A Collection of Horrible Fates | Industrial Edition

Ambient Songs:
By CoAg
https://www.youtube.com/@co.agmusic1823

Intro Theme by Swift Junai:
https://www.instagram.com/swiftjunai/?hl=en
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6hf5nMJ8s6LJJfFR4OQ3lg
https://open.spotify.com/artist/1PoG2b18MHocWZA8zQgWjO

Writers and researchers: Jay Adams
https://instagram.com/jayadamsdigital?igshid=MzMyNGUyNmU2YQ==

Jordan Gottschick https://www.youtube.com/@DerpsWithWolves/playlists

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There are few things more gruesome and disturbing than industrial accidents.
Our soft, squishy bodies are just so out of place
amongst the heavy machinery and fast moving parts. So in
this video we're going to look at five people who had
the incredible misfortune being on the wrong side of the
thin margin of safety. And although the events in this
video are fleeting and nondescriptive, they are still highly disturbing,

(00:21):
so viewer discretion is strongly vised. The turn of the
twentieth century was a time of technological and industrial expansion
in the United States. This led to a booming jobs
and better employment for workers of all means. But as

(00:42):
great as this was for the average family, labor laws
and safety standards were non existent. Factories were notorious for
horrendous working conditions, as leaders of industry were under no
obligation to ensure the work was safe. The average factory
worker at the time also included children, some of whom
worked eighteen hours a day and lived at the fact victories.
As you had imagined, overworked workers made mistakes and mistakes

(01:04):
in an environment full of moving parts, noxious fumes, and
harmful substances were often costly. In the year nineteen hundred alone,
thirty five thousand American workers were killed in industrial actions
and another five hundred thousand were maimed by injuries that
range from lost limbs to severe burns. In the early
nineteen hundreds, in New York City, the Brooklyn Cedarwork Company
ran a factory filled with the latest equipment to manufacture

(01:26):
wooden plates, utensils, furniture, and more. From start to finish,
the process of making cedar and two functional items involved
a lot of steps that were now handled by all
the new machines and large equipment that packed the factory floor.
And in his days as an engineer, William Willsley was
the type of skilled professional responsible for inventing and improving
machines like those At sixty three years old, though Williams

(01:48):
engineering days were behind him, he earned it too. As
a Civil War veteran, William was an engineer on US
naval ships before spending decades working factories just like the
Brooklyn cedarwarer Company. Then, looking for a change of pace
and la years, William took a job at the factory
as a watchman. By the morning of New Year's Eve
in nineteen oh five, William had been in his new
role for about two months and very much enjoyed the

(02:08):
less strenuous work as a watchman. He was required to
make frequent rounds in the property to ensure no one
unauthorized was in the building and that all the machines
were as they should be. It wasn't uncommon for these
new inventions to spring a leak or suddenly catch fire,
so William was the first line of defense against those
kind of disasters. One of his regular tasks was to
go around and close the valves on the many large

(02:28):
vats that held water used in the cedar were making process.
It sounds simple enough, but the valves actually weren't outside
the vats. They were inside. The valves couldn't be accessed
by reaching down to the vat either, Closing them required
someone to clim a few rungs down a ladder that
ran to the bottom of the vat. Closing them also
required doing so with hundreds of gallons of water just
a few feet below. The engineering side of William found

(02:50):
that placement of the valves to be absurd and unnecessarily dangerous,
but he wasn't the type to ignore the requirements of
his job. With a shift almost over. William was on
his final rounds that morning and was looked looking forward
to going home and joining the holiday with his family.
As he walked the factory floor, William would climb to
the top of each water vat. When he came upon one,
stepped down the ladder on the inside, and turned the
valve handled to the closed position. Once done, he'd move

(03:12):
as fas he could up the ladder, but on a
bitter New York winter morning like that, he had to
admit the warm steam felt pretty good. At one of
the last bats, William transitioned from the ladder outside the
vat to the platform, turned himself around and grabbed the
ladder leading inside the vat, But the moment his weight
hit the top rung, it snapped. The Brooklyn Cedar Ware
Company was just like other factories of the time period

(03:33):
in the way of view'd worker safety, which was by
ignoring it. There were no routine safety chicks down on anything,
whether it was complex technology or a simple ladder. As
it turned out, a ladder subject to the steam of
boiling water over a long enough time weakens to the
point of breaking. And yes, the vats were all filled
with boiling water all day every day. Before he even

