Inventors Who Maybe Should’ve Read The Manual Of Their Own Invention That Ended Up Killing Them
Louis Slotin
Slotin was a Canadian physicist and chemist who worked on the Manhattan Project (basically the research and development team that produced the first nuclear weapons around World War Two time). He performed experiments with uranium and plutonium cores to determine their critical mass values.
During an experiment in 1946, Slotin was conducting a demonstration and he accidentally initiated a fission reaction which released a hard burst of radiation. Slotin was publically considered a hero by the US government because he reacted quickly and prevented his colleagues from getting infected by putting his body in the way. He died from that radiation exposure two weeks later.
