I love reading odd facts about damn near anything. For years I religiously read the Darwin Awards and while they offer stories on weird ways to die, they are at times humorous as hell. People might take offense to that but I really don’t care because funny is still funny regardless of the circumstances. I recently stumbled upon three short stories on death that actually became a part of history. They’re not all that funny but they are definitely interesting. Let’s get started.

• On September 14, 1899, Henry Bliss stepped down from a streetcar at West 74th and Central Park West in New York City. As he turned to help a female passenger down the stairs, he was struck by a passing cab, making the 68-year-old man the first pedestrian ever killed by an automobile in the United States.

• Five years after their historic first flight at Kitty Hawk, the Wright brothers took their new plane, the Wright Flyer, on a cross-country tour to prove it could safely carry passengers. The third stop was at Fort Myers, Virginia, on September 17, 1908. As a crowd of 2000 cheered, Orville Wright and his passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge of the US Army Signal Corps, lifted off into the sky. Then the propeller snapped in two and the Wright Flyer nosedived 150 feet to the ground. Selfridge was killed instantly; Wright suffered multiple hip and leg fractures that plagued him with chronic pain for the rest of his life. This was the first documented death on an airplane.

• Here’s another oldie but goodie that occurred during the September 15, 1833 at the launch of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in England. It was attended by the Duke of Wellington and William Huskisson, a member of Parliament. Ignoring the engineers warning to remain on the train, Huskisson joined the other passengers and disembarked to gawk at the engines lined up on the parallel tracks. He stepped onto an empty track just as an engine called the Rocket barreled into the station. Huskisson fell beneath the wheels of the locomotive and lost his leg and died a few minutes later. He was unaware that he had made history as the first person ever killed by a train.

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STAY SMART . . . AVOID STUPID