(03:53):
knew what was happening, William plunged headfirst into the scalding
water below. After fighting to get back to the surface,
weeks filled the factory. The only other person in the
entire building at the time was a machinist named Albert Newton.
When he heard William, he ran toward him, and when
he reached him, Albert could hardly believe what he was seeing.
When he got to the platform and the vat William
was in as he was trying to make his way

(04:15):
back to the latter, William was in hysterics and floiled
in an attempt to keep from sinking. When water boils,
bubbles rise to the surface. The higher the temperature of
the water, the more intensely bubbles shoot to the top
of the water. Get it high enough, and water reaches
what's called a rolling boil. When that happens, the size
and speed of the rising bubbles make the water look
like it's literally rolling, and it may look like air

(04:35):
escaping from the water, but it's actually water vapor. Because
this gas is less dense than water, it rises and
becomes steam when it breaks the surface. When water boils,
anything in it that's more dense than gas will sink,
so William had to fight that much harder just to
stay above the water. When the initial shock of what
he was seeing past, Albert looked around and grabbed a
long paddle used to stir the water on the platform edge.

(04:57):
Holding the handle, he then lowered the paddle end for
w to grab onto and pulled him to the edge.
William then grabbed on to Albert, and Albert pulled him
out of the vat, and coming in contact with William's
bright redskin was enough to cause a burden Albert's arm
in the panic, though Albert didn't even notice as he
rushed down the ladder to get help while William arrived
and continued to screaming on the platform. William was then

(05:18):
rushed to a nearby hospital with one hundred percent of
his body covered in severe burns. Shortly after arriving, William
died tragically. His horrific end did nothing change labor and
safety practices at the factory or anywhere else. It wouldn't
be until sixty five years later when the Occupational Safety
and Health Administration or OSHA, would be formed to enact
workplace safety standards. As a direct result of industrial and

(05:40):
factory accidents that became complace at the turn of the century,
like the one that ended William's life. In the mid
eighteen hundreds, when cities began building tall, iron frame buildings,
architects ran into a problem. This problem was the fact
that stairs make lousy selling points above the fourth floor,
So the solution to this problem was the elevator. Early

(06:03):
versions were little more than glorified freight hoists, which were
platforms that yoyo had up and down with the help
of steam or water power. The real game changer, though,
came in eighteen fifty three, when a mechanic named Elijah
Otis climbed onto a platform high above the crowd at
New York's Crystal Palace exhibition. He then ordered the supporting
rope to be cut and plummeted, but thanks to his
newly invented safety brick, came to a safe and comfortable stop.

(06:26):
All of a sudden, vertical travels seemed less like a
coin toss, and by the late eighteen fifties, department stores
in Manhattan were advertising their passenger elevators as fun attractions. Now,
most of these early passenger lifts were hydraulic. Pictured an
enormous piston in a shaft of water or oil, pushing
the cab skyward. There was another problem with this though,
the higher the building, the deeper the piston had to

(06:46):
sink when the car came down. Digging a one hundred
and fifty foot well under a twelve story structure wasn't
just expensive, it was unrealistic. Engineers would need something lighter, faster,
and ideally some that didn't require to turn the basement
into a mine shaft. That something would end up being
the cable and pulley system, which was met by another advancement,
something known as the attraction motor. This is also where

(07:08):
the counterweight was introduced into elevator technology. These new cable
driven elevators didn't just eliminate the need for underground pistons,
they made high rise buildings truly practical. It was the
addition of counterweights that turned elevators into efficient, scalable machines.
Here's the basic principle. Without a counterweight, an elevator motor
has to lift the full weight of the cab and
everyone inside it. If you had a counterweight that's calibrated

(07:31):
too roughly equal the weight of the empty cab plus
forty to fifty percent of its maximum passenger load. However,
the system suddenly balances out with that The motors job
is more like giving a push to a child in
a swing and not hoisting in the anvil with every cycle.
These counterweights were typically composed of stacked cast iron or
steel blocks and were designed to move in the opposite
direction of the cab. When the elevator went up, the

(07:53):
counterweight came down, and vice versa. The two were then
linked by a series of heavy duty cables running over
a big pulley wheel mounted above the elevator shaft. As
a result of this, the whole system operates with far
less string, extending the life of cables and motors while
using significantly less energy, and when functioning properly, their invisible,
silent parts of the elevator's hidden anatomy never noticed unless

