With that in mind we present some of history's greatest inventors who lived to see their inventions take on unexpected, terrifying lives of their own...

Just like a parent, every inventor has to send their child out into the world. Sometimes that child becomes a doctor or a movie star. Other times that child ends up in a clock tower with a rifle...

6 Orville Wright (1871-1948)

Invented:

The airplane.

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Lived to See:

One used to vaporize an entire city.

EUREKA!

You know the story of the Wright brothers. December 17, 1903, Orville is the one inside the plane:

Orville had big dreams for the invention he and his brother became famous for. Really big dreams. He thought it would end warfare forever.

In 1915, Orville (his brother Wilbur had passed away by then) predicted aerial reconnaissance would make war "... too expensive, too slow, too difficult, too long drawn out" for anyone to keep doing it. After the U.S. entered WWI, Orville confidently wrote that the nation with the most airborne scouts, "will win the war and put an end to war."

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Put an end to war! Awesome! Hey, how did that turn out?

CRAP!

While Orville looked at the plane and dreamed of world peace, everybody else was thinking, "Wow, those people down on the ground look like tiny ants! Ants I could totally crush from up here!"

But still, he clung to the idea. At the end of WWI, Orville wrote that "the aeroplane has made war so terrible that I do not believe any country will again care to start a war," and five years later authored a radio broadcast declaring that "the aeroplane, in forcing upon governments a realization of the possibilities for destruction, has actually become a powerful instrument for peace."

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At that same moment, military engineers scratched their chins and said, "You know, we really haven't realized the possibilities for destruction in these things. We've packed as many bombs as it can carry... can we make the bombs like, way deadlier? Would that work?"

Orville Wright held to his optimism until passing in early 1948. Which means he lived long enough to see...

... the dropping of the atomic bomb. In 1945, this invention that started out as a flimsy thing that could barely skim over the ground, dropped city-flattening bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was the culmination of six years of devastating warfare in which city after city was shattered by aerial bombardment.

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We have to say, though, it did nothing to dampen the man's spirit. In a typically on-the-bright-side letter to a friend shortly after the atomic bombings, Orville wrote, "I once thought the aeroplane would end wars. I now wonder whether the aeroplane and the atomic bomb can do it."

Which leads us to ask the obvious: You mean one of his friends actually asked him what he thought about the atomic bombs? Geez, talk about a dick move. On the bright side, Orville Wright did live to see Chuck Yeager's breaking of the sound barrier, which had to have blown his fucking mind.