave knocking buildings off their foundations, smashing their wood frames to smithereens, toppling freight cars, and killing these innocent people:

Patrick Breen, age 44
William Brogan, age 61
Bridget Clougherty, age 65
Stephen Clougherty, age 34
John Callahan, age 43
Maria Di Stasio, age 10
William Duffy, age 58
Peter Francis, age 64
Flaminio Gallerani, age 37
Pasquale Iantosca, age 10
James Kenneally, age 48
Eric Laird, age 17
George Lehaye, age 38
James Lennon, age 64
Ralph Martin, age 21
James McMullen, age 46
Cesar Nicolo, age 32
Thomas Noonan, age 43
Peter Shaughnessy, age 18
John Seiberlich, age 69
Michael Sinnott, age 78

First responders were overcome with one main obstacle. That was trying to move in the 2 to 3-foot deep pool of semi-liquid molasses that thickened as the day cooled and the goo dropped to the ambient temperature of Boston’s wintertime. It took 4 days to recover nearly-unrecognizable bodies and decontaminate them so identification could be made.

Medical workers established a field hospital to treat assorted injuries like broken bones, crushed organs, and obstructed airways. Cleanup efforts took months. And the molasses smell remained ingrained in Boston’s air for years. Today, over 100 years later, local legend says you can still whiff molasses on hot summer nights.

The Investigation and Legalities Began

Someone had to be accountable for Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre. Those were the people managing USIA’s storage facility in North Boston, and the process would take six years. Eventually, no individual was prosecuted for a criminal act although the utter negligence displayed in (lack of) planning, overseeing, and commissioning the molasses tank’s construction was outrageous.

Two factors drove the need for such a large molasses container. First was the marketplace because, at the Roaring Twenties onset, there was a highly-profitable demand for recreational and industrial alcohol. The USIA executives wanted to capitalize on molasses-based alcohol products as quickly as possible. Strike while the iron’s hot, as they say.

Second was the onset of Prohibition. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified the day after the Boston disaster, and to be in effect one year later. After that, the manufacture of recreational alcohol would be illegal and USIA wanted to stockpile as much as possible.

To corner the American molasses market, USIA needed bulk buying power and an economical supply chain including a convenient storage facility. They found it at Boston Harbor, and they relied on one man to oversee the construction project.

Arthur P. Jell was the USIA’s comptroller—their treasurer. Jell wasn’t an architect or an engineer. He had no basic building experience let alone constructing something as large and complex as a steel container capable of safely holding 12,000 tons, or 2.3 million gallons, of a substance weighing 1.4 times the mass of water.

Jell was an accountant. He was a bean counter and thought like one. Jell’s primary focus was on costs and speed. He was also on a shaky career footing.

Arthur Jell was under orders to get the tank built and get it built fast. The USIA bosses assigned Jell to lead the tank project in 1915 which was the early stages of WWI where steel supplies were running scarce through high wartime productions. By 1917, Jell only had the tank’s concrete foundation done. He was running late and under immense pressure to receive a pre-ordered and on-the-way Caribbean molasses shipment of 700,000 gallons.

If the tank wasn’t ready, the USIA executives would have to find another storage facility (of which there were none that size in America) or dump the molasses at sea. Either way was a major loss for USIA and for Arthur Jell himself.

Jell got the tank operational just in time to save the shipment. Through the low-bid contractor, Hammond Iron Works, the molasses receptacle was hammered together and filled without proper testing. And because the tank was a “receptacle” by definition—not a building or a bridge— the City of Boston did not require a permit for anything other than the foundation.

The tank’s structure had no approved plans, sealed drawings, listed specifications, professional oversight, or approved inspections and tight commissioning procedures. The project depended on a tight-fisted, building-ignorant manager and a corner-cutting construction company operating on a profit-first agenda.