(08:14):
you're the one to service them. On the morning of
February thirteenth, nineteen o seven, the California Warehouse Companies building
on Second Street in San Francisco was just beginning to stir.
But in the belly of the building, tucked beneath the
elevator shaft, Ernest, a thirty two year old electrical worker
was already hard at work. Ernest's career had taken him
along the railways of the East Coast, where he'd worked

(08:34):
for the Boston and Northern Railroad, but at some point
he pivoted to the electrical trade. This was a field
that was exploding with opportunity in the early nineteen hundreds,
as cities lit up and machinery replaced manpower. He then
moved to California to chase what so many were at
the time opportunity, adventure, and maybe a fresh start. He
then found work with the deck Or Electric Company, a
promising position that put him on the front lines of

(08:56):
a rapidly modernizing world. But with that opportunity, kim risk
Electrical work in nineteen oh seven was no joke, and
paired with elevator repair in a bustling warehouse, it was
a volatile mix of moving parts and narrow margins. That
February morning, he descended into the elevator pit, likely to
inspect a repair component of the lift system. The job
would have been familiar enough to a man of his experience,

(09:17):
but time was money, especially for someone new to the
West Coast and eager to prove himself down in that
dark space, Ernest hardly got to work and whatever his
task was for the morning, when somewhere above the elevator
began to rise. It's not clear if it was a
routine function, test to miscommunication or simple oversight, but the
cab was being operated by J. G. Huffy, Ernest's assistant.

(09:39):
JG might have thought the cab needed to be repositioned,
or perhaps he didn't realize his colleague Hald descend it
into the pit. Either way, the machinery obeyed the button's
command without hesitation. As the elevator car climbed, the massive
counterweight came barreling down in the adjacent shaft. Ernest never
had a chance to react. The counterweight struck with tremendous force,

(09:59):
completely moving through any resistance between it and the stopping point,
which included Ernest's head. He was gone instantly, likely without
ever knowing he was in any kind of trouble. JG, meanwhile,
upon relaying what had happened, was so overcome with shock
and horror that witnesses said he was barely able to speak.
The warehouse is hustle then stopped cold, and Ernest's mangled

(10:19):
form was pulled from the pit a short time later,
crushed by the very system designed to make vertical travel
safer and more efficient. But the tragedy wasn't just the
result of faulty design. It was the razor thin margin
for air that workers like Ernest faced every day. The
counterweight simply did what it was built to do, moving
perfect opposition to the cab, but when a human ended
up in the wrong place at the wrong time, there

(10:40):
was no forgiveness in the system's precision. It was right
around ten forty on a Tuesday night in May of
twenty eighteen when an on call came into the Chicago
area nine one one dispatchers emergency personne in around such
a large area pretty much seen, heard, and experience at all,
but the call that came in that night would leave

(11:00):
even the most veteran among them trying to remember a
situation even remotely comparable. Police were then directed to an
industrial laundry facility in Niles, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.
When they arrived shortly after it, they were led by
frantic employees to the back of the building where a
worker had found something no one ever expected to see. There,
wedged between a massive commercial drawer and a conveyor belt

(11:21):
used to shuttle wet linens across the facility was a
forty two year old employee. Emergency personnel got right to
assess in the situation and working to free theman from
his horrific situation, all the while remaining hopeful that they
arrived in time to save his life. Once they had
gotten his body and stuck, however, it became clear that
he was gone. The employee was pronounced dead at the
scene around eleven PM. Police then took over and began

(11:42):
vestigating his death to determine if it was the result
of anything criminal. The first real clue then came from
a security camera around nine to fifty six PM, just
a few minutes after the man was last seen by
his coworkers. The surveillance foota had showed him standing near
one of the large dryers facing the conveyor belt. Something
seems to have caught his attention, like a towel partially
from the drawer's edge right with the belt carried heavy
wet linens from local hotels from one machine to the next.

(12:05):
The footage then shows the men reached for it before
moving out of frame, and that's when the conveyor belt
moved the belt violently lurched upward for a moment, just
enough to throw things off balance, before coming to an
abrupt and complete stop. Everything was completely still after that,
and from that point on the man didn't appear on
the video. He was eventually discovered about half an hour
later by a coworker wondering why the Washington dryers weren't

(12:26):
running from this video. Police believed that when he tried
to dislodge the towel, the machine inadvertently activated, although it's
unclear what exactly could cause that, but either way, it
pulled him into a gap barely wide enough for a
load of bed sheets, let alone a full grown human.
The conveyor system itself is also massive, at about three
feet or one meter across, and towering is high as
seven feet or two meters off the ground in some places.

