10 Inventors Whose Egos Were Bigger Than Their Brains

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10 Inventors Whose Egos Were Bigger Than Their Brains

While these 10 scientists created truly great things, they believed a little too much in the power and scope of their own inventions.

By Daniel Bonfiglio

Published 1 year ago in Wtf

Scientists and inventors are supposed to believe in their creations; how else would they encourage us to use them? But some visionaries had their eyes in the sky instead of what was right in front of them.

While these ten scientists created truly great things, they believed a little too much in the power and scope of their own inventions.

1
Dr. Heimlich fought against the Red Cross for 20 years after they claimed giving "5 back slaps" is a better alternative to the Heimlich Maneuver. Experts now advise doing both. He also claimed that the maneuver should be used to help drowning victims, which has been proven to be ineffective and dangerous.

2
The inventor of Vaseline, Robert Chesebrough, was such a firm believer in its medicinal properties that he claimed to have eaten a spoonful of it a day. During a bout of pleurisy in his 50s, he ordered his nurse to cover him from head to toe in the substance, and soon recovered. He lived to be 96.

3
Sylvester Graham invented graham crackers as part of a radical vegetarian diet meant to curb the desire to pleasure yourself. I don’t think he succeeded.

4
John Harvey Kellogg felt similarly, and hoped feeding children plain cereal every morning would help to combat the urges of "self-abuse." He also mutilated young women. He also encouraged his patients to have a pint of yogurt every day for good gut health.

5
Aircraft inventor Santos-Dumont believed air travel would bring peace to the world so he filed no patents and offered his designs free. However, he burned all his designs when he was accused of being a German spy during WWI, and ended his own life after seeing aircraft used in warfare in the 30's.

6
Momofuku Ando, the inventor of insta ramen believed his noodles could cure world hunger. It’s hard to say that he’s wrong, but as of yet he’s not right.

7
King C. Gillette, the inventor of the disposable safety razor, was a Utopian Socialist. He believed that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls, wrote a book outlining his idea, and offered control to Theodore Roosevelt. Perhaps he was better suited to razors.

8
Stockton Rush was the CEO and founder of OceanGate Expeditions, a company giving private tours of the Titanic using their custom built submersible. Only, as the media quickly found out, the engineering behind that submersible was highly suspect. Despite multiple warnings, he believed his submarine and reckless approach would hold. The result was an implosion that killed him, and his four passengers.

9
Richard Gatling, the inventor of what is considered to be the first machine gun, had actually hoped that the tremendous power of his new weapon would discourage large scale battles and show the folly of war.

10
Franz Reichelt was a tailor who set out to make early aviation safer for everyone by developing a suit that could act as a parachute for pilots. Despite failed tests, he believed that added height was necessary for the device to deploy properly, so he set up a date to jump from the top of the Eiffel Tower. With news cameras and the media all around, his parachute never deployed and he fell to his death. It was February of 1912, and he was 33 years old.