OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush has been added to the Wikipedia list of inventors killed by their own inventions following his tragic death aboard the ‘Titan’ submersible. Rush, 61, was one of the five passengers who lost their lives during a ‘Titanic’-bound excursion after the submersible went missing on June 18.
The list recognizes Rush as a “pilot, engineer, and businessman who oversaw the design and construction of the OceanGate submersible Titan, intended to take tourists to view the wreck of the Titanic.” He is placed on the list after Thomas Andrews, the naval architect responsible for the plans of the Titanic, who also perished on board the ill-fated ship. The bodies of both Rush and Andrews were never recovered.
Rush was accompanied on the ill-fated expedition by Shahzada Dawood, a Pakistani businessman, and his son Suleman Dawood, British businessman Hamish Harding, and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet. The U.S. Coast Guard confirmed that all five passengers were presumed dead after debris from the missing submersible was discovered near the Titanic by a remotely-operated vehicle (ROV) deployed from the Canadian vessel Horizon Arctic.
Rush’s friend Fred Hagen shared with PEOPLE that Rush invented Titan “in order to explore the deepest depths” of the ocean and that “he wanted to democratize the sea and open it up to individuals.”
The Titanic-bound excursions began in 2021, with a series of 18 planned dives scheduled to start this summer. Rush was passionate about the Titanic and believed that there was “wealth of information waiting to be discovered,” according to a previous interview with Princeton University.
“There’s not a lot of data on how these ships decay,” he said. “There are thousands of shipwrecks worldwide that sank with over 500,000 gallons of toxic substances, typically fuel oil”, he added.
Speaking on OceanGate’s expedition, he shared that “part of what we do is get people to appreciate that most of human history is underwater.”
“If you think about it from an archeological perspective, if you had a caravan of precious items — records, books, gold, or whatever — and you were snowed in on the passes of Mongolia, all that stuff got stolen, pillaged. If you were in a ship carrying King Herod’s possessions to Rome and you sank, [it’s] still there,” Rush added.
The Wikipedia list also includes Cowper Phipps Coles, a Royal Navy captain who drowned in the sinking of his own designed ship, HMS Captain, and Julius H. Kroehl, a German American inventor who reportedly died from decompression sickness during experimental dives with his Sub Marine Explorer. These individuals are remembered for their contributions to invention and exploration, albeit with tragic outcomes.