(12:48):
It was a quick and efficient system for getting wet
laundry and heavy compressed mounts from the washer to the dryer,
but it was also a brutal piece of equipment. If
he ended up on the wrong side of it, like
the man did. The autopsy then Confron earned what first
responders are suspected. The man died from head injuries. It
was blunt force, likely happening within seconds of him being trapped. Likewise,
no foul play was suspected, and there were no signs

(13:10):
of sabotage or intentional harm. It was, by all accounts,
a tragic accident. By the dawn of the twentieth century,
the telephone had gone from interesting invention to complete infatuation.
What had once just been in an experiment was now
rapidly becoming an everyday utility, stringing cities, towns, and rural
homes into a nationwide web of instant communication. And to

(13:33):
put this in perspective, in eighteen seventy seven eighteen seventy eight,
the first telephone line was constructed, the first switchboard installed,
and the first telephone exchange opened for business. By just
eighteen eighty, nearly fifty thousand phones were in use, and
that number grew tenfold by the turn of the century,
and within a decade it would hit nearly six million. Obviously,
though these early telephone systems were rudimentary by modern standards.

(13:55):
Wires were often strung on poles with minimal insallation, and
grounding was head or miss at best. In some rural areas,
phone lines were tacked up alongside or even on the
same poles as high voltage power lines. The infrastructure was
just growing too quickly for careful planning and too cheaply
for robust safeguards. Surge protectors weren't a thing yet, and
regulatory oversight was spotty at best. More than anything, though,

(14:17):
people just sort of trusted the technology before they fully
understood the dangers. On Wednesday, January thirtieth, nineteen oh one,
in Smartsville, California, for James Doyle, Junior, the day began
like any other. James was a twenty seven year old
lineman for the Bay Counties Power Company, and for the
past few months he'd been stationed in Smartsville, keeping an
eye on the company's lines that ran between the Yuba
and Bear Rivers. It was steady work, good work, and

(14:40):
he earned a reputation as capable, reliable, and sharp with
his hands. To make his job easier, the company had
installed a telephone at the Doyle home. This allowed James
to communicate directly with men working up and down the
power line without needing to leave the house. Around eleven
o'clock that morning, James stepped toward the telephone. He may
have heard the ring himself, or may have simply intended
to make a routine call. Whatever the reason, he picked

(15:01):
up the receiver and placed it to his ear. James's mother,
standing nearby, would later recall hearing a sharp and sudden snap,
as if something outside had broken. He didn't cry out
a recoil, He just dropped to the ground, right there
at his mother's feet. His mother then screamed, and in
a panic, she rushed to her son and grabbed him.
That's when she felt a searing, invisible force surging through
his body into hers. Her hands were then badly burned

(15:24):
in just a split second. The electrical current still present
in that moment nearly claims her too, but somehow she
tore herself away. James, however, didn't move. According to testimony
given later, James's father heard him speak after his fall.
His voice was apparently faint as he said quote, Mama,
did not be scared a word, I'm all right. As
soon as the words escaped his mouth, James drew his

(15:45):
last and final breath. A corner arrived shortly after, and
would then ask questions, take testimony, and uncover the chain
of events that led to a healthy twenty seven year
old man to die in his own home from an
act of the unknown. The first account came from James's mother,
who was still bandaged from the burns on her hands.
She told the corner exactly what she saw. James walked
to the phone, picked it up, and then she heard
that snap like a branch cracking or rope braking, then

(16:08):
within seconds or suddenly dead at her feet. Then, during
James's father's testimony, he relayed the heartbreaking final words be
sun to the inquest jury. As the corner worked to
piece the instant together, a plausible theory began to take shape,
although it did little to comfort anyone. Investigators believed that
a high voltage power line somewhere along the Bay Counties
route had become loose or broken. When it fell, even

(16:31):
for just a moment, it made contact with the nearby
telephone work, perhaps the very wire connected to the Doyle residents.
That instant contact, however brief, was all. It took thousands
of volts coursed into a line never meant to carry them,
and in the days after the instant, it was learned
that it wasn't just Smartsville that was affected. In Mary'sville,
twenty five miles away. Multiple telephone users reported feeling sudden

