20 Disasters That Accidentally Built Entire Industries

The sinking of the RMS Titanic after it hit an iceberg on April 14-15, 1912, claimed more than 1,500 lives. Inventor Reginald Fessenden had already begun construction of underwater sound devices for the Submarine Signal Company, but he now set his sights on using these devices to detect icebergs. Tests in April 1914 aboard the U.S. Revenue Cutter Miami, using Fessenden’s “Fessenden Oscillator,” proved successful in detecting icebergs from a distance of two miles. Commercial sonar was born.

A 50-foot steel tank containing 2.3 million gallons of molasses burst in Boston on January 15, 1919, killing 21. Rumors immediately blamed anarchist bombers. After a three-year legal battle, however, MIT engineering professor Charles Spofford examined the tank’s steel and demonstrated that the property owner, the United States Industrial Alcohol Company, had installed defective metal and had failed to test it for pressure. The verdict mandated that independent engineers verify structural integrity, thus creating a new industry for commercial structural stress-testing.

During the Great Fire of London, September 2-5, 1666, 13,200 timber houses were destroyed, and 70,000 people were made homeless without any means to recoup their losses. In 1680, builder Nicholas Barbon started the “Fire Office,” which charged premiums based on a building’s construction and value. To cut down on payouts, the Fire Office set up its own private, uniformed fire brigade, composed of company employees, not city employees, to fight fires for the buildings it insured. Commercial fire insurance was born.

When a fire raged through Chicago from October 8 to 10, 1871, destroying some 17,450 buildings, killing about 300 people, and costing around $200 million in damages, architects were stunned to see the supposedly fireproof cast-iron frames warp and crumble under the intense heat. Responding to this crisis, builders Sanford E. Loring and Peter B. Wight began using hollow, porous terra-cotta tile to encase the metal beams of buildings, shielding them from high temperatures that could cause them to melt. Thus, architectural fireproofing became an industry.

When a 7.9 earthquake hit San Francisco on April 18, 1906, three days of fires ravaged the city, killing more than 3,000 and destroying 28,000 buildings. Brick walls without steel reinforcement crumbled everywhere. In response, engineers rewrote building codes to demand reinforced concrete frames and flexible steel joints that let a building bend rather than break. Thus was born a thriving industry of commercial earthquake-resistant buildings.

A Category 4 hurricane slammed Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, with 140-mph winds and a 15-foot storm surge, killing 6,000 to 12,000 people in what remains the nation’s deadliest natural disaster. Rather than abandon their island, engineers constructed a 17-foot, three-mile-long concrete seawall, then pumped a slurry of sand and water below approximately 500 city blocks and jacked up 2,000 buildings in the process. Coastal civil engineering and hydraulic dredging became commercial industries.

The combination of severe drought and deep plowing produced dust storms that ravaged the Great Plains in the 1930s, sweeping away topsoil across as much as 100 million acres and forcing many farm families off the land. The federal Soil Conservation Service, established in 1935, urged manufacturers to produce heavy plows for contour terracing, attachments for tractors that could be used to leave crop residue protecting the soil, and machines for planting shelterbelts of trees. A farm-equipment industry emerged to meet these needs.

In September 1937, the S.E. Massengill Company marketed Elixir Sulfanilamide, a liquid antibiotic laced with diethylene glycol, a common ingredient in antifreeze, without testing it on animals prior to marketing. An estimated 600 bottles shipped across the United States resulted in 105 deaths, primarily children suffering from kidney failure. No laws were broken at the time because testing for safety prior to market approval did not exist at that point in history. However, the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act passed by Congress led to the formation of what we know today as the commercial drug-toxicology and contract research industry.

The St. Francis Dam, engineered by Los Angeles water chief William Mulholland, who designed the city’s aqueduct system, collapsed on March 12, 1928, sending a flood down San Francisquito Canyon, killing more than 430 people. It was later determined that the dam’s foundation was partly on an ancient landslide and partly on rock that disintegrated upon contact with water, because no geologist had been consulted before construction began. California’s 1929 Dam Control Act was enacted in response, establishing the field of commercial geotechnical engineering.

On October 22, 1707, a Royal Navy fleet led by British admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell got lost in fog and, due to the inability to calculate longitude, wrecked four warships on the Isles of Scilly, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,400 sailors. Parliament’s Longitude Act of 1714 placed a reward of £20,000 for a solution. Clockmaker John Harrison eventually produced the marine chronometer, a marine clock accurate enough to measure longitude, thus beginning the marine instrument industry.