Hindsight is usually 20/20. Stephen Puleo does hindsight carefully in his scholarly 2003 book on the Great Boston Molasses Flood titled Dark Tide. Here’s a quote from the book’s description:

For the first time, the story of the flood is told here in its full historical context, from the tank’s construction in 1915 through the multiyear lawsuit that followed the disaster. Dark Tide uses the gripping drama of the flood to examine the sweeping changes brought about by World War I, Prohibition, the anarchist movement, immigration, and the expanding role of big business in society. To understand the flood is to understand America of the early twentieth century – the flood was a microcosm of America, a dramatic event that encapsulated something much bigger, a lens through which to view the major events that shaped a nation. It’s also a chronicle of the courage of ordinary people, from the firemen caught in an unimaginable catastrophe to the soldier-lawyer who presided over the lawsuit with heroic impartiality.

Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide does a deep dive into the structural failures and cause-effect details for why the molasses tank ruptured. So does a highly-respected company called Think Reliability that does cause-mapping, or root-cause analysis, of significant events. Here are the main points of what occurred to cause the failure of USIA’s giant molasses tank in downtown Boston:

Inadequate Design — The tank’s steel walls were half as thick as best engineering practices should have designed them. This was to save cost. The rivets were inferior, too small, and improperly installed. Again, to save cost as well as speed the timeline. The steel panels had low manganese levels which made the tank brittle at low temperatures. Once again, cost saving.

Inadequate Supervision — Arthur Jell did not understand construction methods and engineering standards. He focused on cost and speed instead of reliability and safety. Hammond Iron Works focused on profit and were not supervised or overseen by proper drawings and specifications as well as competent inspectors. Once more, speed and cost drove the bus with no regard for end-use safety.

Environmental Influence — Setting aside the bad design and lack of oversight, Boston’s environment was a wild card. On January 12, when the tank took the 1.3 million gallon Cuban load, there was a smaller amount of cold molasses sitting at the tank’s base. The Cuban molasses was heated on the tanker so it could be pumped to the storage receptacle. The thermal inequality of hot molasses sitting on cold molasses started a fermentation reaction that off-gassed carbon dioxide and raised the tank’s internal pressure. When the morning temperature unusually rose on January 15 (from overnight of +2F to 40F at noon) the pressure exceeded the steel strength.

Ignored Warning Signs — The creaks and groans and worker warnings went unheard or ignored by persons in USIA’s management. To “paint the tank brown” rather than fix the problem would amount to gross negligence in the current industrial safety world. The courts, today, would think along the same lines and it’s from the litigation following Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre that safety rules—specifically in the design, permitting, and inspection of building projects significantly changed. For the better.

Civil litigation began immediately following the Boston Molasses Disaster. An abundance of lawyers filed 117 separate lawsuits against United States Industrial Alcohol and its subsidiary Purity Distillery. The suits amalgamated into one class-act procedure which was the first time in American history that a class-action of this magnitude began. It set the stage for all other class-action or representative-action legal proceedings.

It took six years to wind through the courts. USIA used the defense that the tank had been an act of sabotage—domestic terrorism—committed by Italian anarchists. There was absolutely no proof of this, but the defense tactic took hold the day following the tank rupture. The Boston papers reported that the tank had “exploded” which indicated some sort of explosive device being set off rather than natural forces of pressure exceeding containment and carried out by gravity.

The presiding judge didn’t buy the explosion argument. In his judgment finding complete fault on behalf of Purity and USIA, the judge wrote, “The tank was wholly insufficient in point of structural strength, insufficient to meet either legal or engineering requirements. The scene was unparalleled in the severity of the damage inflicted to the person and property from the escape of liquid from any container in a great city.” In conclusion, the judge ordered USIA to pay the plaintiffs $628,000 which is approximately $10.12 million in today’s currency.

Aside from the legal impact, American building processes changed after the Boston Molasses Flood. Jurisdiction upon jurisdiction required building projects to be professionally designed, properly constructed, and strictly inspected by competent authorities. Today, all major works are intricately designed and approved with architect/engineering stamps and carried out by qualified workers under legal permits.

And today, the site of the brown death—Boston’s monstrous molasses massacre—is a pretty park containing a Little League baseball field, a playground, and bocce courts. There’s a small plaque paying tribute to its horrific past.