(16:53):
shocks while on the line around the same time. Thankfully,
no one else was injured, but several people said it
felt like the phone jumped in their hands or spark
in their ears. Unfortunately, for James, standing at the wrong
place at the worst possible moment, had caught the brunt
of it. There were no criminal charges or lawsuits filed.
James's death was really tragic, deeply unusual accident. The morning

(17:16):
of June twenty first, twenty eleven, in California's Kern County
oil fields was dry, dusty, and humming with the groan
of heavy equipment. Just west of the town of Taft,
Three Chevron workers were walking across the sprawling Midway Sunset Field,
which is the largest and most productive oil reserve in
the state. Among them was Dave, a fifty four year
old supervisor with more than thirty years of experience under

(17:37):
his bell. David's spent decades working among the pump jacks
and steaming events of Kerrn County. He was also as
respected as he was experienced, and the kind of men
who shut up early, stayed late, and kept operations running smoothly.
That morning, David and his screw hab been asked to
check out a familiar trouble spot, which was a dormant
well known for shooting scalding guiss of oil, steam and
rock up to forty feet in the air. Because of this,

(17:58):
workers called it the chimney. As they walked toward the site,
something gave Dave pause. The disccolored and disturbed soil ahead
of him just looked wrong to his eye, and in fact,
a second later, a plume of steam curled up from
the ground. Dave then cautiously moved closer to get a
better look around and to evaluate the risks and to
get the job done. A moment later, however, the ground
opened up with a suddenness that left absolutely no time

(18:20):
to react. The earth beneath Dave gave way, revealing a
roiling pit of hot oil, water and debris. His coworkers
didn't even get a chance to lunge for him before
Dave's primal screams echoed from the hole below. One of
them then rushed forward, reaching a hand out to Dave,
while another grabbed a length of pipe, hoping it would
be long enough hi to grab onto Dave's hands were
briefly visible as he grasped for it, but the pipe

(18:41):
was too short, and soon the air filled with the
sound of boiling as the sickening stench of heated crude
oil and water got stronger. Then, in a matter of seconds,
Dave vanished into the muck, sinking into what can only
be described as a man made hell. The site was
sealed off afterward in a matter of hours, but it
didn't feel like a crime scene. It felt more like
a wound in the earth had swallowed one of Chevron's

(19:03):
most trusted and reliable workers. Investigators arrived sometime later, carefully
stepping around the edges of the collapsed earth, where the
steam continued to hiss from the opening despite their arrival,
though Dave's body wouldn't be recovered from the sinkhole for
seventeen hours, after the boiling fluids had cooled enough for
a recovery team to reach the spot where he'd vanished.
Chevron was tight lipped in the immediate aftermath, but the

(19:23):
shock inside the company was real. Dave wasn't just some
rookie who ignored protocol. He was the guy others looked
to when things went sideways. His coworkers, already in shocked
from the horror of what they had witnessed, were now
left to reckon with the company's response, or lack thereof.
Chevron issied a brief statement expressing condolences, but it was
as if the reality of what had happened hadn't fully
hit yet. State regulators then jumped into action as Dave's

(19:45):
death extended a firestorm of questions about safety protocol and
the risks of a drilling technique known as steam injection.
Chevron was actually a pioneer of this process, and it
took place at wells and had already been mostly pumped dry.
With all the liquid oil extracted, a thick tar remaine
inside wells, so the company turned to steam injection. Basically,
a pump would send steam down into the wells to
melt and thin out the crude that stuck to the

(20:07):
chamber walls, making it easier to pump out every last
drop of oil. At first, it seemed like nothing would change,
but then a series of eruptions caused even more scrutiny,
and steam injection near the site was halted and over
one hundred wells were shut down simultaneously. California. OSHA initially
ruled Dave's death as an act of God, essentially absolving Chevron.
A second investigation then found the site still unusable and

(20:28):
flagged Chevron failing to properly warn workers. Chevron was then
fined at just three hundred and fifty dollars an oil
production rant back up. Thirteen years later, a court awarded
Day's family one hundred and twenty million dollars, finally recognized
in the company's responsibility, but the ruling didn't fix the land.
Jin changed the method and didn't bring Dave back. Today,
steam still rises from the area.