Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions: Fly...

In this week's Classic episode: Were it not for the coal mine, the town of Vulcan, West Virginia may well have never existed. As a rural and geographically isolated community, Vulcan relied on a single, small bridge for its connection to the larger world. When the bridge failed, ...  Show more

Espionage takes many forms. As Ben, Noel and Max learned in the first part of this two-part series, one of those forms was knitting. In today's episode, the guys explore the stories of phenomenal spies who used knitting as a form of top-secret communication.See omnystudio.com/lis ...  Show more

Humans are phenomenally inventive creatures -- problem is, some of their inventions may end up disrupting the status quo. As we explore the history of inventors, we find history is riddled with mysterious deaths, con artists, shady business and countless allegations of conspiracy ...  Show more

Thomas Midgley's inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn't set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer with CFCs - but wh ...  Show more

In mythology from around the world the ability to fly was reserved strictly for the gods. Stories about human beings constructing flying machines were usually punctuated with a moral about hubris. Vain attempts at flight were an easy metaphor for the limits of human ingenuity. Ev ...  Show more

As man was looking to the skies and yearning to fly, two inventive brothers came up with an idea to set humans aloft. The Montgolfiers were among many inventors working toward flight in the 18th century, but they often get all the attention.