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When Thomas Edison was confined to a wheelchair in the last years of his life, his friend Henry Ford bought one too so they could have wheelchair races.
Project Habakkuk
Britain's plan of building an aircraft carrier of ice during WWII.
Billy "Cockeyed" Cook (1928-1952)
He and his siblings were abandoned in an empty mine shaft.
They were all adopted but him, he had a bad eye and a bad attitude.
He had the words "HARD LUCK" tattooed across his fingers. He went on a killing spree and when asked what his motive was he replied, "I hate everybody's guts, and everyone hates mine."
The movie "Hitch-Hiker" was based on him.
The Balmis Expedition 1803
In an age when vaccines couldn't be transported in sanitary, refrigerated containers, 22 orphans created a human chain to save more than 100,000 people from smallpox.
Raoul Curran had just successfully performed the bullet catch trick in Deadwood in 1880 when a rowdy audience member jumped up from his chair with a pistol and shouted "Catch This" and shot Curran dead.
The Black Wizard of The West attempted the bullet catch trick in 1922 for the first time on stage without a rehearsal. He enlisted his wife as an assistant, not knowing she was harboring ill feelings towards him. She switched the wax bullets for real ones and shot her husband dead in front of a horrified audience.
Professor Adam Epstein was killed in 1869 when the wand he was using to ram ammunition into the barrel of a rifle at the beginning of the bullet catch trick broke off and the part left in the gun pierced his forehead.
In 1922, H.T. Sartell was killed doing the bullet catch trick. It is thought to have been a suicide.
Arnold Buck was killed in 1840 attempting the bullet catch trick. He chose a volunteer to load a special blank bullet into a gun, but the volunteer was skeptical of the trick and secretly put some nails into the barrel of the gun.
In 1393, King Charles VI of France performed a dance with 5 members of the French nobility at a masquerade ball. Their costumes consisted of linens soaked in flammable materials and all the dancers were chained to each other. It was dark and the dancers were hard to see, so some fool lit a torch and got up close to get a better look. Guess what happened.
On September 13, 1987, scrap metal thieves stole an old radiotherapy source from an abandoned hospital site in Brazil. It was handled by many people, resulting in 4 deaths. 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination and 249 were found to have significant levels of radioactive material in their bodies.
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