The eruption of Mount Tambora in April 1815 chilled the world, leading to the Year Without a Summer in 1816. Crops failed across Europe, driving up the prices of oats, which were a major source of feed for horses. This forced some farmers to slaughter animals they could no longer afford to feed. Against this backdrop, German inventor Karl Drais developed a new way to get around without a horse. His Laufmaschine, or running machine, was a wooden two-wheeler that you propelled forward by pushing off the ground with your feet. It was first ridden on June 12, 1817. No pedals, no chain. The age of the bicycle began.

The devastating impact of a fungal blight was demonstrated when, beginning in 1845, the water mold Phytophthora infestans wiped out Ireland’s potato crop, resulting in more than one million deaths from starvation and disease and triggering widespread emigration. In October 1882, French botanist Alexis Millardet devised Bordeaux mixture, a combination of copper sulfate and hydrated lime, to combat grapevine mildew in France. It was quickly put to use against potato blight and became the first chemical fungicide produced in large quantities.

Imported cattle brought rinderpest, a viral cattle disease unrelated to Mad Cow Disease, into England in June 1865. Within months, it killed over 200,000 cattle, threatening Britain’s meat and dairy supply. Parliament created a Veterinary Department within the Privy Council (a body that advised the monarch) that same year to research containment. The crisis proved livestock disease was an economic threat, pushing veterinary science toward what became a commercial livestock vaccine and diagnostic-serum industry.

On January 16, 1862, a 40-ton cast-iron pump beam snapped and fell down the single access shaft of England’s Hartley Colliery, trapping 204 miners and boys underground. Over six days, carbon monoxide built up and killed everyone trapped below. Parliament’s Coal Mines Act of 1862 required every British coal mine to have at least two separate shafts, creating a commercial market for dual-shaft ventilation systems and mine escape infrastructure.

On December 28, 1879, during a ferocious storm, the central sections of Scotland’s Tay Rail Bridge failed as a train was crossing it, and all 75 people on board were killed. An investigator named Henry Law inspected the fallen cast-iron columns and noticed air blowholes and inclusions of slag, pockets and impurities left behind during casting, hidden below the surfaces. Although the wind triggered the collapse, the defects might otherwise have gone undetected for years. Engineers responded to the tragedy by testing materials more thoroughly.

In March of 1888, a blizzard dumped 50 inches of snow over the northeastern U.S., while 60 mph winds snapped thousands of overhead telegraph, telephone, and power lines around New York City. Live wires dropped into the streets, igniting fires and electrocuting pedestrians, contributing to some 200 deaths. Mayor Hugh J. Grant and the state legislature ordered the removal of the overhead poles, which prompted utilities to bury their lines and ushered in underground utility trenching.

On September 12, 1857, the steamship SS Central America went down in a hurricane off South Carolina. The ship took 425 souls with it and also sent 30,000 pounds of California gold to the ocean floor, some 8,000 feet below. It wasn’t until the 1980s that engineer Tommy Thompson began building deep-sea search systems, including a robot sub called Nemo. In September 1988, Nemo returned with tons of gold. That recovery proved robotic deep-ocean salvage could be profitable.

Phylloxera vastatrix, a minuscule aphid that feeds on roots, was accidentally introduced from America to France in the 1860s with American vines. Because European grapes had no resistance, about 2.5 million hectares of French vineyards were destroyed by this pest. Entomologists Jules Émile Planchon and Charles Valentine Riley discovered that certain American vine species were immune. Growers began grafting European vine cuttings onto American rootstocks because pesticides couldn’t reach the pest underground. This started the grafting nursery business all over the world.

In late October 1948, a five-day thermal inversion, a weather pattern in which cool, polluted air gets trapped close to the surface, settled over Donora, Pennsylvania. Sulfur dioxide, fluorine gas, and other particulates from local zinc and steel factories made around 7,000 people, or half of the town’s population, ill and killed 20. It became the first publicly known air-pollution disaster in America. The incident prompted the passage of the Air Pollution Control Act in 1955 and spurred a new business making industrial wet scrubbers and air-monitoring hardware.

On March 25, 1911, the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist fire killed 146, mostly young women, in a Manhattan factory because the doors were locked. The public outcry led to the passage of the 1911 Sullivan-Hoey Law in New York State, which gave fire departments the authority to require that factories have automatic overhead sprinklers. The new law drove factories toward Frederick Grinnell’s existing automatic sprinkler system, which quickly became the industry standard for factory fire protection.

This content was created with the help of AI.